Zen practioners are Thick!!!

[Wendy]

I went to the second session of this conference "change your mind, change the world" discussions with the Dalai Lama in Madison,wi. Here's the link I think you can watch it. http://cmcw2013.wisc.edu/

Pretty interesting stuff. Personally if Scienctific studies prove that mindfullness or a moment of silence or whatever the word is, benefits us especially our kids. Then I'm all for. There's too much anxiety, stress and emotional issues in school and at work. And in order for these institutions to integrate programs they want to see numbers, statistics,dollars saved. IMHO

gassho
wendy

[Jundo]

Hi Jenell,

I don't feel what you say is so. I believe that most folks may sometimes become scared, sad or dissatisfied with some situation in life. and they tend to fall in and become prisoners of the viewpoint and emotion, lost in the one sided darkness, seeing their life and this world primarily in such way. To deal with it, they may come to a certain resignation about it (shrugging their shoulders that "it can't be helped"), or look the other way, or even come to accept and be at peace with it eventually or "leave the problem in God's hands, let Her will be done". These are all ways we typically adjust to problems or unpleasant situations in life. Perhaps "Let Her will be done" is very close to our way in fact.

But the Zen Way is simply more radical, intimate, whole than that ... so whole that there may be nothing more wholier.

In Zazen, any "person" to suffer a problem is released, any "problem" is let go as a mirage. There is no self to feel lack, to thing to be lacking, and no lack. All is whole, complete and flowing ... and we are just the flowing. The gap better what "is" and how the little self judges life "should be" evaporates. In fact, the distance to "God's hands" and "Her will" vanishes. All and every is encountered as sacred. Such is simply a more radical ... ultimate ... way of allowing, accepting, flowing, being.

In my friends case, she came to see that even birth and death is much as a dream, creating from the dividing mind's self-imposed categories of "start and finish" ... yet from another way of experiencing, there is that which flows on and on right through all "starts and finishes". This "flowing" is not apart from us, but what you and me and all the world are all along (when the mind stops building walls between its "I" and "not I", "coming" and "going"). Perhaps we might say (if the words appeal) that there was nothing but "God's hand" all along (sometimes we say that our own inner peace, and calling on some outer power to take command of the situation is not so important when we find that inner was outer and outer just inner! ).

Nonetheless, my friend simultaneously took her medicine, let her brain feel natural fear and dissatisfaction with the situation sometimes, as any cancer patient will. She had kids, a husband, it was terrible.

Yet at the same time too, the first view changed the fear and dissatisfaction into a very different experience! Because of the fearless view, even the fear become less fearful. The dissatisfaction became softer. She described this as fear and no-fear at once, such that the fear became small. Like a Bodhisattva, she actually came to be more concerned with her husband, her kids, other patients then her self or own death.

I do not speak merely from theory, for it is something I live daily in my own life for both the big and small "problems" and dissatisfactions.

Gassho, J