Yearly Archives: 2009

Daily Life, Overcome Difficulties, Teachings

This

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It is late however I do like to nip over to Japan and Little House in the Paddy to see what Iain is writing about. Turns out that we are on the same track. Words. Or how it came to me today: This is not what you think. This being here now, all that is encountered.

Words are just a code, quite inadequate for this task, bit by bit that is the other discovery we make. Words are fine to create a facsimile of the original but they never come close to replicating it, they really are a finger pointing at the moon. As we grow older we seem to feel this ‘newness’ less and less but no reason why we should. When did you last say to the person next to you on the train “Look at that amazing cloud over there! It looks like a horse!”

And isn’t it the way of things. Here is Andrew down in Cornwall talking about another theme which I am currently contemplating, fear and anxiety.

Please don’t, what ever you do, feel sorry for us! The longer you go on in this business, the deeper you go and the more intimate one becomes with this. I just want to say that fear and anxiety are better not regarded as problems to fix. The more one thinks and acts as if they are the more real and fixed they become. I have to say it again: This is not what you think! It’s not that it is something else, really. That there is a deeper ‘reality’. That if you thought differently this would be better appreciated. Or, please not, if I think positive thoughts bad things will go away and good things happen.

Overcome Difficulties, Teachings

In The Face Of Fear – Action

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Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. For in action there is magic, grace and power – Goethe

I came across this quote, strangely enough, in a book on Zen flower arranging. It seems to be one of those popular quotes that are dragged up for use in almost any circumstance. Still, something in it spoke to me. I can’t say that I particularly go for the term magic – I am pretty sure that the power of action doesn’t come from a supernatural source, just from a source which for the most part we neglect or fail to comprehend, and maybe after all that is what more accurately characterises what we tend to call magic. However, power and grace I can go with. And the quote is particularly helpful for me just now.

I have, and as long as I can remember have had, a sense of anxiety as my background emotion – it seems to be almost programmed into my body, and at something like an operating system level come to that. Sometimes it is relatively quiet, sometimes it can lead to a quite debilitating fear. A lot of people find this hard to believe of me as I have done things and held responsibilities that many people seemed to find terrifying. I had little problem with them as the outside threat seen by others was nothing compared with my inner fears.

Life is much quieter for me now; the anxiety and fear remain, and if anything are more noticeable without the distractions of external pressures. Still, action is the antidote to fear. Sometimes any action will do. Sometimes it is an achievement just getting up in the morning, getting dressed, feeding the cats, lighting the stoves and milking the goats. Beginning these simple tasks can dispel the fear. At other times there is one particular task calling me to be worked on which, for some obscured reason, becomes the focus of my fear. Then I can find myself becoming exceptionally busy on just about anything that avoids me having to look at the one thing I need to be doing. Beginning this one thing, in the face of the fear, is where the power and grace lie.

In some ways knowing all this helps to stop other things in the future becoming immobilising with the fear they bring. Sometimes, though, the fear and avoidance seem to creep up unnoticed and for a while action seems impossible – but it isn’t. And, nervous as I am to disagree with Goethe, I am relieved to say that often I don’t even have to feel or believe I can do something – just starting is all that it takes.

Teachings

Human Relationship – Spiritual Longing

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Dave of Holding No Bough blog is a regular reader and leaver of comments. Why not link over to a couple of his recent post. First read Flight and then Watching. Below is a quote from Flight.

When I hear the lark ascend in Vaughan Williams’ The lark ascending I feel a just out of reachness, like the lark can’t quite get there, like we (or should I say I) can’t quite get there. Where ever there is. Does the music point to that feeling of wanting to go home in the spiritual sense? Am I just confusing this with some existential feeling of being out of kilter? And in (an adult’s) crying this same out of reachness, like the tears try to fill the gap. Such crying could be over any loss and not closely connected to spiritual home sickness. Yet there is I suppose, at the root of all pain, a gap between where we feel we want or need to be and where the universe appears to have placed us. A gap born of our illusion of separation, our incarnation in the physical body in the material world.

Dave and I correspond, and talk when he is here. Sometimes I get difficult but tonight I just wanted to say thanks. Tomorrow I might get difficult! My message for Dave? This, right here and now, is the Garden of the Bodhisattvas. There is not a gap, there are no gaps, open the gate and walk in. The key is acceptance. Deep commitment (could we be approaching vow again) to the (so called) path that leads there will have you at the gate in no time.

Teachings

Broken Promises

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Started to write about broken promises.
Started to get preachy.
Started to sense that it’s time to stop.
So that’s what I’m doing.

This is for H. <>

Teachings

Levels Of Discourse – Vow

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There are, of course, levels of discourse. And nowhere is this more apparent than when talking about the subject at hand. For short I’ll call that Vow.

In the early days of Buddhism, in the time of the Buddha, I believe there was a simple way to enter the community of monks. The Buddha, or perhaps one of his close followers would say: Come Monk! And that was it. This simple form was a mutual recognition of….mutual recognition of…that which inspires the heart, enlivens the heart, to follow that which the Buddha was pointing out through the way he was living and what he was saying. No doubt there were people who came to join the growing band of devotees who were not invited in. That would be for one reason or another and who know now what they might have been. Being female was one reason, and that changed due to the Venerable Ananda’s representations to the Buddha.

In the intervening centuries becoming a monk has become formalized to a huge extent. The center of the wish remains the same whether it be ones vocation to be a monk or ones vocation to be an IT professional for example. (I do have to stress however that living the life of a monastic isn’t a life style choice, it goes deeper than that.) What I’m pointing to is the fundamental of vow/wish. I’d go so far as to say this is common to all, although the form that takes is vast and unfathomable in its’ expression. Unfathomable because what one encounters in the world doesn’t always look like it’s inspired, deep, honorable, worthy, worthwhile etc.

So here in this post there is a focus on the deep, for most largely unconscious, level of what it is to be human. A human with other humans. Buddhas together with Buddhas. As I am sure I remember hearing, Buddhas come in all shapes and sizes.

See the comments section attached to yesterdays post.