Birdie Transformation Program

Week 28

How to begin seeing others as having Buddha Nature

A meditation

This is meant as an aide. It requires from you willingness to participate, play, explore, use your imagination, suspend judgment and a willingness to open.

You might have heard or read about how everything is connected to everything else. Most people on the spiritual path also probably are familiar with this, from the Christian faith: “Love others as your Self”, or the practice to recognize Buddha nature in others in Buddhism. You might have also noticed some resistance to doing that, or found yourself not able to love others at all, especially looking at how they seem to act or what they are doing to the world and its creatures.

Some of you are familiar with the Clear Light Prayer from the American Book of the Dead. The prayer/reading is posted in its entirety below.

We will be working with this phrase from the prayer:

“…All that I have been conscious of is my own play of consciousness, a dance of light, the swirling patterns of light in infinite extension, endless endlessness,….”

During this Birdie program you (hopefully, by now) already have created in your home a space for certain activities of practice, a space where you feel safe.

Sit there (or lay down, as you need), take a few breaths about twice as long as you normally would. Let go of everything that came before this time and any plans for later. Should there be any emotions or thoughts, be a kind presence to them and allow them to move on. Everything that arises in your awareness, be it thoughts, feelings, sensations, you name it, is just being noticed without being judged. Remember, any emotions that might arise in the process can be met with welcome and warmth. Who you are is bigger than any emotions or fears. After a while, you will notice in you a slowing down, a calming and spaciousness.

Now it is time to play. Begin to imagine yourself as being the shape you are – only – your body is made of light. It does not matter what the light looks like to your inner eye, what shape or colors, with or without movement of the light. Notice the light form. Are any especially bright spots, dark spots, any colors?

Stay with that for a bit and then, imagine the object you sit on, your space and then the room also to be of light, in whatever form that light appears to you.

Expand your inner eye’s vision further now, imagining the house, your town, the landscape all as light, all connected. Go further your country, the planet, the universe and see light – light in infinite extension – of which everything and everyone is part of, all arising in the same space.

You, the natural world, all the people you know, all the people you don’t know, everyone and everything everywhere is connected in one space that is conscious.

Stay with that imagery for a while if you can.

Everything is part of that light existing.

Do this a few times during this week. There will be a time when it stops just being “imagination” and you begin to realize its truth in a way that would be difficult to describe.

However, in your daily life, remembering this can mean to be able to connect on a deeper level, to yourself and others, than the outward manifestation of speech and behavior. No matter what happens anywhere, it is a play of consciousness and everything you do or don’t do to any part of this, including yourself, you have done to all. All the work you are doing to overcome ignorance, you do for all. At their base, everything and everyone, no matter what you(r ego) thinks about their personal looking appearance and actions, is a manifestation of that same ONE.

Staying connected to a deeper part of yourself will enable you to be in this world less as contracted/reactive ego and more as an active benevolent being at peace with itself.

This work does not mean to neglect your body-mind in your everyday life, it simply gives you a glimmer of the ground to be in that is not rooted in the 3-dimensional world.

Confronting the Clear Light

Now I am experiencing the Clear Light of objective reality. Nothing is happening, nothing ever has happened or ever will happen. My present sense of self, the voyager, is in reality the void itself, having no qualities or characteristics. I remember myself as the voyager, whose deepest nature is the Clear Light itself; I am one; there is no other. I am the voidness of the void, the eternal unborn, the uncreated, neither real nor unreal. All that I have been conscious of is my own play of consciousness, a dance of light, the swirling patterns of light in infinite extension, endless endlessness, the Absolute beyond change, existence, reality. I, the voyager, am inseparable from the Clear Light; I cannot be born, die, exist, or change. I know now that this is my true nature.