The ocean is sometimes flat and sometimes rises up in waves, the Ocean is vast, it’s huge, it is unbounded and then at times it rises up into these waves.
Each individual person is like a wave on this vast ocean of consciousness itself.
The ocean doesn’t go anywhere it is unbounded it is eternal.
It is vast beyond our conception of vastness and yet that vastness which is vastness of non-duality, duality arises, limitation arises, separateness arises and we arise as a wave moving across this ocean.
In life, we forget that in fact the wave is an expression of the ocean and that the wave is never separated from the ocean.
Even if we do not experience our connection to that oceanic vastness of the great unbounded consciousness, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t there, it is still there. We forget that we ARE, it’s not that we once WERE, we always are that vastness of unboundedness even as we simultaneously arise into our individual life experience.
Your practice:
As an individual ‘life wave’ learn a series of practices that allow you to draw from that oceanic base and allow that oceanic consciousness to rise up into your individuality.
Do that over a long period of time through profound and systematic practices such that eventually the ideal is that the entire ocean rises up inside your individual life wave.
Now you could say there is an ocean and there is an ocean but you got there in really 180 degrees opposed different waves.
Different paths:
The path one may choose of renunciation, to draw back from daily life, living in a cave or monastery, living a solitude non-distracted life that will be become the ocean. In that way, they would let the life wave settle.
The path most of us choose is the life of daily activities, families, work, interaction and distraction this path let yourself learn.
Those practices by means of which you are drawing and drawing from that universal depth, bringing it up into your individuality, not attempting to leave behind or abandon anything but making that contribution that allows you to transform, refine uplift, create in very, very powerful ways in your life, so that eventually then there is a notion of liberation in this life, in this body, freedom now.
Not freedom postponed to some state, not freedom that is after death, but in this very body, in this life. Freedom within your family, within everything else, the arising of that genius level of mastery, which is a very high ideal.
You may achieve this ideal by practices that contribute, draw, bring up, embody and stabilize in your moment by moment awareness. this will increase a state of fulfilment, no duality, of blissfulness, of intelligence, of love and compassion.