The Great Gesture: A Dharma Teaching

The dharma is all about second chances. 

Traditionally, dharma means the teachings of the Buddha, but it may be even more universally a sense of universal truths that guide our lives and invite us into more and more expansion and awakening. 

So, the dharma is all about second chances. What does that mean?  

Well, in this very moment we have sensory experience. And notice how peculiar it is, whatever experience it is that you’re having — seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling, thoughts, and feelings. All of the activity within you and without you, everything that you’re aware of, constitutes sensory experience. 

The crux of Buddhist practice is this question: “How are we relating to sensory experience?” When we relate to the fullness of sensory experience with presence, with open-heartedness, and with equanimity, we experience life completely. There is no push or pull. There is a profound taste of freedom, liberation, and I would say love. When we really just completely experience the moment there is an overwhelming sense of freedom and love. 

And when we experience the present moment with less than full presence, with less than a fully open heart, with less than total openness and equanimity, then we generate craving — push and pull. We get pulled into thoughts such as, “I don’t like this moment especially. Let me see if I can struggle a little bit and create a better moment.” And then, “Oops, I’m still struggling. Let me try to create an even better moment. Oops, that’s too much of what I wanted, let me push away from that.” 

And the ego is born, that function in us that seeks incessantly and knows no peace and knows no stillness, the part of us that only knows seeking. The ego can’t quite be content with what’s arising right now and so we struggle. Someone has suggested that the ego is nothing more than the activity of struggle. 

But here’s the good news:  No matter what you did in the last moment, the world gives of itself fully in this moment right now. The meditation teacher Dan Brown translates this in the Tibetan tradition as “the great gesture,” the Mahamudra. It’s as if ultimate reality is deeply compassionate. And so if we missed it in the last moment because we were struggling and seeking, then it will give it to us again and again, and it will even offer us the signal of suffering to tell us, “Maybe don’t do that. That’s going to cause more suffering. What does it feel like when you don’t struggle?” And in a series of trial and error, in a series of millions of moments we learn and we wise up, and the more awake we become the more sensitive we become to when we’re open and when we’re not seeking. We become aware of when we’re not struggling and we’re just filled with the inherent love and freedom of the moment. We receive the great gesture of creation and we give ourselves fully to this great gesture, and in so doing we become the great gesture. 

Now, not seeking does not amount to not doing anything in life. Giving up seeking does not mean we don’t get out of bed and sit like a puddle and wait around to die because we are so blissed out and detached from the activity of the world. It’s a matter of motivation. The great gesture is when our motivation comes from a place not of lack where we are seeking to try and get full and therefore every gesture we offer in life is an expression of our own sense of lack like, “Something’s wrong, I need to struggle to make things right.” 

Instead, when we are content, when we meet the great gesture open-heartedly, we are naturally filled with a sense of fullness, with contentment, with a non-seeking mind. There are a lot of terms to describe it. But at this point we move from fullness to fullness. The motivation is not to try to heal some lack of wholeness. The motivation is to “runneth over.” Our cups runneth over and everything we do becomes an expression of abundance. Things start to go well, you could say. This is the great gesture, oh and now, no matter what happened one second ago, here it is again: the great gesture. Your experience exactly as it is. How are you meeting it?  How do you relate to it?

I noticed that today I feel heartache, and it’s painful and it’s uncomfortable. And yet there is a part of me that can just open up to it. It’s not a signal that something’s wrong. It’s a signal we could say, that I’m alive and that I’m sensitive and I’m embodied and it doesn’t have to mean anything. I can just deeply feel it and let it inform me. That’s what happens in those moments where I’m willing to receive the great gesture.

There’s a line from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a great novelist who wrote this of the protagonist in Love in the Time of Cholera: “He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”  

This, if there ever was one, this is a Dharma teaching. Feel the way life obliges you to be born over and over and over again, to give birth to yourself, to give birth to yourself over and over and over again. 

And now in this moment, what are you aware of? Can you just say a deep “yes” to it at the level of sensory experience, at the level of not being in denial, like, “Yes, this is actually happening right now. I am feeling this, I am thinking this.” It’s the deep yes to inner experience. And from this deep yes, we create our lives. 

Let’s go ahead and drop down a little bit more. 

Meditation

Notice this moment. Notice the fullness of sensory experience in this moment. Allow awareness to illuminate the field of physical sensation. Feel the tingling, buzzing transparency throughout the field of physical sensation. Let go of any names you have for anything. Let go of any stories for the moment about what experience means. As if you were just born, just given birth to a new self, a self so new you know nothing of a body, body’s just a concept. You know nothing of past, of future. You don’t even know about present. Present is just another mental label we put on this unbroken stream of sensory experience, flowing through awareness. 

Notice where sensory experience lights up, tingles, vibrates, buzzes. Every moment rising, every moment passes, nothing remains, nothing remains the same. As soon as the buzzing, the tingling arises, it’s already passing. And in this moment, and in this moment, sensory experience fluctuates. It changes its impermanence and attending to the change of things, you also come into contact with the changeless, naked awareness, luminous presence, the space wide open space through which experience passes. Whoever you thought you were a moment ago is already gone, and now a new arising. The great gesture presents itself as the fullness of reality in this moment, and you are none other than this fullness, none other than this great gesture. It all just keeps flowing like a river, the creative movement of the Source, bringing entire worlds into being, gathering them back up. 

Notice what was here just one moment ago leaves no trace, is already gone, already making room for a new arising. Notice you don’t manage the change, you don’t make the change happen at all, it all just happens, it is all just happening. And you, this timeless, spaceless awareness are just totally present to it all, watching it all take shape, becoming, unbecoming, drawn back up, back into the void, from nothing to nothing. And in this moment to the great gesture, a new gesture, a new birth.