The ability to experience our little selves as the “wholeness” or the “whole works” is good medicine for treating the existential suffering that plagues human beings. For example, we may fear death, but it is hard to fear death as much when we are also able psychologically to identify personally with something overarching which has existed, and will continue to exist, before and after our birth or death. If we are simultaneously “that,” then our death is not simply a total death so long as “that” (which is also “you” and “me”) carries on. The canyon flower may wither and die, yet continues on as the ground and fox and river flowing, as the whole Great Canyon. When I had cancer a couple of years ago, and was very much in fear for my own death, I was also beyond fear when I felt myself as one facet of the ongoing world flowing and flowering. It helped bring great acceptance, allowance, and peace to my heart.
There are ways to experience reality that let us taste and bask in the flowing, flowering wholeness of it all. If we can learn to accept and go with the flow of events, fly along where this wind might carry us, be the flow and flowering and blowing wind, then we might accept even those events and circumstances that we do not fully welcome. Yes, in life, we may experience many frictions, conflicts, and disappointments that arise in the gaps between our personal wishes and how things are, resistance to the unwelcome directions life heads. However, to the extent that we can merge our desires into the flow of things, and experience the unity of reality, then our frictions, conflicts, resistance and disappointments disappear, as they are not possible within such union. Simply put, it is necessary to have two or more opposing forces in order to create some friction or conflict, and a single, indivisible dot cannot fight or know an object of conflict when there is nothing other than the one singular dot. No disappointment is possible when our heart becomes the singular, indivisible whole. No resistance is possible when we become the river, allowing the flow of life to flow where life flows. If we resist the world, then we feel friction and tension whenever the world does not go our way. However, if we truly flow (not only “with,” but) “as” the world, then the way the world goes is the way we willingly go, and there is no friction or tension.
Furthermore, to the extent that our losses and sorrows, disappointments and worries are encountered as just this flowing (a flowing which is all the joys and victories, beautiful places and peaceful times too), then all of it is encountered as just “the whole great show.”
One corollary to this formula concerns value:
Zen folks tend to find a certain value to the universe, a preciousness and pricelessness, primarily based on the subjective fact that it is our home. In that sense, it has value at least to us. Arguably, the universe has no objective value, and no external standard (apart from all our individual personal appraisals) by which to judge its value or lack of value, but most Buddhist teachings do seem to find some specialness in the fact that this reality is our home. In modern terms, it is of value to us in our being alive, because this universe appears to have the relatively narrow range of properties (in physics, chemistry, biology and much more) to have allowed our being here, so we find some value in that fact, and consider this universe precious (very much in the same way that a drowning man, finding an otherwise worthless piece of driftwood passing by in a vast ocean, would consider the wood as being as precious as anything in the universe simply for preserving his life in that moment.) Yet somehow, even beyond that, we entertain the feeling that this universe is precious, a jewel, simply for being elegant and magnificent by any measure.
We might compare the universe, from our eyes’ assessment, to a jewel of vast or infinite value, perhaps beyond measure, for the universe is vast, infinite and truly beyond measure. However, we also see everything within the universe as also of its own vast or infinite value, beyond measure. Human beings tend to view large things as more valuable than small, for example, judging that a grain of sand is somehow less valuable than a whole galaxy, or that an ounce of gold atoms is less valuable than a pound of gold atoms. However, Buddhism proposes an alternative scale of measure whereby everything is of infinite value, whereby infinite value = infinite value, thus grains of sand and atoms, whole galaxies and single blades of grass, gold and rusty tin cans, ounces or pounds, as well as the whole universe combined, is/are all precious, all of infinite value, thus all equally and infinitely precious.
Every situation--nay, every moment--is of infinite worth;
for it is the representative of a whole eternity. - Goethe
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