When Zen Master Joshu was a young monk he asked his teacher Nansen, “What is the Way?” His teacher replied “Your Ordinary Mind is the Way”. By “ordinary” Nansen meant the mind Joshu already had; he didn’t need to turn it, or himself, into something else. He didn’t need to put, as the Zen saying goes, another head on top of the one he already had. Unfortunately, these days, when we hear the word ordinary, we are inclined to think it means “average or typical” or even “mediocre”. We contrast ordinary with special, and decide, given the choice, we rather be special. But our practice wont make us special; it will keep bringing us back to who we already are.
Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness
The reason why silence is so disturbing to us [is this]: As soon as we begin to become silent, we experience the relativity of our ordinary everyday mind. With this mind we measure our space and time coordinates, we calculate probabilities and count up our mistakes and successes. It is so useful and familiar a state of mind that we easily think it is all there is to us: our whole mind, our real selves, our full meaning.
Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.
The most important form of distortion fundamental to the way our minds operate has to do with creating the notion of self out of what is essentially an impersonal process. Selfhood is the expression of a particular kind of distortion of view, a situation that develops gradually from basic misperceptions, to the casting of whole sets of misinformed thoughts, and eventually to a deeply rooted belief system that becomes imposed upon all further perception and thought. Here again we see a cyclical pattern. Perceptions give rise to thoughts, which congeal into beliefs, and which then influence perception. When the system operates optimally, it allows for growth, learning, and transformation. But when it is fundamentally misinformed, it can also give rise to a considerable amount of delusion. Trouble arises when the constructed self becomes the main organizing principle, when it is unrealistically invested with qualities it does not innately possess, and, most importantly, when it becomes the node around which maladaptive behaviors coalesce. The self comes to be experienced as a central and dominant element of psychic life, mistaking what is a series of contingent patterns in constant flux for an enduring entity.
Mindfulbalance 