In one of these posts, I spoke of a friend who is clearer than I.

Then, while sitting in a dental chair in the middle of a three-hour crown preparation, it came to me that that is not actually true. On a clear day we say that the sky is blue—but it is actually not. It has no color at all. In the same way, my friend cannot be clearer than I. Awareness is transparent, lucid, open, awake. The ground of being is never other than that, either in manifestation or not. We are shot through with this clarity, every one of us. That beautiful clear light, that naked awareness, is what we are made of—is, in fact, us. I cannot have less of it than the friends that I think are very wise.

However, the patterns that show up in any particular earth suit may be denser or less dense. If I am heavily clouded with emotional suffering, the clarity that is always there is less visible to both myself and to another. So it would be true to say that at times, it is more veiled in me than in in my friend.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but this observation filled me with the delight, even excitement. It’s like being told that the fur on an Angora rabbit is exquisitely soft, and then actually feeling one. I think that I know soft—I’ve touched lips to the nape of a newborn infant’s neck, stroked fingers across velvet yardage. But when I felt that Angora bunny, the experience became vividly different—a new kind of soft—and that kind of experiential knowing remains. That’s why, although reading is wonderful and can open windows on a far wider world, we have to actually fling open the doors and eat our way through that world to digest it fully.

© Amrita Skye Blaine, 2012
photo credit: Wisconsin Public Radio