Learning to Bow
‘To bow to the fact of our life’s sorrows and betrayals is to accept them, and from this deep gesture we discover that all life is workable. As we learn to bow, we discover that the heart holds more freedom and compassion than we could imagine.’
- Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life.
I hold with the Buddhist concept of the soul as mindstream that is a continuation of a bubble of self-awareness. The Buddha did not know about DNA or time as a fourth-dimensional axis of our reality. In order to understand it we must look at our universe is a different way than we normally do. Right now you see yourself as a discrete thing separate from other “things”. However, if you were to view yourself in four dimensions and stretch yourself out through time you would see that you are a long pink worm which is attached to your mother and your father and through them to every other living being going back to the very beginning, the very first self-replicating cell.
You are a pattern. A repeating pattern. A recursive pattern.
That is to say the individual atoms and molecules which make up your body right now are completely interchangeable. A carbon atom in your finger tip is exactly the same as a carbon atom in the soot on your fireplace. What is different is that the carbon atoms in your body are arranged in a very complex pattern and it is life, a force which moves through matter, which arranges it. The very instant life departs the pattern is broken and your body begins the process of breaking down into other things. Nature wastes nothing. You are a continuing pattern in space-time and this pattern is the soul.
Soul nudity is the highest religion.