Category Archives: reflections

Unknown's avatar

500/5000 vision

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About two years ago, Frank had eye surgery that restored his vision to 20/40 – meaning he no longer needed corrective lenses. Having lived from childhood with 20/750 vision, he’s learned many adaptive (and not so adaptive) ways to cope with Coke-bottom eye wear and eventually with contacts which corrected his vision to legal limits.  The surgery took restorative treatment further with two new lens implants; I think one is even a bifocal lens!  The ability to relish a blue sky and that finally being able to really see me didn’t send him screaming into the hills is not the punch line to this story of our relationship.  The gift of new visual range brought into harsh relief the ways we had sculpted our growth around each other to manage the limitation.

I’ve never quite understood the whole vision terminology in the first place but learned enough to know that 20/40 means you don’t think the moose crossing the driveway is a big dog.  So, the fact that after the surgery he still couldn’t find the jam jar on the fridge shelf 10 inches away did not compute.   My logic is impeccable: if you can see something at 20 feet away as clearly as I can when I’m 40 feet away, and if we’re both 10 inches away from the damn jam jar why the heck can’t you see it too!  Try as he could, he could neither explain nor help me understand this predicament.  I, on the other hand, have many explanations that involve unpruned neural pathways, avoidance, gender differences in object pattern recognition, and subtle aversion to my homemade jam.  But none of this actually resolved the problem so he has learned to pick up and read the label of each jar on the shelf and I’ve learned to leave the room to write my blog until he bellows, “Found it!”

All poking at hubby aside, growth, spiritually and otherwise, is about vision.  First, it is in the transition between seeing with old and new eyes (the term refers to one of Joanna Macy’s stages of “work that reconnects”).  Seeing with old eyes is watching an old movie or reruns of a TV show; the brain uses an auto-fill similar to the way your computer fills in a word when you type the first few letters.  Nothing changes because nothing changed. Using new eyes brings things into relief from a familiar ground, highlighting the edges and contours that would have been missed when transmitted through the lens of the old eyes.  Of course, you know we’re not talking about the eyeball anymore.  It’s now about the way in which our assumptions, stories, and desires draw us into the lines, contours, shading, and tone of our experiences.  It’s also about the repetitive nature of how we attend to our environment; what I see today will differ from what I see tomorrow (or the next moment) – all at the mercy of being internally 20/20 or 20/800.

Wendy Johnson, in Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate, describes one of her teachers, Harry Roberts, who asked the gardening students to look over the vegetable garden and into the coastal meadow that rose behind it.  Over a year, they described each week what they saw – developing trust in their vision.  About a year after they began this practice Johnson describes noticing the appearance of a sliver of green under dried brown grass.  It took that repeated effort with unattached vision, entrusting that clarity would emerge with time and seasons, to see that one spot in a field which could protect and support new growth.

Second, growth requires a powerful range of vision. It isn’t enough to simply focus on the blossoming and shoots of this season.

“Remember in your thinking,” Harry once said to me (Johnson), “That this is a Buddhist community.  And we are trying to live like one.  Buddhism is forever.  It’s not a crash program for the next five weeks.  We are looking at things from the perspective of five hundred years.  Buddhism is not a religion.  It is a way of life.  If we make it five hundred years we will make it for five thousand.  We are building for the future.”

We need to cultivate the power of this range of sight.  Playing with this concept, I imagined that the Buddha and other enlightened teachers saw our potential from 2600 years ago and we perhaps only began to appreciate that potential about 200 years ago (conservatively estimated); that gives us a vision range of 200/2600.  Not quite spiritually blind but still likely to need correction.  Now the question remains: what will be necessary in our practice as individuals and a community to adjust that vision so that it is 500/1000 or 2500/5000?

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

Unknown's avatar

do not stop here

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This is Oliva doing no-mind practice under the kiwi vine.  I want a little bit of this in my practice.

The pesky thing about practice is in what to do about the mind.  In the last post, it wandered around the room like the kid on a tricycle in Billy Collins’ poem Insomnia – (it) will not stop tracing the same tight circle / on the same green threadbare carpet.  Sitting this morning, I took it by its chubby arm, wedged it under the cushion and watched it pop out as soon as my full weight sank into the buckwheat and memory foam.  So I put it

~on the shelf where it berated me for not putting the Cd’s back in alphabetic order.

~on the altar where it flicked at the limp rose petals and sent incense ashes tumbling onto the table.

~in the bell where it found cat hair and dust bunnies holding court.

~on my foot where it tapped a baton sounding a prelude to numbness with a three-part tingling.

~at my nostrils where it began to tickle the edges with the cat hairs it had kept from the bell.

~in that space just under my navel where it pounced and bounced summoning the sensations of anxiety and fear.

It seemed no matter where I placed it and begged it to stop. there. stay. still. just. this. breath. it. be. came. that. place.

I wondered what it would be like to be a little more here and little less stuck to here.

Takuan Soho was a prolific writer, Zen monk, calligrapher and tea master.  In Unfettered Mind are letters written to two sword masters giving advice and criticisms aimed at marrying the spirit of Zen with the way of the sword.  One letter, The Mysterious Record of Immovable Wisdom (Where to Put the Mind) describes how to engage with the mind.  Takuan Soho viewed the mind not as unruly but rather as too easily absorbed into a space where it becomes slave to what is there.

If you should decide on one place and put the mind there, it will be taken by that place and lose its function…  Because this is so, leave aside thoughts and discrimination, throw the mind away from the entire body, do not stop it here and there, and when it does visit these various places, it will realize function, and act without error.

Putting the mind in one place is called falling into one-sidedness.  One-sidedness is said to be bias in one place.  Correctness is moving about anywhere.  The Correct Mind shows itself by extending the mind throughout the body.  It is not biased in any one place.

If the mind moves about the entire body, when the hand is called into action, one should use the mind that is in the hand.  When the foot is called for, one should use the mind that is in the foot.  But if you determine one place in which to put it, when you try to draw it out of that place, there it will stay.  It will be without function.

Keeping the mind like a tied-up cat and not allowing it to wander, when you keep it in check within yourself, within yourself it will be detained.  Forsaking it within your body, it will go nowhere.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju