Zen Master Seung Sahn often said that the most important thing to be mindful of is “keeping our life direction clear.” We can study sutras for years and absorb teachings intellectually but to what avail if our family relationships, habits and thought processes control our life and every movement. Throughout any given day, how much of your experience is governed by responses to situations and circumstances? These responses, please look at them closely. At their root is an accumulation of ideas and concepts you have imposed upon yourself by your judgments and opinions. Juxtapose that with the amount of time in your day when you can honestly say you are free and at rest. In all probability, very little. The time spent navigating the ocean of your ego with it’s non stop self concerns may actually encompass your whole day.
Your body is an energy field. If you were to increase the magnification up to the power of an ordinary microscope, nothing would appear as solid. Should you then be able to place your body under a powerful electron microscope, you would seem to have dissolved, a matrix of wave patterns that the great ancestral teachers referred to simply as energy movement akin to what can be described as a cosmic dance. The point of my saying all this is that our mind and senses want desperately to cling to some notion that we are an unchanging entity. Zen meditation as we experience it, this quieting of the mind, is the centuries old process of observing our attachments permeated by this non stop mental movie. A movie that we erroneously employ in a manner that well….is non existent. This is not to say that if we accidentally cut ourselves while chopping vegetables in the kitchen we are somehow oblivious to or detached from pain and the immediate need to apply a band aid on the affected area. Our bodies should be considered tools that allow for compassion and love to grow and unfold in this life journey. Subtle movements of energy are happening all around us and all the time. Put in the simplest way possible: human beings are process, not entity.
The cultivation of this ever changing human energy exists in ancient practices such as chi kung. The purpose of this cultivation is essential. It provides access to see through the veil of our insidious predilection towards believing over and over again in this non existent ”entity.”
The Chinese sage Lao Tse, author of the Tao Te Ching, is quoted as saying that “the energy of the universe is never exhausted.” When we quietly allow things to come to us via meditation rather than continuously engaging our self promulgated agenda, this yearning for peace and equanimity is revealed in all its beauty and simplicity. Being still and unmoved, breathing deeply and silently, we are suddenly free from the
inevitable disturbances. The cosmic dance is then able to manifest.
Ji Haeng Zen Master – Desert Dragon