1. Common grace
The matrix of mind that is our meaningful story can add a certain richness to our pleasure. But prior to that storymaking, our simple pleasures can be blissful in themselves because they reflect the bliss innate to consciousness itself. For example, when we taste the exquisite pleasure of our favourite ice cream flavour, the bliss that arises is none other than the bliss of consciousness tasting itself through the medium of the ice cream. Or when we fall in love with a special someone, the bliss of beholding our lover is actually awareness beholding its innate bliss in the form of your lover.
Of course, soon if not immediately after that initial breaking forth of bliss, our mind gets overactive and fabrication takes over. Stories are made out of our experience of ice cream or a love relationship, becoming richer and more complex along the way. This story or matrix can be marked by varying degrees of suffering or pleasure depending on the quality of our fabrication. Faint echoes of the bliss of consciousness persist in some form in our everyday life story. Given that this bliss however faint happens in us, to us, through us without our doing or controlling, I give it the term “grace.” And given that this grace of bliss is available to all, accessible by all, in ordinary circumstances of life, I call it “common grace.”
Grace encompasses more than bliss. Grace includes all experiences even painful ones and is none other than the unfolding of life itself. Grace speaks to what we explored previously on the effulgent play of consciousness taking all forms, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, thought, emotion, and all refined states of meditative absorption. The spontaneous expression of consciousness is unceasing and seemingly taking place in time, is in fact, outside time. For time is but an object in finite mind, part of the content of consciousness, and thus an artifact of the expression of consciousness. Time is within consciousness. Consciousness is outside time.
Grace of awareness is the totality of all experiences—pleasurable or painful—emerging freely as timeless displays of awareness itself. Nothing is excluded. Nothing is rejected. Everything belongs. Under common grace, even difficult experiences can hold hidden wisdom and energy that stimulate growth towards a better version of yourself, your matrix.
Apart from these instances of common grace, there can be moments of disruption in the flow of experience where the sublime, the blissful, the divine seems to break out or jump forth. These moments may seem timeless and instantaneous at the same time. They are instances of awareness (compared to the sun’s rays) breaking through the thick clouds of our matrix—usually dense but potentially fragile and thus open to disruption. Bliss of awareness enters powerfully from deep into the shallows to confer a sublime joy. Linear time breaks down. We might catch glimpses of mystery and light in the words of sacred texts, in melodic voices and songs of worship, and in the faces and gestures of spiritual teachers who by their presence leave a deep transformative imprint on us.
Fabrication in the form of myth, metaphor, image, and desire all meld into an embodied sense of the sacred. This sense of the sacred can be termed a divine epiphany or in theological speak, a theophany. This theophany can be described as divine appearance bathed in an ineffable fullness of meaning, bliss, trust, love and devotion. It is a beautiful blend of the pure bliss of consciousness suffusing a poetic and mythic thought structure imbued with rich meanings. Here again, we see an instance of common grace albeit in a sublime form: a mixture of uncontrived bliss and mythopoetic thought. This is common grace—sublime and profound—available to all, accessible by all who cultivate the eyes to see.
2. Uncommon grace
Above and beyond these examples of common grace of awareness, there is uncommon grace that transcends all our limited conceptions, even those of “enlightenment” itself. Here, we have uncommon grace that has its source utterly beyond the manifest and unmanifest universe. Uncommon grace is transcendent grace. At the same time, the source of uncommon grace is thoroughly inseparable from the universe, pervading and infusing it by its light, life, and love. Uncommon grace is also immanent grace. The origin of both uncommon and common grace, in the final analysis, is One.
Grace personified is person-able: responsive in intimate loving ways, deeply present and involved in every detail of your life, totally for you and your highest good. Grace is beyond notions of personality and impersonality, yet is highly and powerfully person-able. When you encounter Grace, it is not by virtue of your self-effort or individual merit. It is not something you can cultivate to attain, and thus is uncommon. It is purely an unearned and unmerited grace that descends into your horizon out of its own free initiative. Our conceptual categories and ego conditioning fail to comprehend this amazing grace.
In encountering Grace, we encounter complete redemption of our flaws and mistakes; complete erasure of our guilt and shame; complete restoration of broken pieces of our heart; complete rest and refreshing of the mind; and complete recreation of consciousness that is our spirit. We are literally "born again" or "born from above" in our innermost being so that the innate radiance of consciousness is overhauled, made anew into a greater wholeness than ever before. No longer a fractured luminous piece of the whole that feels boundless but actually remains a mere fragment. It simply partakes in the boundlessness of That which it reflects. Rather, the consciousness fragment feeling itself to be infinite is remade into a whole “round mirror” reflecting perfect wholeness within its actual inner completeness. This is the true “great completion” or “great perfection”—the absolute dzogchen. Beyond traditional conceptions, Grace transforms everything including dzogchen itself, however impossible this may seem.
3. Absolute Theophany
Uncommon grace is also theophany of the absolute kind, not born of awareness and not mixed with mythic narrative. It is pure unadulterated infusion of grace from beyond the unseen margins of consciousness. Direct and immediate, fresh and shattering, totally unexpected and sudden, gentle and strong, bright and vivid, unfazed shimmering darkness—not in a negative sense but in a sense of being ungraspable by mere discursive reasoning and conception. Unspeakable mystery yet vividly alive and present to awareness, freely revealing himself to an awareness unable to objectify or grasp him. What transpires is simply this: an instantaneous implosion of illumination that is an indubitable convicting knowledge of the person, nature, event, and work of Christ.
Yes, Christ—the living incarnate Word, crucified and resurrected Redeemer, exalted and glorified Saviour. This revelation needs further unpacking. For now, know this: absolute and relative theophany all boils down to the truth of Christ. In other words, all theophanies are in the final analysis Christophanies—appearances of Christ. Mythic or trans-mythic, perceived or conceived, our experience of the sacred is an experience of the numinous. To experience the numinous is to perceive the light of consciousness who is wholly Other, shining from beyond into our aware being. This light is none other than the light of Christ revealing himself to us in myriad ways. Christ can meet us on all roads, even though all roads do not necessarily lead to Him.
In the end which is also the beginning, we are left with Christ as our absolute ground, source, space, dimension, and presence in whom we live and move and have our being—absolutely. This is beyond enlightenment. This is encountering Grace. In this, all there is finds its end.
