As waves come with water and flames with fire, so the universal waves with us.
- The wave is form, never substance — a ‘waving’ (activity, process, movement), not a thing. Only the ocean is real; the wave looks individual and unique but its separateness is illusory. Non-duality is the truth: you are the ocean waving, not the wave.
- Practice via breathing: feel the ocean breathing in you — each inhalation a wave rising, each exhalation a wave dying. Between the two, who are you? Nothingness, shunya — the void, your real center. Misery needs a (false, ego) center to cling to; the void gives it none, so in it all misery dissolves into deep ease. (Buddha promises not bliss but only the end of misery — there is no positive feeling to seek.)
- The hinge — witness: you can DO nothing about the waves; they rise and fall on their own and every effort is useless. The one thing possible is to witness the wave-form (the rising-falling continuum). Witnessing suddenly reveals what is beyond yet within the wave — the ocean. This affinity and oneness with all is samadhi.
- Spread it into every act: a sex desire — feel it as ‘the ocean waving in me,’ not ‘my’ desire. The love act — two individuals merging until the waves vanish and only the ocean remains (then sex becomes meditation). Hunger and thirst — ‘the universal feels hungry through me,’ ‘the existence is thirsty within me’ (Dogen). Whatever happens, let it happen to the cosmos; you are only a surface wave.
- The root of all anxiety is the wave mistaking itself for separate — then fear of death is inevitable, because it sees other waves dying. Only a wave can die, never the ocean. Feel yourself as the ocean and the death-fear dissolves.
- The ego (‘I am’) is the sole barrier — more anti-religious than even atheism (Buddha and Mahavira were atheists yet realized). Non-ego, not belief in God, is the core. With ego you cling to the wave-form; drop it and you fall back into the ocean naturally.