Sea of Potential

One reason we might meditate is to free ourselves.

Free ourselves from habits, beliefs, loops of the mind, memories, emotional patterns, and even physical imbalances.

We can look at this search for freedom in different ways. Spiritual traditions, religions, philosophy, and science have all explored that search for freedom.

Let's look at science for a moment.

I want to quote Dan Siegel from his book IntraConnected: “In the fields of mathematics and physics, the pursuit of understanding the nature of the universe has resulted in a proposal that there exists a ‘mathematical space’, known by such terms as a ‘quantum vacuum’ and ‘sea of potential’, a space in which all possibilities rest before they transform into actualities.”

In Daoism, we recognize the concept of Wuji. The undifferentiated state, before the emergence of Yin and Yang. The source from which all things arise.

In different spiritual traditions, we encounter concepts such as God, Prana, or Buddha Nature.

A sea of potential. Nothing yet fixed, nothing separate, and everything possible. The source from which all manifestations arise.

Zen teachings are full of pointers toward this. As an example, from the Hsin Hsin Ming: “The Way is perfect like vast space, where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess.” Nothing lacking. Nothing in excess. This is the place of ultimate freedom.

Now, we might think that we need to die to enter such a space, to leave this body and this world behind.

Not at all.

When we truly sink into present moment awareness, we can touch this freedom right here.

The difficulty is that we are so deeply conditioned to interpret everything through what we already know. Our minds are constantly naming, comparing, judging, remembering, anticipating. We rarely encounter reality without immediately putting it into the context of our past experiences.

What happens when we simply receive what is here, before we add a judgment, a name, a story, or even a context?

A sound is simply a sound.

A smell is simply a smell.

A sensation is simply a sensation.

A sight is just colors and shapes entering the eye, before we even name what we see.

There is an immediacy to this experience. A directness that is usually hidden beneath our interpretations. This is present moment awareness.

Of course, our ability to interpret the world through past experiences is tremendously useful. It helps us survive. We know that a rattlesnake is not something to pick up!

We need this capacity.

However, when we are caught alone in this narrow way of perceiving, and therefore acting in the world, we are no longer truly free. We are living from the past.

We are meeting this moment through yesterday's mind. And we might never actually encounter what is here now.

Yet this moment is a sea of potential!

It is here that something new can emerge. It is here that neuroplasticity becomes possible, as new experiences and responses begin to reshape the patterns of the brain and our whole nervous system.

The freedom I am talking about goes deeper than changing our habits or rewiring our brains.

It is the possibility of perceiving life directly, in its unfolding, before we confine it to what we already know.

This means we actually are living life, present and truly alive.

Dr. Yang Jwing-Ming uses a wonderful metaphor involving a pendulum to describe the freedom and restriction of consciousness. Imagine a pendulum suspended by a string. When the string is thick, its movement is constrained. We can imagine this as consciousness limited by conditioning, habitual thinking, and our fixed sense of self. As the string becomes thinner, there is less restriction. The pendulum can move more freely. Our awareness becomes more expansive, less bound by our ordinary ways of perceiving reality.

The thinner the string, the greater the freedom.

I find this a wonderful way of understanding right effort in meditation.

Because freedom is already here.

We do not need to manufacture it. We do not need to struggle to get somewhere where, in a deeper sense, we already are. And yet, this does not mean that we can simply drift off into our habitual unconsciousness.

We need to be really, really awake!

Awake in a different way. Not through tension or force. Not through trying to control our experience.

Rather, through a profound openness. An alertness that is also soft, receptive, and spacious.

This is the paradox of practice. We make a wholehearted effort, and the effort is not to produce a particular experience.

It is to become available to what is already here.

To let the string become thinner.

To notice when we are caught in an interpretation, a judgment, a memory, a belief, and recognize that this is not the whole truth. It is simply the mind doing what it has learned to do. And in that recognition, something opens.

We don't have to believe every thought. We don't have to follow every emotional pattern. We don't have to continue living from the same limited understanding of ourselves and the world.

We can return to the direct experience of this moment. Not rejecting our thoughts or our conditioning, but seeing through their limitations.

And the more deeply we are able to stay with this unfolding moment, the more we begin to realize that reality is not something fixed that we are merely observing. It is alive. It is constantly arising, changing, dissolving. Every moment is a manifestation of this vast potential.

What we call Wuji is not somewhere else, removed from our ordinary lives. It is not separate from the sound of a bird, the sensation of breathing, the person sitting next to us, or even the thoughts moving through our minds.

The vast, undifferentiated potential and the particular forms arising from it are not two separate realities.

Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.

This is not just a beautiful philosophical statement. It is something we can begin to realize directly through practice. The freedom we are looking for is not somewhere beyond this life, beyond this body, beyond this moment.

It is right here, in the very unfolding of this.

The question is: Can we become open enough, awake enough, to experience it without immediately reducing it to what we already know?

That is our practice.