ALREADY SAVED, by Pitaka 1975
Outside a private home somewhere in Berkeley, hopefully still stands a huge sprawling tree. This is not just any tree to me, but perhaps it could have been.

In my experience, evoked time and time again as I recall the sight of my beloved tree, it gushes with love as a radiant streaming of a delicious "substance", flowing out to all beings, unconditionally, indiscriminately, for no reason at all. In this quality of "contact" for lack of better word, the world opened up, exposing to me the underlying nature of itself, the mysterious life stuff, beneath the appearance of objects and what we call space.

What happened to my perception and experience as this opening occurred was that "my body" was not as I had always assumed, a separate object, but "fused" because the space was not empty nor a gap between objects. No where was this absent! It went on forever in all directions. I directly experienced that "I" was and am both the contained and the container, as if in an endless womb with no boundary of me and it.

This was revealed as the actuality of all things which appear and that which sustains their appearance, their "being". This meant that "I", as this, could never be separate, that in Reality separation is not an option. I sobbed in gratitude for knowing that regardless of how cut off I had often felt, perhaps from the moment of birth, that this was always an illusion. Everything I had known up to this moment proved to be false, constructed of combined thought, emotion, sensation and sensory perception, all without substance. My experience was not trustworthy! Although it was all I'd ever had to find my way.

I was flooded with gratitude for the absolute compassion that could never be lost nor earned, nor abandoned. I remember thinking, this is what is meant by eternal life, and the father and I are one. This belongs to every being while we live in ignorance of it, even a prisoner in solitary confinement has this, no matter what they have done.

"The fire that iron or gold need,
            would it be good for fresh quinces or apples? But gentle flames are not enough for iron,
            it eagerly draws to itself the dragons breath. That iron is the soul who bears hardship,
            under the hammer and the fire, this one happily glows red!"
                                                                                Rumi

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