There is nothing lacking in you.
Take a moment to sit with that statment.
I know it can be difficult to believe. It’s difficult for me, too.
In so many areas of our lives, we compare ourselves to other people, archetypes, or ideas. It’s so easy to feel like you are too much and, at the same time, not enough.
I’ve spent so much of my life trying to grow and improve. Often, the goal has been centered not on my own experience but on others’ experience of me. I want to grow so that I can be easier to tolerate in the ways that I feel difficult. Such a paradox, how even attempts to “grow” can be a form of shrinking yourself down.
Yesterday, I read about Dzogchen, a Tibetan tradition linked to the Buddhist and Bon religions. It is a tradition that believes we are all a part of a larger whole of existence, and that the aim of life is rediscovering this ultimate ground. The word Dzogchen, itself, means “great completeness.” The wholeness of existence is complete and perfect, in no need of change, and we are a part of that. There is nothing we need to change or “fix” about ourselves just as there is no fixing the universe. Our imperfections, much like our feeling of separateness, are illusory perceptions.
In the tradition of Dzogchen, we all possess the ability to awaken from this illusion and rediscover the base of all existence. Each of us is already a buddha whose “ordinary mind” — our ego, so set on protecting the separateness of “me” — gets in the way of our awakening. Since we are already buddhas, it means we don’t need to hide away on the top of a mountain or engage in esotericism; all we must do is practice opening ourselves to the knowledge that already exists deep inside of ourselves. Beyond our attachments, beyond our grasping, beyond our belief that we are separate. To begin the process of reconnecting to our original state of existence, all we must do is be aware.
This poem comes from the Bon and it speaks to our ultimate wholeness. It teaches that self-awareness can lead to the ultimate truth of being because we are the universe and the universe is us. There is no distinction.
Nothing, not even one thing,
does not arise from me.
Nothing, not even one thing,
dwells not within me.
Everything, just everything,
emanates from me.
Thus I am only one!
Knowing me is knowing all.
Great bliss.
This poem brings another to mind: Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. While I won’t reproduce the entire poem, I will quote from section 46.
Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.It is not far, it is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know,
Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land.
Whitman was a part of another tradition that focused on the perfection of being, American Transcendentalism. Much like Dzogchen, Transcendentalism espouses that all beings are connected to a greater whole. In their worldview, influenced by Eastern traditions from India, each person is an individual expression of the larger “over-soul,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson called it. Decades before Iris Murdoch wrote about nature as a tool for “unselfing,” the Transcendentalists viewed nature as an essential tool for understanding the inner workings of the universe and our place in it. As Emerson observed in his essay, Nature,
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
I have experience with this feeling. Back in 2015, I went on a hike with my cousin, Laura, in Rocky Mountain National Park. It can be difficult for me to feel a sense of awe, so it stood out to me by how easily I felt it that day amongst these rocks and trees that have long pre-dated me and will outlast me just as well. It gave me context for my place in the broader timeline of existence. It gave me a sense that my entire lifetime is but a fleeting moment in all of time and space. While feeling small can sometimes feel frightening, this time it felt calming. When you realize your place in the wholeness of existence, it allows you to ease your grip on the events of daily life. You begin to recognize how unimportant they really are in the bigger picture. What feels so urgent and crucial, today, will not matter in a year or five years, and certainly not in a millennia.
In a social structure that makes us feel broken and incomplete, often with the aim of selling us a capitalist solution, traditions like Dzogchen or Transcendentalism can help us remember that we are already whole. There is nothing essential that can be gained or lost. What we need is here, right now, in this moment. This is not to say there is nothing we can do to be kind to ourselves and other living things; it is not to say that our actions have no consequences. It is simply a reminder that our choices cannot and will not add or detract from the essential perfection of the universe to which we belong.
It is easy to get caught up in my “ordinary mind,” to let my ego run amok and shrink me to something much smaller and less extraordinary than I truly am. I am not imperfect. I am not too much or too little. I am the universe and so are you. So are the tree outside my window and the cat snoozing next to me. We are like waves rising from the ocean and crashing against the shore. Both changing and unchanging. Always part of a larger and unfathomable whole.