Nature Nurture - The Wild Life

Oct 14, 2025

3 min read

Updated: Aug 25

Nature and nurture. Wildness and wilderness. Unification is life itself as the mystical beatific 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 if we really are not separate from nature? And what are these adorable kin animal creatures, these curious interdimensional beings? Even the whole animate cosmos as the whole of experience in consciousness, of consciousness, is alive with life, as 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 this power of powers we call life, sentience, in the very heart of hearts of beings which so cherishes fulfilling its desire, to fulfill its existence and being, to fulfill itself? The Buddha said desire is the root of all things, with becoming as its nature. Another root teacher said, Just as it's in the nature of being to seek adventure in becoming, so it's in the nature of becoming to seek peace in being. It is pointed out as buddhanature aka cittanature, and bodhicitta aka naturenuture.

The teachers say this is the secret to both samsara and nirvana, these two aspects of our nature, the culmination of life and fulfilling of nature. The secret and redemption of ignorance and suffering, the secret and redemption of happiness and liberation. Isn't knowing how to fulfill this root desire the essential point in Buddha Dharma? And inevitably all existential life endeavors for that matter? Meaning, purpose, actualization, fulfillment, do turn out to be quite fundamental and important after all, if one is paying wise attention and listening.

But more poetically, there is this desire to know and to be real and to be free. For the genuine mystic gnosis realization, 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 peak astonishment indeed, and most uniquely through the fact of being this reality. I know, mystic entitlement in the extreme. To unify and to be in harmony with the whole is to be it. The wisdom knowing its emptiness 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. Another root teacher said, Nibbana is our true nature, we know it by being it, the pure citta is nibbana.

So, this desire and love is at the root of all life and being, and the quenching of ignorance fulfills it. We may call it immanent wisdom and compassion, or relative and absolute bodhicitta, or the jnana called satcitananda. Maybe just 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 the impersonal reveals, so to speak, that it is doing us rather than us doing it. Like the ancient masters pointing out, perhaps buddhanature has sentient beings rather than sentient beings having buddhanature. Or use your preferred reality motif here. The nonself self, the desireless desire, the identity inherent in reality, it is knowing it by being it. This is how I've been instructed and inspired by my teachers, and thus far affirmed it is pointing the way.