Waving

Joan Tollefson

Everything is a choiceless movement of an ungraspable, inconceivable and indivisible presence. There is space Here-Now for everything to be exactly as it is, and it is never the same way for more than an instant. Human beings with our complex brains have a habit of overlooking our actual present experiencing in favor of a conceptual story that we have learned—we overlook the territory itself, which is alive, and try to live in an (inaccurate and misleading) map.
By giving open attention to our actual direct experiencing, by looking and listening rather than always try to think our way to clarity, by feeling into this spacious awaring presence that we are, we can discover that we are like moving waves in the Ocean—each of us is a momentary, ever-changing, fluid movement of the whole Ocean. We are not actually separate from the other waves, and we are never anything but the Ocean. We cannot go off in a direction other than the one in which the Ocean is moving, and when we “die,” we subside back into the Ocean that we never actually left.
The Ocean includes big waves and small ones, stormy seas and placid ones—but it is one, whole, undivided happening without borders or seams. Only when we identify exclusively as the wave do we worry that we are “too small” or “too big” or worry about what will happen to “me” when “I” die, as if a waving movement has ever been any solid, persisting “thing” to begin with, or as if it has ever been apart from the Ocean.
The true “I” to which we all refer prior to name and form is the Ocean. And we don’t have to stop being a wave to realize that we are the Ocean. The Ocean loves waving. To paraphrase Rumi, “You are not a wave in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a wave.” So wave on in whatever way you are being expressed, which you cannot help doing. And do not fear returning (at the moment of death) to the place you have never left.