What Dogen refers to as The great mystical power is not restricted by circumstance, location or time.
What is it?
When we look at our lives, we often see a kind of dichotomy.
One side is what we variously call our conditioning, our karma, our fear, our anger, our pain, our poison.
And on the other is something else. What we might provisionally call love, or compassion or openness or something else.
And the two sides are dramatically different. And they don’t appear to be equal, often it’s as if love or compassion is like a tiny sliver of light within the darkness, perhaps even just a sliver within memory.
Whereas the poison that we experience sometimes fills up our whole awareness. It seems dominant.
But what we need to understand is that this poison that we have is limited by time and space and circumstances. It is not a genuine obstruction. And what we perceive as a sliver of light is in reality like a great fire. It is not a question of turning away or turning towards.
And this great fire endures.
Everything else is just noise and shadow.