What's in Your Head?

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,

So, we have been talking about some 'heady' stuff. Not! Big Mind, Oneness, Buddha Nature, Emptiness, Ein Sof...are decidedly NOT heady. If they are, you do not know them.

Some close friends, learned men, told me a person cannot live in vast emptiness. Heck, I've said the same to my students. I lied.

Well, not exactly. Teaching must be appropriate to the person we stand before.

Here's the thing: as a person practices mindfulness, from cushion to cushion, that person is living in non-duality, He or she is living as one for all and all for one without a thought about it.

Can this be done? Of course. The Buddha did, the Zen Patriarchs did, Abraham did, the some Jewish mystics did, some Chassids did, some Trappist and Benedictine monks did, some nuns of various faiths did.

Yet, a question remains. Is is desirable to live in non-duality today? Are we so jaded, so dualistic in our cultural assumptions, that to live in non-duality is a threat?

Is mutual aid as a distributive justice model which bases itself on the vast interdependence and interconnectedness of all beings a threat?

A rabbi friend pointed me to an article in the NYT yesterday regarding mindfulness and like many things out of New York minds in seemed quite neurotic to me. ('Must have something to do with Woody Allen, I suspect.)

But it does give rise to a question: can those who have open eyes co-exist with those with eyes half open? It depends. If those with eyes wide open are willing to receive the pain of the others without a fuss, I mean truly assuming the suffering of others without an egoistic broadcast about it, then yes. And if not, well, they are fakers.

We cannot walk on water. We must walk in the mud with the rest of the world, getting our hands and feet dirty, and loving all that there is about it. Because there in the mud is buddha.

Remember, its all about our starting point: begin with "I" as a separate self and we are not there. Yet, if we begin with "I" as code for Infinity and there we are.

Be well.