Growing up in Lebanon, the abundance of the Levantine land and sea was overshadowed by the constant paradoxical threat of everything being taken away from us at any time. This environment made it easy to confuse abundance with accumulation, layering up as a form of protection.
Ali, a Syrian refugee, was fifteen when he started showing up on our local beach south of Beirut, watching surfers glide across the water. One day, he found a random piece of polyester, and with a knife he transformed it to what barely resembled a surf board. He paddled out with it on a stormy day, wobbling but determined. Of course, seeing his dedication and courage, someone couldn’t help but hand him a real board and teach him how to stand. Today, Ali is one of the best surfers out there and plans on opening a surf school in Syria.
Lakshmi is the goddess of abundance, the ever-giving generous mother. She invites us to look for it in a more subtle place. She sits on a lotus growing out of mud, and into space. Space is not absence, it is the fertile ground of all manifestation; the womb, Garbha. When we start to notice the spaciousness, the emptiness in everything, we tap into the abundant nature of reality.
The piece of polyester was garbage to the one who threw it away, a toy to the beach dog, a shelter to the insects. But for Ali, it was a doorway to a passionate union with the ocean. “vastu-sāmye citta-bhedāt tayor vibhaktaḥ panthāḥ” Things are empty of fixed identity and full of essence. They become what we allow them to become. When we stop deciding what something or someone “is,” we finally see them for what they are, which is infinite and fluid by nature. In this sense, emptiness abounds in fullness.
Recent neuroscience findings show that when the brain relaxes its conditioned, automatic labeling processes – through meditation for example – it gains greater access to the field of raw and present sensation, and in doing so enhances the richness of the experience. The boundless nature of everything is also expressed in quantum physics, with the demonstration that particles maintained in superposition exist as pure potential, until conscious measurement collapses them into “classical” form, shaped by the measurement itself. By ceasing to label things, we prevent their “collapse” into rigid definitions. We allow them to remain open, abundant, and infinite. When we recognize that everything is already contained within one thing, we no longer feel a need for more of it.
“The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again” Krishnamurti
Look at the sky. Can you paint its color without using any words? Do you feel closer to it when you take the words away? When observing an object of devotion, the phrase “I have no words” suggests that any attempt at description would inevitably diminish the subject’s immensity. Look at a tree. Try to describe it without any labels. Do you see the vastness of the universe that it contains? The infinite abundance it holds? Practice this with anything around you, and observe yourself merge with the “is-ness”, the fullness of it all. This is Yoga, Union. “Yoga is the state of missing nothing” Sharon Gannon.
When we feel this sense of wholeness present even in the smallest things, Aparigraha: non-grasping, becomes a more natural expression. We don’t cling as tightly because letting go is not experienced as a loss. Fullness flows from fullness. The reverse is also true. The act of giving, of creating space, of releasing something held tightly, knowing that nothing is ever truly lost, is what reconnects us to the generous nature of reality. Instead of seeing abundance as layering up, we observe the state of completeness & union that arises when layering down. The more that we shed layers of projection on our world, including the one of separation, the more freely the river of abundance can flow.
Neem Karoli Baba would tell his devotees “If you seek samadhi, help others. If you want kundalini to rise, feed others.” Generosity pours from fullness and is a direct path back to it. The more I meditate on tathagata garbha, the Buddha Nature of everything, the more compassionate I am towards all beings whom I thought I was separate from.
Fear of lacking is the opposite of abundance. We don’t attract abundance like a magnet; we allow it to flow like a river through space as we become aware of it. Emptiness is not lack, or negation. It is the womb of everything.
