In almost all depictions of the Buddha, he is either meditating or sleeping. (I say “almost” because I surely cannot claim to have seen any but a small number of them.) Rarely is he shown just walking down the street purporting everyday human consciousness. I’m guessing the message is that Buddha is always in meditation, even when he is interacting directly with maya. Sleeping Buddhas imply that All is dream to a Buddha, whether encountered open eyed or not.
The closest that Buddhist iconography and statuary comes to the apparently separate configurations with which maya’s sirens taunt us are the laughing Buddhas. Their big bellies imply that a Buddha is always “eating,” enjoying the Great Harvest: the supper of the Great Lord, fully assimilating joy in and as Allness draping the One every timeless moment. The message these jocular fellows seem to imply is that it’s perfectly fine for an enlightened One to be aware of, even to partake of maya. Indeed, these statues conk us to realize that maya is not an enemy to be conquered. It is part and parcel of universal architecture, all the way up to the most profound, all-inclusive realms “where” the One’s highest initiates and Cosmic Beings mosey.
Buddhas represented in meditation and asleep predominate because most humans—tied as they are to maya’s propensity to prevaricate separation masquerading as truth—mostly need reminders to detach themselves from their “normal,” sticky fingered encounters with maya’s buxom temptresses. Moreover, they’re equally in need of reminders to shun Morpheus as their soporific ambling lulls them into states that comparatively lend vegetables the perspicacity of racecar drivers. Laughing Buddhas are fewer in number because humanity doesn’t need as many reminders to laugh. Albeit, human laughter is rarely Laughter. It is usually but a riotous, hollow tintinnabulation, which fails to plumb maya’s infinite emptiness. SUCH emptiness bodes light’s pointillistic opportunity that impressionistic painters take such pains to depict. Impressionists “get it,” for they attempt to convey how infinite “contact” renders apparent imagery a lightning storming holographic mandala.
Laughing Buddhas are not just humanly guffawing. They are ingesting and projecting joy, for joy is maya’s raison d’être. Life’s oh-so-serious cosmic jokesters propound maya precisely to bust the One out of omnijail: the ultimate boredom of omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence experienced absent spiritual Hierarchy. The One’s Agents use maya’s oxymoronic spiritual nature to fashion paradox into a getaway car. They use their souped up convertible consciousness to decamp a worldliness which sports closetfuls of hard-and-fast, blue jeansesque ennui in favor of infinity’s ever loving, fire blossoming bloomers.
Joy in maya is the ever-style in which enlightened Beings drape their awakenings. In their ignited costumery, they Join the Om to You by realizing themselves and every “other” as facets of the One. The joyous electrical zing maya proffers, and which they take in partnership with their Shiva dance, becomes figure-eight flow, which is the ever-more-infinite One integrally consummate with merely apparent other. Maitreya’s clipper ship moves onward, plowing “through” maya’s breakers foaming transcendence across the bow. Their Merkabah Chariot speeds across the desert lands they’ve deserted fast as divine Love’s lightning. Maya’s dust attempts to bedevil its well-lubed fittings, but, instead, they are sealed in freedom’s eternally vigilant bearings. Although their Presence is liable to set immobile miens atremble, they waltz through their wonderland with aplomb. Their face-to-face with God is a cheek-to-cheek dance, where partners pop out all over, seemingly willy-nilly like video-game phantoms, daring them to meld. And so they do; but their melding style melts the phantom elements as their Reality prospers.
Real consciousness, which is the One’s Agents harvesting maya’s spectra, is oxymoronic by definition. Choiring “other” cannot also be One to the human mind’s outer perception—and yet it IS THAT symphony of silence. Such self-contradictory, faceted perception enshrines paradox as the implement used to harvest holographic fields ever ripe for joy’s picking.
You get up in the morning. You make and eat breakfast. Maybe you save money on gas by taking the bus to work, so you pay strict attention to timely schedules. You watch the clock at work, unless you actually enjoy it. But, all those details are only frills upon your Identity, wholly laced with God, the One’s own joy.
Get it?
All through maya’s goings on run ribbons of joy you can use, not only to festoon your bonnet, but to dissolve the roadblocks scattered about your day, manned by thugs demanding to see your “papers.” Yes, indeed. Your every perception demands your papers. “Who are you, anyway?” asks the imagery you invest with consciousness.
If you respond, you’re done for.[1]
Awake and Alive, you can only smile like those Buddha statues, or jostle that sagely magnus midriff bowlful of jelly with uproarious convulsions, inadvertently ridiculing the phantoms. Such joy will offend most humans, but take heart with Gautama: some will understand. And some will complement your gracious plenum, smiling with you face to face in the One’s All knowing wink, which ratifies that you get it.
[1] Jesus knew better than to chat up Pilate.
