Painting Our Own Canvas

One of the core texts of Kashmir Shaivism, the Pratyabhijnahrdayam, describes a sadhana for recognizing the ultimate reality. That sadhana is to absorb all of the objects that we encounter in our life into ourselves. By absorbing all of those objects, those energies, those processes into ourselves, we begin to appreciate that there is nothing outside our own consciousness, which is consciousness itself. By observing that we are connected with all of the objects that present themselves in our lives and having the experience of the feeling of the contact that each object in our life brings up within us, we begin to understand that there is total interconnectedness between objects and their energetic nature and ourselves. Slowly we assimilate all the objects into our own consciousness, and we begin to appreciate that our consciousness is unbounded and infinite, and has no beginning and no end.

Our attitudes, opinions and judgments deny us the opportunity to absorb our experiences and to resolve the residual resonances of those experiences within the circulation of our own creative energy because we are constantly building walls within ourselves. Until all experiences are assimilated and all the residual vibration of all the limited experiences resolves, we still have some karmic experience to pass through. So we should be taking down walls instead of building them.

Rather than spending any time getting engaged with all of your judgments and attitudes, take these kinds of tensions as a reflection of some circumstance within yourself that is appropriate for you to dissolve. Allow the experiences that you pass through in your day to be part of the learning process that we call life, so that you will be nourished and your understanding of the ultimate reality that you are will expand and expand.

This experience of the truth of your own individual consciousness is available to you, and it begins when you start to practice genuine love and respect for everybody in this world. You have to realize that each person is here to, and has the right and responsibility to paint their own canvas. Whether we appreciate their art or not is irrelevant. There is enough work for us in painting our own.