For me, the Avatamsaka Sutra teachings, and especially the practices that lead a person to experience what they say in that text make clear that we are so much more than we believe when clinging to ordinary views, of ourselves, and our world…

It’s remarkable to me how limited peoples’ accounts of their own and others lives are! Even here, there are countless worlds, and we can glimpse some of them, commune, and receive benefit from them as well. This is what is talked about freely in the Avatamsaka sutra. It is the way our lives actually are here. We are not bound by what is seen with our five senses. There is some kind of awakening needed to enter this realm, this fuller way of being, but it’s not beyond any of us, if we get good instructions, from qualified teachers, and make some efforts to learn to see.

The Nature of Perception – The Ten Dharma Realms Are Not Outside a Single Thought

We do create the worlds we experience, collectively and personally. To see this is surprising, and liberating at the same time. We need only test out this proposition to see how far it extends. The hells, the hungry ghost and animal dispositions, as well as human and deva consciousnesses are all potentials we have, innately, and this should be known as something fundamental. Instead most people have fixed assumptions of who they are and who others are. Not having investigated, these concrete conceptions form the basis for a limited sense of this life and our possibilities.

Where else is compassion and aspiration to fulfillment found except in this deeper view of our nature here?

{For more on the view offered in the Avatamsaka Sutra, see Interdimensionalty in Buddhism and in American Cinema, and, The Avatamsaka Sutra and Buddhist Tantra}