There’s an insight that transformed my life, my way of seeing, relating, practicing, and pursuing profound transformation. I share it often and each time I hold it in my meditation new implications emerge.

Even the tiniest glimpse of Infinity is still infinite.

Let's reflect for a moment.


Even the tiniest glimpse of Infinity is still infinite.

Often times as seekers we want to hold onto states or experience more exalted states of consciousness. There’s nothing wrong with profound mystical states. They inspire. They inform. They shift our center of gravity. They change how we see the world around us.

But they are not the goal.

When we seek to break the confines of feeling like we are trapped in a limited mental loop that makes us unhappy, makes those around us unhappy, and that is the root of so very much suffering in the world around us, it propels us on the path. Our goal is freedom from that fixed and limited way of seeing so we can live in a way that is joyful, harmonious, happy, inspired, and free. We want our actions to ripple out bringing positive momentum into the world.

We pursue new ways of seeing and knowing beyond our compulsive identification with thought. If we are very fortunate, we have glimpses, moments or even longer, of a profound identification of self beyond the mind.

What do we do with those glimpses?

We usually savor them, enjoy them, feel buoyed by them.

Temporarily.

We share them and hold on to them, pulling them out when we are discouraged or depressed, hoping the memory will feed our passion once again.

But that doesn’t really work.

It really falls under what Trungpa Rinpoche called “spiritual materialism.” We want more and better, higher and brighter, thinking that next bliss state will do it. That next kensho will spark the big fire.

Meanwhile, the beautiful glimpses we’ve already had, those fragrant, sweet tastes of what lies beyond a perspective bound by thought, sink further back in our memory. They never dull because the authenticity of our glimpses is real. But our ability to see the luminosity does. It’s like windowpanes dulled by dust. The sun is still bright, we simply perceive it as muddy, lackluster, dimmed. We doubt the sun, not our vision. We seek to replace the sun with a brighter one, chasing what we’ve already found. And since there is only one sun illuminating this world (to stretch the metaphor a little) we go from window to window and find there’s nothing additional to see. What’s needed is a cleaning off, a re-calibrating of our own understanding, a recognition of the preciousness of the glimpse we’ve been graced with.

Even a glimpse of infinity is still infinite.

Think about it. Infinity has no beginning and no end. It cannot be measured, sliced up, or partial. It’s infinite.

Whether you have a glimpse or blast a portal as wide as the Himalayas open, infinity itself will not become less than infinite. It can only be perceived as a whole.

Spiritual experiences are ultimately about shifting our perspective from a smaller-minded, acquisitive orientation with our limited self-oriented perspective at the center, to one where the greater reality becomes our orientation, our lens through which we see and interpret life.

Any one of us may have had a little glimpse of the Infinite. The Infinite is still as vast and fathomless as ever.

Embracing this and allowing our identification and orientation to shift frees us from endless grasping, striving, and that never-enoughness that characterizes so much of modern thought. It allows us to release our identification with the one who is seeking and experience the nonseparation from the whole. It allows us to align with the inimitable Bruce Lee’s advice, “Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”

Basking in and as that Heavenly Glory, we become free from the mental torment of constantly feeling like something is missing, we aren’t quite there yet, we haven’t had enough. We free ourselves from that hamster wheel so we can stop the exhausting race to complete ourselves and all of the sudden see the world so welcoming of our care and so thirsty for our passion. Once we see, like the call to the bodhisattvas to release all suffering of countless beings, we won’t have the mindshare to worry about the idea that something might be missing from our essential selves.

I invite you to keep turning over the jewel of insight that you’ve already experienced. Polish your discrimination so you can see freshly. Delight and offer up appreciation for having seen the light of the infinite squeak through the crack of our postmodern window. Follow the light beam all the way to the other side. So when you look back, you look back with infinite eyes, you see with the eyes of the world.