MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
Translucency of the Physical World
The frozen stillness of a garden reveals to the poetic eye a Vision of the translucency of the physical world, through which the Metaphysical world can be seen shining. To him who has once been granted this transparent epiphany of the Other World, there prevails ever after an overwhelming certainty of the reality of the nondual relationship between the two worlds and an unshakeable conviction of the unreality of the physical world when divorced from the spiritual realm, its divine source and principle, by the illusion of everyday life.
Yet to those who are still under its malefic spell, it is this grey materialistic falsification that is mistaken for the only reality, while the translucent Vision is dismissed as a mere poet's fantasy, for only when the physical is seen in isolation does it appear opaque. The real worlds of natura naturata and natura naturans in their nondual union have not been abolished by the projected abstractions of science or the rational reductions of positivism. They are still there, an inexhaustible source of joy and peace to those with eyes to see and ears to hear, once such cerebral delusions are dispelled.
And through serene contemplation of their unique qualities the aspirant can still attain the realm of Pure Being, Pure Consciousness, and Pure Bliss. Far from denying the physical world, such an insight immeasurably heightens all its sensuous qualities. ‘Every minute particular’ becomes holy, distinguished in the clearest precision of detail, each equally vivid, precious, and significant, because it represents the realization of one of the possibilities of Infinite Possibility. Yet all are illuminated from within by the same Clear Light of the Void, for the lower is subsumed by the higher, in which its multitudinous but essential qualities are united and preserved by the Quality of qualities.
For the first time this world is perceived in its pristine reality, sub specie aeternitatis, one of the most striking aspects of this experience being its timelessness. Ever-accelerating time, which seemed on the point of consuming space, suddenly reaches the end of its cycle, when ‘time must have a stop’, and so with its possibilities permanently fixed as though in ice, time in its turn is crystallized in space. As Titus Burckhardt says: ‘The knowledge which a man obtains from such an insight cannot be of a purely rational or discursive kind. For him the world has now become as if transparent: in its appearances he sees the reflection of the eternal 'prototypes'. And even when this insight is not immediately present, the symbols which spring from it nevertheless arouse the memory or 'recollection' of those prototypes’. It is the final alchemic stage in which the psyche ‘becomes a motionless crystal filled with light’.