This is perhaps not so important, but I was reminded of the ocean and drop analogy.
Our sense fields are made up of our experiences of this human self and the wider world, and it’s all happening within and as what we are.
We can call this the ocean. To us, what we are contains the whole world as it appears to us. Any boundaries happen within and as what we are. Any time happens within and as what we are. We are capacity for all of it, and we are all of it as it’s here.
In a sense, this is the ocean. It’s the only ocean in our immediate experience and noticing.
This is also the psychological or small interpretation of awakening. We don’t need to refer to anything divine. We don’t need to use any special terminology. It’s not something other or apart from us. It’s right here and we can notice it here and now.
There are several pointers and approaches that can help us find this for ourselves, sometimes in a short period of time and without much if any preparation. (The two I am most familiar with are the Big Mind process and the Headless experiments.)
There is also the spiritual or big interpretation of awakening, and this is where we would talk about the divine, Spirit, God, and so on. For instance, we can assume that all of existence is like us – it’s capacity for itself and, in it’s many forms, it’s consciousness. The details here are open for discussion, for instance, we may assume the existence of divine beings and so on. There are some hints that this may be accurate, although none of this is required for talking about awakening.
If we take this larger view on awakening and make some assumptions about the nature of all of existence, we can say that we – as we experience ourselves – are a drop in this larger ocean.
To ourselves, we are the ocean. And to existence as a whole, we are a drop in the larger ocean.
Note: When we discover our nature as it appears to us – as capacity for the world, as what our sense fields happen within and as, as oneness, as consciousness, and so on, all will appear as this.
We experience all of existence through and as what we are. So it’s inevitable that all of existence will look like what we are. But we cannot really know. It’s an assumption, which may be correct or not, or may be partially correct and partially not.
That’s why I like to differentiate between a small or psychological understanding of awakening, and a big or spiritual understanding of awakening. The first is simple and down-to-earth, the second makes some assumptions beyond what we easily can check for ourselves.
INITIAL NOTES
Our sense fields, one, an ocean work all sorts of things within it, small interpretation of awakening
This may be a drop in a much larger ocean, big interpretation of awakening