It’s Boundless

First off, I just love the word boundless because like the Big Bang, or like the salt in the ocean, or “all the grains of sand in the Ganges”, or the number of YouTube videos put up every minute (400 which is 576,000 a day or 207,360,000 a year– but check with your calculator) or the Arctic Tern that migrates 30,000 kilometers from its nesting ground in the Arctic Circle to Antartica, the word boundless speaks to everything everywhere.  The Chinese sages referred to it as the “10,000 things” and with this we are reminded that we are each but a speck in a towering immensity. What’s more, the immensity is not only outside and all around us, but we are the immensity. 

Consider that there are 86 billion nerve cells in your brain right now and that should you live to 70, your heart will beat 2.5 billion times pumping approximately 1 million barrels of blood and that the square footage of your lungs, if opened  up for a little tennis match, would cover the dimension of a tennis court including the doubles column. And how the boundless will greet you first thing in the morning! Just today when I woke up at 6AM to the glow of the first light of the the sun, whose rays traveled 93 million miles to reach my bedroom window and by then I had already thought enough thoughts to fill an entire novel, including the preface and many long winded foot notes David Foster Wallace style.

In Chaos Theory, a cool concept equally challenging to fathom, everything in the universe emerges in fractals and expands exponentially becoming the weather pattern heading your way this week, the angle of a flock of birds in flight and the fluctuating trend of the stock market. So when we refer to the boundless, when we measure the immeasurable, we are talking about what is in front of our eyes right here and now. Every breath, every footstep, every idea is part of the breadth of the boundless. And as the great Tibetan Dzogchen master Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche said, you don’t have to accept it or reject it or try to change it in any way. You only have to realize that you are it.