Having Your Cake and Eating It, Too
The delicious paradox of being both infinite and human
From a comment made in the Peter Brown book group—part of an ongoing exploration into Peter’s pointings and the nature of experience.
Comment from J:
I’ve heard both you and Peter state that, in your experience, you get to “have your cake and eat it too” in this exploration of experience. Yet presently I’m not fully sure about that. I’m not sure the fire of this sustained inquiry allows you to keep any of your cherished ideas or beliefs. Presently it seems to lead to ‘no man’s land’—a space where you no longer know anything about anything; you don’t even know if ‘you’ exist.
DE:
Your reference to either Peter or me saying, "You get to have your cake and eat it, too," seems to me to have been taken out of context and/or misunderstood. That quip isn't meant to suggest that "any of your cherished ideas or beliefs" remain untouched.
It does, however, point to something more profound.
It means you get to appreciate and enjoy the miracle as it actually is, while at the same time having the full human experience, with all of its triumphs, horrors, joys, and challenges.
For example, you get to feel the immense love of a dad for his daughter, knowing all the while that no "dad", "daughter", or "love for" can be pinned down in actuality. All of those designations are nothing other than Radiant Presence (the phrase that Peter liked to use) appearing as the countless flavors that are arising as "J's life".
They're richly meaningful overlays onto the one miraculous, unresolvable Mystery that you know to be You.
It's like becoming lucid in a dream. The dream continues, just as before, but knowing it's a dream makes a huge difference. You get to see that you're not limited by, threatened by, or in any way stuck in whatever might be happening in the dream. Nothing is riding on how the dream turns out or on what it happens to look like.
And it's quite a "load off" to see that the dream is unfolding in the much larger, much more unfathomable field of experience that is You.
And yet...you get to have the experience of the dream, too! Even as you get to appreciate what it actually is and who you actually are.
Having your cake and eating it, too.
Hope this is helpful.
Enjoy your cake,
Dena