‘In Zen Buddhism, it is widely thought that the ultimate goal of the practice is neither to be engaged in zazen (seated meditation) nor to achieve satori (the sudden disclosure of reality) but rather to embody in everyday life the vision that zazen and satori have made possible. In that sense, “meditation” is not the intentional activity so much as it is the quality and depth of mindfulness that you bring to any activity. Thus, depending on which orientation to meditation you take, you might say with equal truth that an awakened human being no longer spends much time in meditation (in the first sense) or that in fact such a person is virtually always in a meditative stated of mind (in the second sense). (The Six Perfections)
I would not claim to be awakened, but I do spend less time in meditation these days, and try to bring that frame of mind to my daily life. I was struck, reading this again, about his definition of satori, ‘the sudden disclosure of reality’; where has reality been all this time, and how did we not notice it before?
Shundo David Haye 