Imagine …
Imagine … that you are a caterpillar. Perhaps a plain green one, or perhaps you’re sporting fancy spots or stripes: green, black, orange, white, red or yellow. Or maybe you’re a furry black and brown one — or one with colorful spikes — but in any case, a caterpillar.
You’re one of many caterpillars. Your world is filled with caterpillars. What you notice is that the caterpillars inch along as such, for some amount of time, and then they disappear behind the wall of a cocoon, never to be seen again.
Some caterpillars don’t talk much about their eventual disappearance; it just happens naturally one day. Others express fear and trepidation about this inevitability. Others engage in activities intended to prepare themselves, or even to accelerate the process – to reach that day of disappearance as quickly as possible.
Then one day you, too, find yourself building a cocoon, and then – within its warm embrace – relaxing deeply, almost as if drifting off to sleep, but with a difference you can’t quite articulate …
When You Wake Up …
When you wake up, you are a butterfly. Your wingspan is the entire cosmos. In fact, the cosmos is nothing but your wingspan, powered by the infinity of your supple heart beating, steadily, from its unfindable center. Within your gaze dances the light and darkness of all-that-is – along with its rainbow of colors.
Your One-Butterfly body has the capacity, every now and again, to appear as an infinite multiplicity of butterflies: your butterfly-cells like holographic emanations, dancing playfully. In these moments, the cosmos of your body is filled with this winged display: all variety of butterflies, in different shapes and sizes, shimmering delightfully.
You understand and can now see clearly that the so-called “disappearance” of your caterpillar-friends, behind the wall of their cocoons, was simply a waking-up to this One-Butterfly. The intimacy of this reunion, this re-membering, is unspeakable.
One-Butterfly
You recall – with a tinge of nostalgia mixed now with gentle melancholy — when all you could see were caterpillars. Now all you see, from horizon to horizon, and joyfully, are butterflies: either One-Butterfly; or One-Butterfly simultaneously with its infinity of holographic butterfly-cells, tremoring playfully within, like a house of mirrors.
You can see that some butterfly-cells still imagine themselves to be caterpillars — still inhabit a perceptual world filled with caterpillars — the notion of a butterfly not to mention One-Butterfly no more than a faint stirring, deep within. But you see and know them as Butterfly and butterflies: as your Self, and no-other.
Coda: The Code Sheet
- Lila = seeing only butterflies
- Maya = seeing only caterpillars
- Dharmakaya = One-Butterfly
- Sambogakaya = holographic emanations into butterfly-cells, visible to other butterflies and occasional caterpillars
- Nirmanakaya = Butterfly/butterflies compassionately appearing as caterpillars (to the vision of caterpillars)
Yes!
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