Tag Archives: 108Enso

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mirror bright

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I’m not sure why gardening gloves would be called Karma but I bought a pair.  And perhaps that is my karma; always dragging myself around from one bright, shining object to another.  No wonder I’m frequently fatigued and frustrated.  Or frantic and fearful.  No, I think it’s more like indecisive and irritated.

Well, as I write this, I am certainly feeling indecisive and irritated.  It’s cloudy and the delivery of the newly purchased lawn mower is delayed – threatening clouds holding the overgrown lawn hostage.  I want to get out to the vegetable garden and clean it up.  It’s one of the last pieces of the gardens that needs attention.  But I’m torn between doing paperwork (it is cloudy after all) and weeding.  What if I did one and neglecting the other has serious consequences?  What if I did the other and neglecting… no wait… that’s the same question!

It happens frequently.  I think I’m asking good questions, analyzing the best approach to something but really I’m just stuck in this split, wanting an answer I can live with, one that confirms my worldview and belief system, something that isn’t going to be demanding in its corollaries.  That would be too frightening.  And when I’m most fearful, I tend to become most dogmatic.  This is the moment when I am vulnerable to zen sickness: there is no decision, no decision-maker, no garden, no paperwork.  I’m starting to see that the most insidious of my cravings is the desire to annihilate reality because it, too often, confirms my limited self.

Joko Beck (Everyday Zen) writes about the “Bottleneck of Fear,” the way in which we contract our lives down to a limited view of ourselves.  We are all subject to being conditioned to protect ourselves however we derive meaning about who we are from the conditioning.

The bottleneck of fear isn’t caused by the conditioning, but by the decision about myself I have reached based on that conditioning.

I am conditioned to value efficiency and efficacy.  These are the cornerstones of my identity; they are the twin deities of my personal religion.  Split between decisions – even if they are those of low-threat as paperwork and gardening – triggers a gut level response which Joko points out is my best teacher.  Bringing awareness to that gut-clenching illuminates the fear and sheds light on the falsehood of my limited self.  But it takes practice not just sitting around waiting for that understanding to emerge from the murky depths of my multi-layered delusion state.

Joko does something fascinating with this idea of practice.  She points out our eagerness to go to Hui-Neng’s verse that raised him to be the Sixth Patriarch: “there is no mirror-stand, no mirror to polish, and no place where dust can cling…”  Sure.  If our vision is clear in the first place.  But usually it isn’t; clouded by the cravings, desires, preferential states and deceptive actions, how can we get past the dust, let alone find the mirror!

It’s a paradox, Joko writes.  We need to understand the Sixth Patriarch’s words but we need to practice with the verse that was not accepted by the Fifth Patriarch.

This body is the Bodhi tree;
The mind is a mirror bright:
Carefully cleanse them hour by hour,
And let no dust alight.

(W)hen we fail to see clearly, we create merry mayhem for ourselves and others.  We do have to practice, we do have to polish the mirror, until we know in our guts the truth of our life.  Then we can see that from the very beginning, nothing was needed.  Our life is always open and spacious and fruitful.  But let’s not fool ourselves about the amount of sincere practice we must do before we see this as clearly as the nose on our face.

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velocity

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It’s going to be a spatter week!  Oh and, Joseph… note the white balance!  I’m too embarrassed to explain why I wasn’t getting the right effect for all the advice I was getting.  But that’s the problem, isn’t it?  There are subtleties in the join-these-dots-please of a teaching I tend to be oblivious to.

The nuances of getting the ink to spatter was one of those moments.  However, it ended up being a good lesson about the physics of objects in motion and letting go of how I think something should happen.  And it lead me down a rabbit hole about mass, velocity, and attaining enlightenment.  If I recall, mass X velocity = momentum.  Which says a lot about the effect of my surplus baggage on sustaining momentum in anything I’m doing – mental or physical – including getting enlightened.  One of the excess bags is the one that I call Wishfulness.  It carries the shoulda’s, woulda’s, and what if’s.  (The coulda’s are in the Resentment bag.)  It gets heavy at times, these moments of wanting a second chance – or even a better first chance. 

Here’s a nice piece from Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen:

To some degree we all find life difficult, perplexing, and oppressive.  Even when it goes well, as it may for a time, we worry that it probably won’t keep on that way….Nobody believes his or her life is perfect.  And yet there is something within each of us that basically knows we are boundless, limitless.  We are caught in the contradiction of finding life a rather perplexing puzzle which causes us a lot of misery, and at the same time being dimly aware of the boundless, limitless nature of life.  So we begin looking for an answer to the puzzle.

Joko points out that we tend to look outside ourselves – that bigger car, higher salary, better vacations, and so on.  These are the “if onlies” that we go through hoping for a resolution to the puzzle of feeling our suffering and intuiting our boundlessness.

First of all, we wear out those (if onlies) on the gross levels.  Then we shift our search to more subtle levels…we turn to a spiritual discipline.  Unfortunately we tend to bring to this new search the same orientation as before….  “If only I could understand what realization is all about, I would be happy.”

Enlightenment is not something you achieve.  It is the absence of something.  All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal.  Enlightenment is dropping all that.

I’m getting the sense that just dropping off those excess bags at the Salvation Army is not enough.  Velocity has to drop off too.  A full stop?  It suddenly occurs to me that the velocity of the ink is most powerful when the brush comes to a sudden stop on the paper.