Dear Me,
Thich Nhat Hanh speaks on the idea of singlessness in his book The Art of Living. Of this he speaks ” Suppose we look up to the sky and notice a beautiful cloud. We think, “Ah, that’s a lovely cloud.” Then we look up a few moments later and the sky is clear and blue, and we think, “Oh, the cloud has disappeared.” One moment things seem to exist and then they’re gone. We look at things this way because we have a tendency to be caught up in signs, appearances, and familiar forms, and this
distracts us from seeing the true nature of reality. When we see something we recognize in the phenomenal world, like a cloud,
we say it is there, it exists. And when we can no longer see it, we say it is not there, it no longer exists. But the underlying truth is that it still exists, even if its appearance has changed. The challenge is to recognize that thing in its new forms. This is the meditation on signlessness… A sign is what characterizes the appearance of something, its form. If we recognize things based on their sign, we may think that this cloud is different from that cloud, the oak tree is not the acorn, the child is not the parent. At the level of relative truth, these distinctions are helpful. But they may distract us from seeing the true nature of life, which transcends these signs. The Buddha said, “Where there is a sign, there is always deception.”With the insight of interbeing we can see there is a profound connection between this cloud and that cloud, between the acorn and the oak, between parent and child.”
Dear Me, 