Ordinarily, we feel that we are separate individuals, each an 'I who's in' the world, either loosely or more closely connected as family, co-workers, citizens of a country and the like. The sun shines above, the ants crawl below, the days and years pass. That is one perspective on things, useful and necessary in daily life ...
... but also the source of conflict and suffering.
Sometimes I hear Zen folks say that we are beings who are all "interconnected." We depend on the air we breath, the sun in the sky, and each other. It is true. Yes, this is the case. We share this common boat of a world and universe, and we had best learn to live together, to share it nicely. "Interconnected" is a beautiful and powerful reminder to cherish each other and the planet that is our home. We need to learn its lesson.
However, "interconnected" ain't even the half of it:
Sometimes, in Zazen, the hard borders soften, and we may experience that all things, people and moments interflow in and out of all things people and moments, and "inter-in" too, as each-and-all fully contain each-and-all and each other and the whole shootin' match. We are the whole world and universe and all time, and the whole world and universe and all time flows in and out and is fully contained in each hair and atom of our bodies, every dewdrop, any tick of the clock, with room to spare. Now, that's an in-and-out-and-all-within-interflowing-interining-insight!
Still, do not stop there:
Sometimes, one clearly realizes that we are interidentical, in most intimate and radical sense, such that the bird is the fish flying in the sky, while the fish is the bird swimming ... not mere reflections of each other, but precisely each other in varied guise. The mountain is you mountaining, and you are the mountain walking on two legs, you are the mountain living your life ... all while I am you, you are me, the mountain is the bird and fish and stars and rusty tin cans and blood drops on a battlefield and on and on. You are every single sentient being that has ever lived, lives or ever will live, and they are precisely you ... as much as you are you ... and all the insentient too. It is a radical redefinition of who we are, knocking down the names and borders. As the dead are the living when dead, and the living are the dead just living, there can be no death here, nor birth either ... even as things come and go.
Not to mention, there's immutable THIS which this's all this. Master Dogen called this THIS as "INMO," meaning something like the ineffable 'WHAT'S WHAT.' Dogen riffed, for example, on this famous teaching of INMO:
Those who want to attain the matter that is INMO
must themselves be people who are INMO.
But as they are already people who are INMO,
why should they worry about attaining INMO?
must themselves be people who are INMO.
But as they are already people who are INMO,
why should they worry about attaining INMO?
WHY indeed! Even so, there is further to know.
That is because one had best not mumble these things as mere ideas. Nor should one feel them distantly or lightly or as a casual hint mostly forgotten.
Rather, one had best Practice-Realize such sincerely, Sit Zazen, then get up and move in our many Zen ways in which doer-doing-&-done are not two or three ...
... uncovering this Knowing that pierces right though "knower" and something apart to "know" ... marrow of one's bones until there is no doubt.
In fact, you and me and all things have been so all along.
One merely needs realize so, then to live accordingly.
Far from abstraction, this unity and interpenetration is the ultimate cure for all separation and friction found at the heart of human suffering. Even as we continue to live as individual beings, getting on with our day to day, the revelation of such radical interidentity and interpenetration is liberation from all conflict and division, the settling of all coming and going, a light through our experience of birth and death and the passage of time.
As our great Soto Zen progenitor, Dongshan, exclaimed at the moment of such revelation:
I move now, independent, myself, yet everywhere I meet this.
This now is thoroughly me, yet I am not now this.
One must fully realize so, thus to know suchness.
This now is thoroughly me, yet I am not now this.
One must fully realize so, thus to know suchness.
Gassho J
stlah
** Apparently, this INMO design is also the symbol of the Irish Association for Emergency Medicine which, of course, we wholeheartedly support!
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