A good friend of mine from Kanzeon came to mind this morning: Bruce W., who died more than twenty years ago.
I remember that during a wilderness retreat in Canyonlands, Southern Utah, he had a small blackboard with announcements of who was in charge of what duties (I think). After each name, he had written “AKA Buddha”.
In typical Bruce fashion, it was both funny and true.
To ourselves, we are inevitably consciousness, and to us, the world appears within and as the consciousness we are.
I assume it’s like that for all consciousnesses, for all creatures that “have consciousness” as we in our culture like to say it.
That means we are all Buddha. We all have Buddha nature. We are all consciousness. We all have the characteristics of consciousness. We all are those characteristics.
To us, we are oneness and the world, to us, happens within and as the oneness we are. Here, there is inevitably love, a pragmatic love that’s independent of fleeting feelings and states. The world, to us, appears dreamlike since waking life and dreams all happen within and as the consciousness we are.
We are the whole field of experience – this human self and the wider world – equally, and not one thing more or less than anything else. We are not fundamentally any content of experience.
Even more essentially, we are capacity for all of it, for consciousness and all the forms it takes, our whole field of experience.
The image is made by me and Midjourney