Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘We live in a world that we experience as a world of material objects that have no meaning other than the meaning we give them, no value other than the use to which we put them, so the world is this dead place on which we impose our will and our values, and we try to transform that according to our desires. We do the same thing with our bodies and minds, and too often we do that in the name of a spiritual practice, where we’re going to transform ourselves into something better, purer, calmer. We think the state we’re in has something wrong with it and we’re always involved in trying to improve or fix it. What I call our secret practice, is the use that we privately want to put meditation to, what parts of our self, of our mind, we want to extirpate: our anxiety, our anger, our sexual desire; what part we want to build on or buff up: our calmness, our generosity, the kind of person we want to be. There can be value in doing that. There can be value in making certain efforts in becoming a certain kind of person, but there’s a whole other aspect, a whole other dimension to practice which I call the religious aspect, which is about putting an end to all those projects of self improvement and leaving everything just as it is so we can experience its intrinsic value, it’s value just as it is, without putting it to any use whatsoever.’ (Sesshin: Presence Rather Than Endurance)