I am the lovely world
There is nothing like a calm walk through a quiet forest. Or gazing peacefully across a calm sea, with sunlight reflecting from its surface. The sight of a flower with morning dew still tear-dropped across its petals, how the heart can sing at such sights!
Alas they are fleeting, as the mind cannot stand to sit still for too long. It says that there must be production and effort, a plan must be hatched or a job fulfilled. It says that there is no time to waste in all this pointless gazing.
To truly see the world, we must wake up to the truth that the entity the mind is so keen on protecting, advancing and comforting - the ego, or limited self - does not exist. Then the chatter will die down and we can take our rest in such beautiful sights - indeed, at all sights, for each moment is pregnant with beauty if one cares to look. All of it emerges from the One, the Creator of all, from the silent depths of Being in the eternal Now.
But even after realising this truth, do we “see” the world? Who is the “we” that “sees”, and what is “seen”? The implicit duality of language sometimes obscures more than it reveals. To say someone sees a beautiful scene implicitly creates two objects and an activity - a seer and a seen (the two objects) and the seeing (the action).
But are there really two such entities?
We are conditioned to think so, but there is nothing in the experience that demonstrates this to be so. There is just seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, thinking, and so on, but no experience of a seer, a hearer, toucher or thinker. Once this is realised there is a breakthrough.
Then self-reflective thought can cease. A merger with life occurs and there is no longer a little “self” which everything must be referenced to. The kingfisher dipping into the lake is no longer beautiful to “me”, it is just beauty in motion, and I, Awareness, am that beauty, that motion. The only “self” that is left is that True Self, which cannot be described but can be lived, and that life is all things.
Separateness vanishes and all the loveliness of the world is seen to be One, and there is no longer any little idea of “me” distanced from it. All then becomes Love, for love is the union of apparently separate things - it is the entanglement of all, where nothing can be described in isolation from anything else.
This understanding, this way of life, is not far away. It is actually what you are living right now, unknowingly. For the thoughts you are apparently lost in are intimate and one with Awareness - there is no internal distance between your consciousness and the thoughts and feelings which arise “in” it. There is no in or out, subject and object, even in the realm of thought.
There is just thought and feelings, with no thinker or feeler; just spontaneous modulations of Awareness. Or, at the very least, spontaneous from the viewpoint of a finite mind.
So there has never actually been separateness, disunity, ostracisation. It is only Awareness under the form of separateness, the One appearing to be many.
Once this is realised, the ideas about the limited self begin to fade, and we can enter into the Kingdom of God, the Pure Land, which in reality we have never left.