Things are fundamentally groundless

Another teaching from Reggie

The buddhahdarma says, "things are fundamentally groundless." We can see this very vividly in our own lives. Some people actually think that they have secure ground in their lives, their jobs, their relationships, finances, whatever. In that case, they put a lot of energy into trying to maintain that secure ground that they think they have. This is the conventional approach. While it may temporarily produce a modicum of comfort and security, it doesn't solve--or even address--the fundamental problems of our lives, namely that—at best--things are always uncertain and we live on the edge of death.
Then there is the approach of the buddhadharma. Most of us practitioners feel quite groundless a lot of the time, if not most or even all of the time. We want to get things together; we want situations to be clear; we want people to understand and appreciate us; we want to know where we stand and who we are. But somehow, we can never get any of this to happen in a definitive way. We feel shaky and unresolved about the important things in our lives. Our relationships are problematic and we cycle between hope (that they’re working) and fear (that they’re not). Our employment situations are marked by uncertainty, lack of clarity, and questionable future prospects. People are in their own worlds and we can never get them to be or do what we want. And our own sense of identity is constantly up in the air. We can never quite arrive anywhere or come to any definite conclusions about ourselves.
As the dharma says, groundlessness is not a temporary experience or a random insecurity and it is not a problem that can be fixed. It is just the way things are. In meditation practice, we have a chance to be with that feeling of groundlessness and explore it. And groundlessness eventually opens up into the dharmadhatu, the limitless space of mind in which everything is free to be what it is and what occurs is seen as the play of wisdom