The Treasure Within
Just Beneath the Surface
Dear friend,
There’s a clattering going on. The area where we live is going through big changes with huge building programs for residential properties. The knock on effect is that many of the existing homes are having work done to them also. For sale signs are popping up in the surrounding streets. It’s a familiar pattern in London and across the world. Areas that were previously low rent are populated with artists and creatives, later to be followed by property developers.
We’ve yet to have our first trendy coffee house open, but it will come.
I remember when I lived in South London, how remarkable the change was as electrical goods shops and plumbers merchants turned into tea rooms, seemingly overnight.
A great big house fly is buzzing around, and the whine of a jet engine ploughs over head. Car doors thump and children’s voices float on the breeze. Life continues, changing and growing into new forms and combinations, energies rolling like the waves of the ocean.
The surface of life is an invitation to dive deeper. To feel the beating of our hearts, the rise and fall of the breath. As my awareness sinks down out of the business of the mind into the stillness of the body, the fly, like my thoughts, cease their buzzing.
Peace naturally rises up like a fresh discovery, an underground spring, fresh clear water sparkling in the sunlight. Flowing the way life flows when we allow things to be as they are. It’s the false self that dulls our experience, heaping the dust of time on the ever new present moment.
It reminds me of the story of the golden buddha. Monks, knowing that an army of robbers were approaching, covered a golden buddha in clay. That way the solid gold figure might be overlooked by the marauders. The ploy worked, the invading army perceiving nothing of value in the clay figure passed it by in their ransacking the monastery.
Future generations of monks rebuilt the monastery and venerated the clay statue, unaware if what lay beneath it’s earthen surface. One day a young monk was cleaning the statue when they accidentally knocked off some of the outer casing to reveal the glint of gold beneath.
How easy is it for us to become buried in the day to day demands of our busy lives? Rushing around on the surface, where does it get us?
It pays to build moments into our day where we stop and let the clay drop. That way we rediscover each day the treasure within. Gold is just a metaphor for what cannot be spoken of directly. The precious life of which we are part and which is part of us manifesting as the surface of the world. Underneath the surface, events and places and living beings, all connected in the one great ocean of energy from which we emerge.
There is something eternal in us. We are evolving as a species to become increasingly aware of our dual nature as simultaneously human and divine. Our cultures will need to adapt. They have developed with this awareness hidden like gold beneath the clay.
How beautiful that it was the novice monk who uncovered the truth by accident. Going about their daily duties, attending to the dusty surface, a piece falls away to reveal the beauty within.
You could call it grace.
Spirit is forever reaching towards us.
Perhaps it is enough to stop for a moment and admire the beauty of some small aspect of the surface of the world. A flower maybe. A bird in flight. A smile.
To give thanks for the gift of life.
Deep diving.
Into the peace within.
As we change, we change the world.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey