Nature Nurture - The Wild Life

Nature and nurture. Wilderness and wildness. Unification as life itself is the mystical beautific vision.

What is it that is so alluring and adorable about nature and wildlife? It immediately confronts us with the nonverbal, with the mystery, with the source, with our self. What are these adorable kin creatures, these curious interdimensional beings? The animate cosmos as the whole of experience in my consciousness, of consciousness, is alive with life. It immediately has the sense of being wild and free and utterly incomprehensible. If we're sensible.

What is the source of being? What is the source of knowing and loving? What is that power of powers in life, in sentience, in the very heart of hearts of beings which so cherishes fulfilling its desire to fulfill existence and being, to fulfill itself? Shall we call it buddhanature, or cittanature, or heartmindnature, or perhaps naturenature?

As they say, this is the secret to both samsara and nirvana, the secret of life. The secret and redemption of ignorance and suffering, the secret and redemption of awakening and liberation. Isn't knowing how to fulfill this root desire the actual single point in Buddha Dharma, and actually all existential life endeavors for that matter? Meaning, purpose, actualization, fulfillment, do turn out to be quite fundamental after all.

More poetically, the desire to know and to be real and to be free. To be in awe, wonderstruck in amazement is required. As they say, if the discovery of reality is not astonishing, one has surely missed it. To glimpse the totality of emptiness and fullness is to be it. To unify and to be in harmony and whole is to be it. Loving and being loved in love is to be it. Being knowing being and nonbeing, its cocreation and procreation and nocreation, is to be it.

So, this desire and love is at the root of all life and being. We may call it immanent wisdom and compassion, or relative and absolute bodhicitta, or the nyana called sat cit ananda. Maybe this is where the personal and impersonal also unify, or if even they were ever separate in the first place?

Like a figure ground reversal it reveals, so to speak, that it is doing us rather than us doing it. Like the ancient masters suggested, perhaps buddhanature has sentient beings rather than sentient beings having buddhanature. Or use your preferred reality motif. The nonself self, the desireless desire, the identity inherent in reality.

Well, who wants to know and why, I might ask? I do, because until it realizes the true nature of its nature, it continues to blunder and plunder the existential enigma.

Hey we're in snake consciousness!

Swimming in the ocean of consciousness

Like a magician's illusion, a rainbow, a mirage

Empathy, unification, wisdom, compassion

What it's like to be a bat

Stop, look, and listen

Who are you?

What's my hurry, you ask?

Nature and nurture is all that we're here for