Imagine you’d taken a massive dose of LSD — and the experience lasted a lifetime. That’s what life essentially is. Everything we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, imagine, think, and feel — including our very ability to see in an individual perspective... these are all one continuous designed experience. And it is made out of limitation. Limited perspective. Limited capacities. That’s what makes for the spectacular work of art that is our experience of life.
By design life is continuously confusing and dissatisfying. The many colors of the rainbow are the many colors of irritation and unrest, confusion and pain, with only bits of happiness scattered throughout. That is by necessity, because it is only out of parts that things can be made. And things are limited and are subject to change and destruction. So even at their best, there’s the fear of change always in the background.
The Whole, which is perfect, peaceful, and complete, is not a thing and cannot be experienced that way. The experience of that Whole, however, is always with us — though it is not an experience like other kinds of experience. We experience the Whole when we drop all preconceptions and thinking. That unnameable thing that remains, that Silence compared to which even silence is noisy — that’s the Whole. We can’t see it, know it, or name it, but we sense it directly — as us.
Once we learn to see past all the things we know the ordinary way, whatever remains is that.
If we simply learn to notice it, we can have the best of all worlds: the satisfaction of the Whole and dissatisfaction of beautiful, changing limits at once. Pain and pleasure and deep abiding peace, at once. All the benefits of life and all the benefits of death, at once.