“You don’t have to
prove anything” my mother said. “Just be ready
for what God sends“
Poet William Stafford died of a heart attack in August 1993, having written a poem that morning with these words…
Just be ready
Tag: impermanence
Completeness
The start of a New Year often gives rise to a restless energy, thoughts of needing to do better, to achieve more, to comparing our actual life with some better life, berating ourselves for perceived failures and shortcomings. Dogen reminds us to let go of this drama, these continually shifting ideas created by the mind, and rest in a sense of completeness
No creature ever falls short of its own completeness
Wherever it stands it does not fail to cover the ground.
Dogen
Let go of stories…
Two quotes from Mazu, 709–88, one of the greatest of the ancient Chinese Chan (Zen) masters, to remind us to live in the immediacy of the present moment and not in how our thoughts tell us what our life should be like:
When successive thoughts do not await one another,
and each thought dies peacefully away,
this is called absorption in the oceanic reflection.
A monk asked, “What is the essential meaning of Buddhism?”
Mazu said, “What is the meaning of this moment?”
Impermanent Conditions
Christmas and New Year can give rise to a lot of “I am” or “I am not” thoughts…
We tend to just react and take it for granted that all the ‘I am’ and ‘I am not’ is the truth. We create ourselves as a personality and attach to our memories. We remember the things we learned, we remember what we’ve done – generally the more extreme things; we tend to forget more ordinary things. In meditation we are bringing awareness to the conditions of the mind here and now, just by being aware of this sense of ‘I am, I am not’. The thought ‘I am’ is an impermanent condition. The thought ‘I am not’ is an impermanent condition.
Ajahn Sumedho, Investigating the Mind
Rest at ease
Sitting in meditation is a way of clarifying the ground of experience and resting at ease in your Actual Nature.
It is called “ Revealing the Original Face” and “Bringing to light the landscape of the basic ground.”
Put aside all concerns. Let go of all the things that hook you.
Simply, do nothing at all.
Don’t create things with the six senses.
Clear water has no back or front, space has no inside or outside.
Objects of mind and the mind itself have no place to exist.
Zazen Yojinki, one of the two founders of Sōtō Zen in Japan, late-13th/early-14th century AD, Notes on what to be aware of in Zazen
light, darkness and preferring the shadows
The days begin to lengthen, and we look forward….
Our biggest shadow issue is not evil. It’s that we live small and adaptive lives. And Jung put it this way in a very homey metaphor. He said, we all walk in shoes too small for us. And I think that way of saying, all right, we had to learn early as children, the world’s big, and we’re not. The world’s powerful and we’re not, now, how are you going to survive a few decades with that?
And so the, the biggest shadow issue for us is how much fear governs our behaviors,…And how often we’re serving the sort of archaic messages from long ago and far away, which is walking down the street backwards. And, how seldom we step into the largeness of our own journey, because frankly it’s intimidating.
James Hollis
Mindfulbalance 