The  ‘Beer of Awareness and the Bubbles of Manifestation’ was the title of a talk i gave recently in a small tent. It was an enjoyable hour and a half for me – and also it seems for the happy handful who found themselves there – involving ginger beer, paintings, bubble blowing and a small plastic man in a tin box!

I nicked the beer image from one of James’ talks as its a refreshing a visual metaphor for non-duality. The bubbles are arising from the ground of the beer as its efflorescence…a part of it, within it, and the moving aspect of it – not separate from it nor homogenous with it. In the same way the froth of manifestation, occurring within the openness of the mind, is an enjoyable  but ever-changing display… identification with, and fusion with, individual bubbles is exhausting and unsatisfying…as they pop pop pop!

It’s not a perfect metaphor as the contents of the bubble in a glass of beer is different from the beer itself whereas a bubble in space is space surrounded by space. The encapsulation is a very thin wall and when the bubble pops all is as it was before the encapsulation. The bubble is not a ‘thing’, stable, enduring – an entity which can be known and controlled or something to rest on… and neither is that which we co-create with the energy of the mind….

….’The old man of the village called us back to drink three cups beneath the crooked mulberry…

Mankind is small but this drunkenness is large …where now is your Japan, where your Korea?’

…to a Korean friend – from Sayings and tales of Zen Buddhism by William Wray