Amaravati Origins

Intuition is the ability to embrace the world and eternity in the present. Now that may sound pretty grand, but if you reflect on it, it isn't such a rare or impossible thing to do. Thinking of it in terms of abstract thought, it does sound difficult, but in terms of experience it's quite a normal, natural thing to be able to do. "The gates to the deathless are open" so in that state of intuitive awareness, that's the entrance or that's the point, that's the intersection of time and the timeless; and that's what we're able to realise in this human form. Within the limitations of our humanity, we can actually realise and learn to trust in that still point in the present, which is the point that has no boundaries. It's a point; it has no circumference, yet it's unlimited; and that's where we give up the thinking, analytical mind and experience it, realise it through this way of contemplating and opening to life. Meditation, in Buddhist terms, then isn't an attempt to control and to filter out all the coarse, unpleasant things in life; nor is it about only supporting the refined aspects. It brings around a willingness to flow with life, because with intuitive awareness we no longer feel the need to control experience.

If we're caught in the worldly dhammas -- the patterns of mental behaviour -- we get so upset or confused by this or that, that we do have to control and exert a lot of effort to try to survive in the world. It gets too frightening, there are too many aggravations and frustrations. But with the enlightened mind, then there isn't the need to control because we're no longer stuck in something which just goes from one thing to the next. We have the escape. There is an escape : "there is an escape from the born, the created, the originated^1" The world, the body, the feelings, the mental states and all that: there's an escape from that. The word "escape" doesn't mean escape out of aversion; it doesn't mean we hate or blame the world. It's not that kind of escape but it's the escape through wisdom, through seeing the nature of things as they are is "like this." And realising that as long as we're bound into the conditioned realm, identified with it, attached to it, lost in it, then the best we can do is try to control it for our own benefit: make lots of money and try to buy a nice cottage in some pleasant place and try to avoid any unpleasant scenes, unpleasant people and so on.