‘We would all prefer happiness to misery, paradise to hell, survival to immediate death.  We are thus ever bifurcating Reality, dividing it into something good and something bad, something we like and something we don’t.  Similarly, we discriminate between satori and delusion, and strive to attain satori.

But the reality of the universe is far beyond such an attitude of aversion and attachment.  When our attitude is ‘whichever, whatever, whenever’, then we manifest the whole universe.’ (On Zazen)

Of course, that ‘whatever’ has a slightly different quality to the ‘whatever’ we can easily parody as arms being thrown up in the air in resignation and indifference.

‘If you push for samadhi as a goal, you may achieve a kind of emptiness, but it is not true emptiness because the person isn’t truly empty. If in your daily life you misuse other people, or manipulate them, or are interested in your own power, then the samadhi – which can be developed quite artificially- is not, as far as I am concerned, a true samadhi… 

Almost everybody is attached to their samadhi! Samadhi is almost like an athletic ability, And people even learn to use it to avoid their own suffering… If you have artificial samadhi power, you may maintain it during the day, and it may look really good as long as there is no particular stress. But under stress such samadhi often proves to be quite fragile.’ (Meetings With Remarkable Women)

‘I realized the main thing preventing a more intimate connection to the natural world was concept — the mysterious filters our mind lodges between us and the world, at every turn, at every second, in just about every interaction. Concepts can be good: We get the concept of “mortal danger” when a car is hurtling toward us. But concepts, also a form of assumption, can neuter experience because pure sensations become impure when we judge them. Concepts are what we deploy when we ask what we can get out of a walk, rather than the opposite.

Researchers who study our brain activity while we walk use the term “automaticity” to describe how our body behaves on a stroll. Automaticity is defined as “the ability of the nervous system to successfully coordinate movement with minimal use of attention-demanding executive control resources.”

We should leverage the gift of walking to stop thinking and start doing, apparently, what walking is asking us to do — pay attention to the stuff of place, the place itself. To arrive at that point takes time, and discipline, but when it does, delight bubbles up, a “praising of the mysterious and tender touching we are so often in the midst of,” according to Ross Gay, poet and author of “The Book of Delights.” Place comes to life, any place, from the life we gave it, from attentiveness.’ (from the New York Times)

This was a nice article about the power of attention and walking, which obviously I am a huge fan of. I could not resist a little wry smile at the fact that the author, having discovered this, felt compelled to write a book about it.

‘When we come to a practice such as this, we can sit down with our emotions and feel them without holding on. Being awake on the level of emotion means no longer deriving a solid sense of self from how and what we feel. Usually our sense of self is enmeshed in what we feel. We say to ourselves, “I feel angry. I am angry!” Looking deeply into this, we can see that what we are really saying in that moment is my sense of self is fused with my anger. If we look even more deeply, we see we actually cannot be defined by an emotion that runs through the body. The fusion is an illusion.

Seeing this is awakening through the heart. We discover what we feel, period—and what we feel doesn’t need to be avoided, nor does it define us. The more we shut out the body and our feelings, the more we retreat to thinking, which tends toward disembodying. The intensity of our compulsive thinking is in direct proportion to the extent to which we are not willing to experience our emotional body and therefore disassociate from it.

When we are no longer defining self on the level of emotion, our sense of self is liberated from our conflicted feelings. But we cannot get to this point by bypassing our emotions in the hopes of arriving at some exalted state. We cannot avoid what we feel.’ (from Lion’s Roar)

This was a commentary on yesterday’s quote from Hongzhi.

‘Emptiness is without characteristics. Illumination has no emotional afflictions. With piercing, quietly profound radiance, it mysteriously eliminates all disgrace. Thus one can know oneself; thus the self is completed. We all have the clear, wondrously bright field from the beginning. Many lifetimes of misunderstanding come only from distrust, hindrance, and screens of confusion that we create in a scenario of isolation. With boundless wisdom journey beyond this, forgetting accomplishments. Straightforwardly abandon stratagems and take on responsibility. Having turned yourself around, accepting your situation, if you set foot on the path, spiritual energy will marvelously transport you. Contact phenomena with total sincerity, not a single atom of dust outside yourself.’ (Cultivating the Empty Field)

Those screens of confusion, eh?