Am I Big Enough?
The burst richness of life is never only about one thing: chemicals, energy, vibrations, ideas, power, hormones, roles, or language. Each of those is a way into life’s fullness, but they are only portals: one mode to be with experience in its over-flow.
Moving with and between various modes, and what they reveal, is the art of living. Being with the fullness of life is the key to living fully. None of us is one note. We are all vast symphonies of complex overflow.
This approach avoids the problem of lining up all the aspects of life into neat rows that completely correspond. Do we have 5 chakras, 7 chakras, or 10? How many minds are there? Is there a final universal grammar, or a supervening single frame that rules them all?
In Buddhism, the answer is clearly “no.” There is no one ring that rules them all. Different approaches disclose different aspects of worlds and experience. There is no actual competition between these modes and features: no one way that finally describes what is real. There is no such thing as one world. Or one me. Or you.
Do we have 5 chakras? Yes. 7? Yes. 72,000? Yes. One chakra? Yes. Countless? Yes. All of these are true, and they all correspond to entire worlds that arise, abide, and dissolve differently.
When the modes and worlds maintain open communication between themselves, the symphony of living is gorgeous. Unspeakably rich. Utterly abundant.
The need to have one way, one answer, one metric is a gut level fear of death. Finally I know what is unchanging: what will stand the test of time. But relatively speaking, nothing lasts forever. Everything that comes together eventually disperses. What is unchanging? The thread of awareness that flexibly, care-fully accommodates all positions, endlessly.
Space is all-pervasive, but weather-wise we can’t even calculate how that works when there are 3 elements involved, let alone countless ones. If we can’t even solve the 3 body problem, completely understanding the vast mystery of life ain’t gonna happen — at least not according to that way of being and knowing. Numbers point towards just one way of knowing. One language.
Elegantly moving with and between is the demand of our time: How to release fixation and attune accurately as life ebbs and flows?
Living poised is THE superpower — it’s our natural intelligence when we don’t lock up. If we’re poised and open enough to be with movement in real time, the world opens into worlds, Buddhism expands into Buddhisms, each of us becomes an unfathomable plurality, and yet without any chaos or congestion. There is an elegance within worlds, and a complex field of possibilities between them.
For example, in Vajrayana that’s why it’s so crucially important to follow sadhana instructions exactly. Not because this is the only way that worlds cohere — as if Vajrasattva can only be white! But because in this world, according to how I am right now, and how I’m available to be grounded and in touch, this is how that world’s alignment coheres. Right now, this is the exact, perfect flow pattern. H2O. Gravity centralizes mass. The Buddha appeared 2,600 years ago.
But change a single element to the world — my framing, how I relate, or the world I’m in touch with; epistemology, methodology, or ontology — and a different world arises. Now Vajrasattva is blue. His name is Akshobhya. He is in the east rather than the center. Worlds and beings realign and nothing broke. No train wreck. Life kept on living without missing a beat.
When we freeze frame the movie of life we get a discrete time slice of exact patterning. In that micro-moment of space-time, karma was exactly that way. Then real life kept on flowing, and dependent origination did what it does: everything changes without mixing anything up whatsoever. Karma is infallible and inconceivable according to duality-fixated freeze-framing.
In the mandala of Vajrasattva, if we then zoom into his heart center we discover that there are entire worlds of beings happening even just in there! From far enough away it seems like a syllable won’t even fit. Zoom in and there’s plenty of room for galaxies of syllables, palaces, and entire world systems! And they’re all spontaneously self-arisen and self-reciting! We don’t have to create them or figure them out, we just have to be with them! If we then zoom out we can’t even see Vajrasattva at all, let alone hear his mantra or notice what enlightened activities are going on in his left pinky finger.
We all know this. The 1st Men in Black movie, every Google Map search, and the Webb telescope all viscerally demonstrate this: zooming in and out within maps discloses entire worlds of delicious details without any confusion. It just depends on where and how we zoom. How we frame. The problem is always forgetting when we freeze frame — forgetting that a snapshot is not real life. Instagram and Tim Tok aren’t real life! But they sure feel real!
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Duality mind is just so damn stubborn. And toxic duality mind is the worst. It forces you to live in my world, even when I don’t even want to be there! Misery loves company, and wow, going to war seems to be just about the hardest habit for us humans to break (Om Mani Peme Hung). It’s so excruciatingly sad, this samsaric tendency to always have to box everything in.
So how do we go deeply, diversely? How do we foster deep diversity rather than shallow diversity or deep narrow-mindedness? There is a the common Tibetan phrase of “knowing many things, but missing the one important thing,” as well as what I heard the great Yangthang Tulku Rinpoche said at the conclusion of bestowing three months of Rinchen Terdzo empowerments at ODD [paraphrased]: Don’t try to practice all of these empowerments. On the path, that is impossible for anyone. Instead, master one of them that you feel connected to. Learn its lineage, its history, its philosophy, instructions, and the various ways of practicing it — become an expert in all of that for a single practice. Otherwise we might move between practices [worlds] learning bits and pieces, without really knowing any of them well, and without getting any stable realization. Since each Buddha embodies all of the other Buddhas and their mandalas, accomplishing one practice includes them all.
For me this points towards the importance of both remaining flexibly open, as well as going profoundly deep into an arena of inquiry. In terms of liberation as a bodhisattva, that seems to be the swiftest approach: fully resonate and be transformed by one enlightened world, which naturally syncs up in interdependence with all the other mandalas.
How amazing it that — that the nature is this way, and we still have living practice paths to become fully natural by relearning to just be natural! In human history, the nonsectarian Rime movement in Tibet is a perfect example of this deep diversity, as well as HH Dalai Lama’s general approach to all fields of knowledge in our shared 21st century world. The pressure is on for each of us to deepen in similar ways as our world’s metacrises compound and accelerate in novel, meta-complex ways.
Within every living, complex game are infinite options and infinite worlds they point towards and enact. Unto itself, each world is coherent. Between worlds, final coherence isn’t the right question. Elegant accommodation and being with is.
Am I big enough to hold multiple worlds, multiple modes, multiple “me”s? Am I inclusive enough to flexibly flow without breaking down or mixing everything up?
If a table can simultaneously be a world of quarks, atoms, molecules, chemicals, raw materials, and labeled designations, why can’t I? There is no fundamental contradiction here. The only real problem is my own ability to poise open, available, in touch, in real life…with you and your world, as they also arise and fall into other worlds, forever.
Am I willing to be this big without breaking? And without breaking others?
The first step is to allow enough space. To be big enough. Spacious.
The next step is to lovingly include. To carefully embrace. Warm-hearted.
Wisdom and compassion.
Emptiness and dependent origination.
Emptiness and clarity.
Freedom and fullness.
In union. Inseparable. In touch.
Openness is unchanging: it is not a thing. Inclusion is a mode: a way of beings. It includes endless things elegantly without contradiction.
Being big enough and careful enough is the challenge of tantric living.
Living and loving within and between is just how life is.
So I guess this means:
Am I alive enough?
