We are always doing something to cover up our basic existential anxiety. Some people live that way until the day they die.
Underneath our nice, friendly facades there is great unease. If I were to scratch below the surface of anyone I would find fear, pain, and anxiety running amok. We all have ways to cover them up. We overeat, over-drink, overwork; we watch too much television.
There are many people in the world who feel that if only they had a bigger car, a nicer house, better vacations, a more understanding boss, or a more interesting partner, then their life would work. We all go through that one. Slowly we wear out most of our ’if onlies.
An old Zen rule of thumb is not to answer until one has been asked three times.
We are caught in the contradiction of finding life a rather perplexing puzzle which causes us a lot of misery, and at the same time being dimly aware of the boundless, limitless nature of life. So we begin looking for an answer to the puzzle.
We’re constantly waking up to what we’re about, what we’re really doing in our lives. And the fact is, that’s painful. But there’s no possibility of freedom without this pain.
There is no end to the opening up that is possible for a human being.
If from morning to night we just took care of one thing after another, thoroughly and completely and without accompanying thoughts, such as “I’m a good person for doing this” or “Isn’t it wonderful, that I can take care of everything?,” then that would be sufficient.
Awareness is our true self; it’s what we are. So we don’t have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness, with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments. We’re either in awareness, which is our natural state, or we’re doing something else. The mark of mature students is that most of the time, they don’t do something else. They’re just here, living their life. Nothing special.
When we’re lost in thought, when we’re dreaming, what have we lost? We’ve lost reality. Our life has escaped us.
Daily sitting is our bread and butter, the basic stuff of dharma. Without it we tend to be confused.
Joy is being the circumstances of our life just as they are.
That’s essentially what Zen practice is about: functioning from moment to moment.
When I watch my mind and stay with my body, out of that comes some course of action.
Living Zen is nothing special: life as it is. Zen is life itself, nothing added.
Who knows how we should be? We simply do our best, over and over and over.
Human beings are basically good, kind, and compassionate, but it takes hard digging to uncover that buried jewel.
In practice, we return over and over again to perception, to just sitting. Practice is just hearing, just seeing, just feeling.
At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we’re able to see.
Doing one thing at a time and giving oneself wholly to doing it is the most efficient way one can possibly live, because there’s no blockage in the organism whatsoever. When we live and work in that way, we are extremely efficient without being rushed. Life is very smooth.
103When we try to be something that we are not, we become the slave of a rigid, fixed mind, following a rule about how things have to be. The violence and the anger in us remain unnoticed, because we are caught in our pictures of how we should be.