tassajara cabin
Tag: zen
Question
Is anything sustainable in the ephemeral?
in motion
“
To be passing is to live; to remain and continue is to die… in sculpture, architecture, and painting the finished form stands still, but even so the eye finds pleasure in the form only when it contains a certain lack of symmetry, when, frozen in stone as it may be, it looks as if it were in the midst of motion… For when we fail to see that our life is change, we set ourselves against ourselves and become like Ouroboros, the misguided snake, who tried to eat his own tail. Ouroboros is the perennial symbol of all vicious cycles, of every attempt to split our being asunder and make one part conquer the other… Released from the circle of attempted self-love, the mind of man draws the whole universe into its own unity as a single dewdrop seems to contain the entire sky.”
-Alan Watts
The Wisdom of Insecurity
Decay
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While the Greeks worshipped strength and beauty of form, Taoism considers the grotesque and deformed and weak somehow to belong more to the process of change, thus they are closer to the Mother.”
-Ellen Marie Chen
1974 essay
A fixation on moments
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Left alone in time, memories harden into summaries.”
-Sarah Manguso
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary
Mix
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Ambiguity is the warp of life, not something to be eliminated. Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making shifts and making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with pattern, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.”
– Catherine Bateson
Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way
You & I
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The self is the way we organize reality. It is mutable. Ephemeral. It’s an organizing structure that arises and is always completely embedded in relational reality. It’s never apart from that relational reality. That’s it. It’s pretty simple.
Oftentimes when people hear the teachings of no-self, they think that no self exists, or that no self should exist. But that’s not what it means. The teachings of no-self mean that we are not fixed, we are not permanent, separate, isolated. We are this dynamic reality. We are as Dōgen says: a flower of emptiness. A mutable articulation of reality.
So the teachings of no-self are not aimed at erasing ordinary personality or diminishing our worth, our needs, our vitality.
The self is not a problem to be solved or an obstacle to be obliterated. Quite the opposite. The teachings are about liberation from constricted states of suffering. Liberation from the delusions that we have about the self. They aim for our full participation, with kindness and clear thinking.
It’s also true that when we let these teachings sink in, when we allow them to touch us, they are deeply, deeply challenging. Because they ask us to risk a new way of being…
Releasing the hold on the self is a necessary and radical event that is liberating. It is also a process that leaves the practitioner to the edge of the known and beyond. The practice requires a willingness to allow everything on which one has relied and what is most intimately known — the self and one’s notions about the nature of reality — to shift and change.
If we look closely at this process, we find the ability to allow it is intimately linked with our experience of trust. And it requires an encounter with trust. Ultimately, it requires trust in life itself.“
-Rev. Dr. Daijaku Judith Kinst
SF Zen Center
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