The Final Frontier

“If you begin to analyze thoroughly any or all of man’s refined faculties and exalted qualities…you will come at length to the farthest reaches and ultimate frontiers of thought only to find yourself face to face with naked being itself.”
—Privy Counsel, Ch. 3

This “naked being itself” is paradoxically both the destination of spiritual practice and its origin. This is the place from which awareness and love arise and to which they return. This is it, in all its various names: the Ground of Being, Buddhanature, the Godhead, Satchidananda, etc. Here, we see all the individual qualities of our personhood floating within a vast sea of being and consciousness. Here we see the interconnectedness of all phenomena and to the extent that we can respond at all, it is simply to offer up our being into that ocean of light, for our good and the good of all other beings, in “a single all-embracing prayer such as this:

That which I am and the way that I am,
With all my gifts of nature and grace,
You have given to me, O Lord, and you are
All this. I offer it all to you, principally
To praise you and to help my fellow Christians and myself.”

This is, to the extent that words can be used at all, the essential prayer of all the saints and bodhisattvas.