I was nestled in my rocking chair, soaking in the spring air, my gaze sweeping across my garden. The roses were just beginning to unfurl, their red and yellow petals a vibrant pop of color. To their left, the tree I'd planted only a year ago now offered double the shade, a testament to its rapid growth. And the birds—a delightful variety—were busily feasting at our feeder.
A wave of profound calm washed over me. I cherish these moments, recognizing the inherent value of the garden I'm cultivating and the deep sense of relaxation and healing it brings just to sit and observe. Other times, my mind races with exhilarating new ideas—a mini-deck for my tomato buckets, ingenious water collection barrels, a gravity-based self-watering system. In those moments, I feel like a kid unwrapping a new LEGO set on his birthday.
Just a month prior, I'd had another epiphany. I was thinking about my van, Bubba, and all the tools I'd acquired, the countless things I could build. It suddenly struck me that I was experiencing the same joy I once found in LEGOs. I remember grinning to myself, thinking, "Oh yeah... but now we've got all the adult toys, eh eh eh!". But I digress.
So, as I reveled in this tranquil scene, a profound thought—more accurately, a concept—crystallized in my mind. My logical brain grasped it, and simultaneously, I felt it as a deep insight, that proverbial "aha!" moment where everything clicks into place.
I'll do my best to articulate this experience, though words will inevitably fall short. How it felt is truly more than half the story, and language can only convey so much. When I say "I saw," please understand I mean my mind fully accepted this new framework; it made complete and utter sense. There were no angels or disembodied voices involved.
Instead, I perceived a fundamentally different way of witnessing the scene before me. Something in my brain just clicked, much like the moment I finally understood trigonometry in school, or when recursion and pointers suddenly made sense while I was learning Turbo Pascal as a teenager.
I was perceiving all the birds. All the plants. Not just the ones in my immediate view, but conceptually, my mind encompassed all of them at once—the trees, the rocks, the mushrooms, everything. The individual separations dissolved. I was seeing a process. The Process.
And within this unifying revelation, this monist insight, the distinction between the created and the creator vanished. It no longer held any meaning.
Tat Tvam Asi
