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The Daily Dharma – July 17, 2021

Figurative oil painting of Amy posing in the studio in Berkeley, California.
Amy in Black Painting Seamus Berkeley

In this [i.e., the body that is “limitless”], I am speaking not of the body that we think we have, the body we conceptualize as part of our “me” or my self-image. Rather, I am talking about the body that we meet when we are willing to descend into it, to surrender into its darkness and its mysteries, and to explore it with our awareness. As we shall see, this true, limitless body cannot even be entered until we are willing to leave our own thinking process behind – on the surface, so to speak. It is similar to the deep-sea diver: while floating on the surface of the sea, he knows little of what lies below, but when he descends into its depths, the limitless worlds of the ocean open to him. It was of this ever unbounded and unknown body that the great siddha Saraha spoke when he said, “There is no place of pilgrimage as fabulous and as open as this body of mine, no place more worth exploring.”

Reginald Ray
from Touching Enlightenment; Finding Realization in the Body