Posted inDharma, Valerie's Messages

Message from Valerie: Coming Home

August 16, 2023

Scott and I returned late Sunday night from the annual Sanbozen teacher training in Toronto. It’s good to be home! Home in the ordinary sense of daily life in and among the Mountain Cloud community, and in the fundamental sense of our true home – the essential fact that is always exactly where you are. 

During the Kenshukai, a theme emerged early on: “Dwelling nowhere, mind comes forth.” This line from the Diamond Sutra is a way of naming our true home. Empty, boundless, without any substance or hindrance. Abiding nowhere. And yet . . . this. 

This, in its unique particularity, is nothing but the shape or form of one seamless nothing-at-all-ness. The fact – not only where we are but also who and what we are.
 
Students sometimes report settling into the silent spaciousness of sitting and asking, “Where do thoughts come from?” The head? No. The eleven organ systems of the body? No. The space beyond the body, some wider collective awareness? 

Look into it and you cannot find a beginning, a source, a ‘coming from.’ 

Look into this looking and, in one unguarded moment, the one looking may disappear. Never was there.  The ten thousand myriad things appear, each bit whole, complete – and illumining completely.
Welcome home. 

Photo by Valentina Locatelli on Unsplash

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