As a separate self, we yearn for escape or cling to constancy. We would die for something better or hang on for dear life. We are drawn to the greener grass or repulsed by the monster who lives in the woods.
We embrace the fundamental truth of cause and effect and believe we have the power to control the outcome of every situation. Our spiritual journey can be a desperate attempt to modify our reality, hoping for something more real, liberating, and life-changing.
We are trying to mold the future with our will when even our will is not our own, it is a product of cause and effect. The one who wants change is a product of cause and effect. The desire to want change or keep things the same arises within cause and effect. There is no escape from cause and effect.
We may have a moment of clarity when the cause-&-effect-imagined center drops away. We see through cause and effect from the stillness in which it arises. We become aware of our unbounded nature as the spaceless-space of all existence. We see cause and effect arise from within the limitless, vivid, emptiness which is pregnant with the potential of everything-ness. We touch the ground of being as the ground of being and experience perfect presence as existence itself.
But cause and effect arise again. We discover Karma is real. We may journey to the center of existence, but when we re-emerge from the bliss of nothing, we are again trapped in the whirlpool of cause and effect. There is no escape from the endless karma of cause and effect.
But what is cause and effect? Where did it come from? What is karma made of? Isn’t it arising from within the boundless, vivid, aware, empty potential that is the ground of being for everything? Isn’t the consciousness that is the “I” of I am arising from the awareness of “am-ness”? Then it follows that what is arising is arising from what I am. My body extends from, and as the spaciousness that is the space for its existence. My body may have skin, but the skin isn’t its boundary because it is what it consumes. It’s the dirt on which it walks and the air it breathes. It’s the earth and the solar system, and the cosmos. It reaches out to include time itself and the Big Bang. It is every aspect of cause and effect to include cause and effect itself.
I am cause and effect. I am karma itself. I need not escape because there is nowhere outside of what I am. This revelation and its acceptance is my freedom. No escape brings liberation.
To liberate ourselves from our karma we must become karma itself. Book of Equanimity: Illuminated Classic Zen Koans, Gerry Shishin Wick.
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