A few days ago in time, I explained how to stop time, reverse time, twirl time in loops and many other tricks both timely and timeless.
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Here, I will tell you the secret of travel across the cosmos, all without need for a rocket, not bound by the speed of light. How?
It sounds like some mystical and magical ability, some otherworldly, paranormal force ... but I assure you that this space travel is really quite down to earth, easy to understand yet boundless in its power to liberate. The ability to experience this is present in all of us.
Like time travel, it comes down to the human mind's skills at proprioception - The body's ability to sense its position and movement in space and time. (Here is something about that: LINK)
It is the modeling created within the human brain, the muscles, bones, sense of balance and spatial-temporal centers, that defines your experiences of where your "you" is located, where it stops and stops, your borders, what actions are yours and within what spatial areas they occur. Very roughly it is your feeling that "you" are inside your skin, between the tips of your toes and the top of your head, and that everything outside is "not you." The sweep of your limbs marks the range of your actions. Further, you have the feeling, based on memory and imagination, that you "began" at your birth or first memories, then to end when the heart and breath stop someday.
In fact, we could not live and function on a day-to-day basis were that not true. We could not even put on our own pants if we did not have a sense where our leg ends and the pants begin, and likewise for all our dealings with other things and beings in the "outside" world.
However, a key aspect of our Zen ways through the centuries has been the use of various means and methods to replace such mental models of who we are, and who we are not, with perfectly valid, useful, verifiable, wondrous alternative mental models of what one is versus what one is not, where one stops and starts or is boundless. Truly, it is not hard to understand (even if a little tricky to experience). We fundamentally redefine, either soften or fully drop the lines and firm definitions of who and what we are, and re-experience ourselves with limits dropped away, borders and checkpoints redrawn. What principle says that we must only define ourselves, and see ourselves as ending at the tips of the fingers? We can knock down the bodily walls and replot the mental map.
We cannot function on a daily basis without our proprioceptive system, but neither need that be the only way we experience life. We can experience our nature in many ways.
You feel that your hand is "you," and assume the same for the hairs on your head, and that your heart and aching knees are "you." There is practical basis for that, for when your hand is burned, your knees ache, your heart stops, it is you who winces in pain or sits cold at the funeral. You do not (I assume) think that the bird in the sky is you, nor the ground or the mountain, nor the distant stars. Such is our ordinary way of defining who a person is.
But, I assure, you can also come to define yourself as the bird, ground, mountain and star as much as hairs, hand, knees and beating heart. All is your one great living, moving, dancing, leaping body. "You" can instantly span across the cosmos, to the most distant galaxy or star, because they are just you and have been all along. The fire's burning is your burning, the water's flowing is your flowing. All is as much you as your bones and breath. In fact, what need even for the word "you" when ideas of "not you" drop away?
Of course, this can easily go to one's head, when one suddenly perceives that one is the whole cosmos and everything in it. So I remind you of this: Do not let it go to your now VAST head: Yes, the worms and rusty tin cans are you but, in fact, looked at another way, that means you are just lowly worms and rust, the tiniest ant and filthiest dust. So, be modest. Remember that "you" truly drop away, and all things in this world are each other, so there is no fixed place to hang one's ego.
The bird is you flying in the sky, but you are precisely the bird standing on the ground ... for the sky is the ground in the sky, and so standing is flying standing.
As Ancestor Dongshan proclaimed, "I am not this, this is just me."
Yes, you have a birth certificate that affirms that you are you, a death certificate at the end, and a driver's license in between with your picture. But otherwise, there is no law, no cosmic rule book, that says you cannot be everything else too, and the whole thing. Before your birth, this was as now. After death, now is just then. When you drive from here to there, where are you driving but from you to you? Thus, at birth and death and in between, where did you come from, where can you go?
Zazen is our traditional means to redraw the lines, and thus to find ourselves as every blade of grass, being and moment of time. The hard borders of self and not self soften, or fully drop away. Dropping our demands, resting in Shikantaza's radical equanimity, putting aside the fight and our resistance to the world, all phenomena prove permeable. Each moment is every place and all moments, each place is all places and timeless too. Inside the wall is just out that is in, outside the door is in that's out. Every moment of time is this moment of sitting, every place in the world is this Zafu.
As Master Dogen proclaimed ...
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A person’s body and mind change according to situations and time.
A billion worlds can be sat through within a single sitting.
Even so, at that very moment the body and mind cannot be measured by self or other.
It is the power of buddha dharma. The scale of the body and mind is not five or six feet,
because the five or six feet is not fixed measure.
Where the body is neither bounded nor boundless, it is not limited to this world
or that world, to the entire world or the immeasurable entire world.
A billion worlds can be sat through within a single sitting.
Even so, at that very moment the body and mind cannot be measured by self or other.
It is the power of buddha dharma. The scale of the body and mind is not five or six feet,
because the five or six feet is not fixed measure.
Where the body is neither bounded nor boundless, it is not limited to this world
or that world, to the entire world or the immeasurable entire world.
- Shobogenzo Senmen
Gassho, J
stlah
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