Show and Tell

With palms together,
Good Morning Sangha,

There is a phrase a Korean Zen Master used frequently: Open mouth already a mistake!

This is so true. Language and the workings of our minds to produce language and the thought behind it, is essentially dualistic. There is no getting around it. This is why many koans have no literal, verbal answer and why so often the Master asks the student to "show" him rather than "tell" him.

Even in literature this is true, oddly enough. We are asked to show something in our stories and poems, rather than tell something. Pictures, painted or spoken, are better than a thousand words spewed out.

Moreover, the moment we open our mouths to speak we are out of the moment and into our thoughts about the moment. Yet we struggle so with this, I know I do.

I want to tell you!

Yet in doing so, I make a big mistake.

You must teach yourself!

You must experience yourself!

There is no telling that is worth anything. From whence does this desire to tell come?

Be well.

Just do

With palms together,
Good Morning All,

So, you are busy. Too busy to take good care of yourselves. And then you die. Whatever you were busy with no longer matters a whole lot.

The most important thing?

In the meantime life happens. Between the tasks, at the stoplight, during a break, sipping a cup of water, just before you speak, these are the moments we are most awake these days. The rest of the time life seems not to be our own. We place ourselves on autopilot and just get through.

This is no way to live.

Stop it. Live in every moment, as you do your task, do it completely; as you drive, drive mindfully; as you speak, speak with care. This is not difficult, but it does take practice. Sometimes you will be there, sometimes not. Its OK, just do.

Be well.

Karma

With palms together,
Good Morning All,

If you, me, and the universe are one then what is the real teaching of karma?

To address this question you must really enter it.You, me, and the universe are products of dualistic thought, convenient and necessary for survival, but weights on the rope of liberation. Karma is nothing other than an understanding of the deep and continuous connections of everything. Often thought of as cause and effect, we understand karma when we mentally step away and see that streams flow in all directions at once.

This is because that is. Very precise. Very exacting. Nothing is individual or seperate or unnecessary. When you are this teaching, karma is just another useless notion, like heaven and hell, nirvana and samsara, you and me, or the many other rafts along the shore.

Be well.

Rich Beyond Measure

With palms together,
Good Afternoon All,

Over this last few days I have been practicing mindfullness in motion. Practices this as a participant-witness through my day, moving, sitting, eating, talking, listening with full attention. This full attention is special, however, as it is attention without effort. Just witnessing the breath, the sound, the smell, the sight, the mental imaginings, all the while knowing that they are unreal is the truest sense.

I listen now to the baby giggle, then cry, and the delicate chopping and slicing sounds of my son's knife as it expertly cuts through myriad fresh vegetables and herbs as he prepares our evening meal. The conditioned air flows across my face and through the hair of my newly growing beard on my face.

In each moment a lifetime of experiences.

We are so rich each of us. The whole world of experience is ours for the willingness to touch it. It is such a shame that we withdraw so often, blunt our senses, and cloud our minds with the clippity-clap of notions.

Live awake.

Be well.

Happiness

With palms together,

Good Morning All,

To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine-ah, to imagine is to experience the world as it isn't and has never been, but as it might be. The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future. As one philosopher noted, the human brain is an "anticipation machine," and "making future" is the most important thing it does.

From the new book, 'Stumbling on Happiness' By DANIEL GILBERT

courtesy, NY Times Review of Books

Yes, this is one of the functions of the human brain, a great evolutionary step. The ability to imagine has been key to our survival and to our dominance of this planet. It has also lead us down the primrose path of delusion. Don't we all enjoy 'being somewhere else'? Especially when the present isn't as we 'expected' or 'desired'? We day dream, fantasize, and otherwise dream travel: on vacation most of the time.

The practice of Zen is a tool to help us come back to reality. It teaches us to live in the present moment, regardless of the quality of that moment.

Now some may ask why we should want to do that. And those who have been raised on or who are hooked on alternative realities such as television, gaming, film, would have a hard time answering, I suspect, so comfortable and interesting is virtual life.

Yet, in truth, alternative realities and mental imaginings are simple mental constructs, having no more validity than the phosphorescent dots on the old TV screen.

There are uses for such realities, but they are uses only, not habitats.

Time to wake up!

Be well.

Defining the Spiritual Situation, 2

With palms together,
Good Morning All,

So, we hae a continuum of understanding of God from "No God" on one side to "God" on the other with a thousand shades of gray in between. Each shade presents its own unique hue, its own understanding of the role of the "believer" and the "clergy." Each contains its own "domain assumptions."

Manuel argues that we Buddhists are above and beyond a notion of God. This might be one side of the continuum. Understanding the issue, of course, from the subject's point of view. Do I want to even acknowledge the possibility of an object, subject asks? The Buddha himself seemed to want to avoid these discussions because he felt they were not useful to the goal of the Buddha Way.They are of the sort that philosophers often get to: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Yet, my commentary is not so metaphysical. It is quite practical.

Our understanding of the universe guides us. Our willingness to drop away self and be enfolded by all is an important ingredient to our daily practice. The idea of God is clearly a human invention, and in primitive cultures this idea was anthropomorphised so that we could either better understand our conception of God or control him through supplication.

Some have argued that God is none other than a reflection of ourselves and so has evolved as have we through the centuries. No doubt this is true. And if true, where are we today?

To dismiss God dismisses entire cultures and their very powerful beliefs. Dismissing this means not understanding those cultures and such a lack of understanding can be deadly, especially in the contempory climate. Jihad is, afterall, a "holy war."

None of my discussion was intended to argue for or against a personal belief or point of view, only that we use a frame of reference within which we might understand how various peoples use God or a notion of God in their lives. Even atheists have a God they rail against, otherwise they would be mute. Often their understanding of such a God is of the Judeo-Christian variety, often punitive and primitive in conception. Such a notion becomes a straw man in an argument and suggests a simplistic examination of the whole thing.

God, however, is a universal phenomenon, not constrained by the human mind, not created in the human mind. God as the universe, the intricate processes, the outside and the inside, the very fabric of existence, is hardly an anthropomorphism. We in Zen might understand God as shunyata itself. Or not.

Be well.

Fences

With palms together,
Good Morning All,

Ever since I was a little kid I wondered how borders existed. I often looked at maps of the world, scouring the continents looking at the lines separating one country from another and wondering what they looked like on the ground. As a kid I thought maybe there were actual lines and that it must be some body's job to go around painting them, like they do on roads. As an adult I still wonder about these lines dividing us as a species. I wonder about how these divisions divide us rather than bring us together. I wonder about the fear that is created through groupings, the discrimination that develops, and often think about the world as a place without boundary as a place without limits.

When we drop our boundaries, in one sense, we create possibilities for expansion. Companies know this. International corporations see boundaries as impediments and actively work within them to make them non-existent. Would it not be wise to eventually find a way to live on this planet as if we are all part of the same family of man?

Creating fences, putting armed soldiers along our borders, seems unwise to me. It creates a police state of sorts, and further divides us. True security, it seems to me, comes with friendship and intermarriage, where all people see themselves as family.

Threats to the family will always exist, well at least as long as there are both vast differences between haves and have-nots and as long as groups of people suffer and die while others live and thrive.Increasing the height of the fence will not stop that.

Be well.