i remember a story i heard when i was young. It was about the “Infinite Essence” (will refer to this as “Big_I”, as it transcends personhood) …. and some call “Him” God….. and some call her Sophia…. and some call her Gaia…… some call him Jesus…. some call it “The Great Spirit”…… adn some call him Buddha or Buddha-nature…..
So….. in reaching out to birds and trying to “be present with them in their life”, Big_I always scared the poo out of the birds whenever Big_I approached them, and the birds would fly away in terror….. because Big_I was SO big …. so Big_I devised a way to represent or manifest as a bird…….. that way, the Big_I could be present with the birds, and they could see Big_I as one of them, and not something scary and big which had nothing to do with them……
This has stuck with me.
So, to say that one representation of “Infinite Essence” IS IN FACT the Infinite Essence, is to not get the point, that the representation does not equal the actual HUGE Infinite Essence which it is trying to represent, for purposes of connecting.
So if we close our eyes, and sense the Infinite “beyond” the face Big_I is wearing to “be present with us”, we can move beyond faces ……. and we can learn to live in direct relationship with the Infinite (which from the beginning was and is and will be, in and through us “Small_I’s”).
Reality is Dharma 