The Ordinary Miracle

The Space Between (5)

Eventually, the dynamic equilibrium of resting in undivided wholeness matures into something almost invisible, with the extraordinary becoming so ordinary that you forget it was ever extraordinary at all. Life looks exactly as before, but now it hums with an interior light. Everything is different though nothing has changed. The dishes are still dishes and traffic is still traffic, and yet they’re transparent to the silence that holds them. Darryl Bailey has called this “acknowledging the obvious,” noticing the clear simplicity of what is, which is so self-evident that it’s commonly overlooked. The mind expects awakening to be dramatic. What actually happens is just a deepening into plainness. The world, instead of becoming more spectacular, becomes more itself. Colors don’t glow with supernatural light; they simply are, vividly and immediately, no longer filtered through the commentary of thought.

This is not to say the path is uniformly quiet or that all traditions point toward the same destination. The tantric traditions, Kashmir Shaivism in particular, describe the ground of consciousness not as empty but as ecstatically, vibrantly full, a pulsing aliveness that erupts into form rather than withdrawing from it. That vision is not a lesser teaching or a preliminary stage. But whether the ground reveals itself as stillness or as radiance, as the silence beneath sound or as the energy that becomes sound, what is recognized is that it was always already here, prior to and intimate with every experience that arises within it. The plainness and the fullness may be the same recognition arriving from different directions.

Franklin Merrell-Wolff distinguished between perceptual and introceptual awareness, each the converse and complement of the other. Perception sees objects: the tree, the table, the thought. Introception knows itself as the seeing. Most people live entirely in perception. After awakening, the two mingle until they’re indistinguishable. You see the tree, and simultaneously you’re aware of being the awareness in which the tree appears. The boundary between the two perspectives dissolves. It’s like a silent explosion, after which reality becomes exquisitely ordinary and unbearably beautiful at the same time. In fact, the ordinariness is the beauty. The hum of the refrigerator, the creak of the floor, the rhythm of breath, the chewing of food, the chirping of birds, the wetness of water—it all throbs with the same presence.

The Zen poet Bashō captured it in seventeen syllables:

          an old pond—
          a frog jumps in,
          sound of water

There’s nothing mystical about that. Instead, it’s just this. The frog, the splash, the ripples fading. And in that simple event, the whole universe revealing itself. The Gospel of Thomas says, “The kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.” It’s obvious, not hidden. You were looking past it the whole time while you were searching for something grander.

In relationships, too, the miracle shows itself. A marriage, a friendship, or an encounter with a disagreeable salesperson that was once filled with tension now reveals an undercurrent of love. You see the other person’s defensiveness not as an attack but as fear wearing armor. You also note the same in yourself. Conflict turns transparent and is now seen as merely two expressions of the same awareness, momentarily forgetting their unity. Even heartbreak opens the heart’s own space more widely. Pain is no longer an enemy but a teacher, showing you where you still resist and contract.

The same transparency makes itself known in work as well. Whether you’re writing, building, teaching, digging a trench, or tending a garden, the activity becomes meditation. This is completely free of the attempt to “be mindful,” because there’s no longer a separate “you” doing it. When the ego stops trying to force outcomes, the creative spirit moves freely. The hands move, the words come, the solutions appear, all without effort, all as an the expression of simple alignment with what wants to emerge.

Enlightenment smells of soap and coffee because awareness finally breathes through everything without exception. There are no sacred moments and profane ones. Every instant is the same radiance, wearing different clothes. The laundry, the laughter, the grief, the mundane frustration of a jammed printer, it’s all the dream dreaming itself. It’s awareness playing at form.

NEXT: Experiment 5 – The Space That Holds Everything