In the experience of yogins
who do not perceive things dualistically,
the fact that things manifest without truly existing
is so amazing they burst into laughter.
~ Longchenpa
Everything we experience is real.
It's just not what we think it is.
One of the peculiarities of reality is that it tends to pattern itself into apparent objects, people, moods, sounds, thoughts, and so on.
In Peter's words, presence never shows up naked.
It always looks like something. It always seems to have certain qualities and characteristics.
Take my kitchen table, for example. It appears to have a particular shape, color, texture, and density. Similarly, everything in my experience—my body, other people, the sound of traffic, a red apple—appears as a pattern of very specific experiential characteristics.
But when I look closely for these patterns, they can't actually be found.
At first glance, my kitchen table seems concrete, solid, static, with clearly obvious qualities such as wooden, rectangular, and brown. But when I try to pin down these "obvious" qualities, things quickly become strange and slippery:
"Wooden" is a conceptual description, a thought—and not inherent in my direct experience of the table.
"Rectangular" oversimplifies a shape that has endless irregularities and is entirely dependent on the particular perspective I happen to be looking at it from.
And "brown"? When I look closely, I see thousands of different shades of brown, black, tan, and more. What exactly—and where exactly—is "brown"?
Moreover, not only can these patterns not be pinned down, they continually deviate from previous versions of themselves. The table I'm experiencing now isn't the table from two seconds ago. Moment to moment, my experience of the table subtly shifts, each "version" disappearing even as it appears. So which of these continually morphing versions is my kitchen table?
It's like asking, "What shape is a fractal?" It's a question that makes no sense. A fractal seems to have a pattern, but upon closer examination, there are endless patterns within patterns within patterns, forever.
Experience is exactly the same way.
The shape or quality of anything depends entirely on how you look at it—and there's no limit to the ways you can look.
When I carefully examine my kitchen table, all I find is unresolvable "un-patterned-ness." None of the table's obvious qualities (like wooden, rectangular, or brown) are stable or coherent.
So, exactly where is the table? Does it even exist? Not in the conventional way we imagine.
What does exist is an experience I'm labeling "my kitchen table."
This label is like a URL pointing to an unresolvable, dynamic energy presence that continually morphs, never repeats, and opens endlessly into more and more experience.
My kitchen table is thus the concrete presence of infinity.
Patterns appear, but they don't independently exist. They're never separate from the one unified field of radiant presence. Yet, somehow, there's all this inconceivable complexity, specificity, and diversity—a table, a computer, my body, trees, the world, my life situation, other people, psychological tendencies, songs, emotions, current events, galaxies, the entirety of human history, and everything else.
But just as with my kitchen table, we can empirically (and astonishingly!) verify that none of these things have any internal coherence. Each is an un-patterned, unresolvable, non-repeating appearance in reality. Much like dreams, they appear, but they don’t exist.
The only thing they actually consist of is the vibrating, shimmering aliveness of radiant presence itself.
That these apparent patterns appear is not a problematic bug in reality, but a miraculous feature. Each apparent pattern is a convenient "handle" allowing you to interact with your own energy field. It's you in relationship to the energy of You.
And while the apparent patterning and the raw energetic presence are conceptual opposites, experientially they seamlessly coexist and interpenetrate. Both are pure radiant presence. Experience includes the patterns it appears as, yet is never limited by them.
Recognizing that these apparent patterns are actually un-patterned and infinite is the very heart of the great spiritual discovery.
The fundamental human struggle arises from feeling trapped within seemingly fixed patterns—our identities, relationships, problems, and circumstances. Yet, in truth, no entrapment is possible. All situations, however fixed they seem, are spontaneous appearances of boundless radiant presence. Realizing this experientially helps to free us from any imagined limitations, revealing life as a playful dance of infinite possibility.
Insightful and uplifting! Thank you!
I wrote down “Presence never shows up naked.” When you said it, during your meeting. I love that! And “This label is like a URL” just blew my mind! Thank YOU for all you do!