Mindfulness

Our next stop was the Bud­dhist tem­ple fre­quented by our cab dri­ver and his fam­ily. This sur­pris­ingly small but sim­ply styled struc­ture, which would oth­er­wise never have struck me as a tem­ple, was not, accord­ing to our cabby, a place of wor­ship like a church. This hal­lowed space, with its larger-​​than-​​life, gold-​​leafed stat­ues of the Bud­dha, seated in a lotus posi­tion, each ded­i­cated to the mem­bers of a sin­gle fam­ily, their ances­tors as well as their heirs, and main­tained by the liv­ing, was instead, a place where one came to expe­ri­ence or become mind­ful of the Buddha—or one’s own unac­tu­al­ized Self—in the same man­ner Moses had approached the burn­ing bush, that lay on the very ground of his being. The place so reminded me of the space where I retreated, to com­mune with Who I Really Am, the hair actu­ally stood up on the back of my neck.

Were we tem­ples then, so con­structed that each of us reflected the light of the fire which burns within, in ways as broadly sim­i­lar and yet as uniquely dif­fer­ent as were the Bud­dha and Christ? Was each of us a sub­tle vari­a­tion of the truth burn­ing to ignite the images that smol­der within us and keep us apart? Had we been brought together, here, by our nuances, like the pieces of a great jig­saw puz­zle, to get a clearer pic­ture of Who We Really Are?

Unaware yet, of the nuances of truth that were dri­ving me to act so instinc­tively, I sud­denly became aware or mind­ful of the need I had to pen­e­trate the void which enveloped my mind—that Mind of all minds—to see what It had in mind for me. Only I had to expend a lot of energy to escape the grav­i­ta­tional pull of all those earthly cares and con­cerns which weighed me down. At the point where I moved beyond my self, I entered the tun­nel of vision, a worm­hole of sorts, that took me within reach of the great light at the other end. Fear­ful yet, of my own enlight­en­ment, I stepped back into the con­ver­sa­tion my friend, Greg, and I had been hav­ing with our cabby. Before the worm­hole had pinched off, I looked back just in time to see the Bud­dha wink at me. At that point, I made a motion in favor of leav­ing the place, but not before I had conned our cabby into tak­ing a pic­ture of us, with my cam­era. As we stood fac­ing the Bud­dha, this side of the event hori­zon, I looked back just in time to see the cam­era wink at me. With that, I real­ized I had just hopped from one sin­gu­lar­ity to another, only this time, in syn­chronic­ity with my psyche.