The thunderstorm was over. Texas Buddha and Reverend Clovis Jones sat looking at a beautiful rainbow. “How can you not worship the God who made that rainbow?” Rev. Jones inquired.
“I worship God within the rainbow.” Returned TB.
Tilting his head incredulously, the Reverend said, “Please go on.”
“When we look at a rainbow, our eyes see distinct strips of color, but we know from science that behind that broken appearance is actually one smooth continuum of light. Our eyes and mind break that one unity into what we experience as distinct colors. If I do not remember the invisible ground of the rainbow, I will think the colors are separate and distinct things. And, if I do not remember that the colors are happening in me, I may go looking for the rainbow as if it were outside myself.
“I believe all of nature is like the rainbow. It is one organic whole that we perceive as endlessly separate objects and beings. In truth, all the plants and all the animals weave in and out of one another. All the objects interact. Even life and death weaves in and out of an invisible loom.
“In the rainbow, distinctions result when light passes through a drop of mist at a certain angle and hits a fully functioning human eye. The rainbow isn’t exactly inside me or outside. There is something bigger and deeper happening. I do not believe that someone outside of nature made the rainbow, or made nature for that matter. But I do believe in remembering that just as the rainbow is my experience of a transcendent energy, nature is the manifold experience of an invisible source to which I owe my very being.
“It is wise to remember the rainbow is a projection, but it is enlightened to remember that we are too.”