When I Am Dreaming

Whenever I am judging, I am dreaming.  The mind is the dream.  I am not owning my dream whenever I am judging. I am a player in the dream, totally identified with it.  To be aware of the dream is to wake from the dream, but one needs to be fully aware, not just have an idea that it MAY be a dream, not just a belief, but an actual experience.

When I am dreaming I am so convinced that I am in reality that I cannot see that this is a dream.  What else can it be if right now is immediately gone and I am not seeing  the phenomenon?  If I am merely thinking that the moment I began this sentence I am writing is gone and I am not getting it?

So...  Shakespeare wrote that "all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death." And that life is a "walking shadow" - shadows are not reality! And that life "is a tale told by an idiot…." And "signifying nothing".  Did he use the term "idiot" to shock? Are the unenlightened, idiots?

Yes, the judgements that  it is the fault of this and that, him and her.... I do not own these feelings, they own me! I am electing what I believe is outside of me as cause of the way I am!  Unless I first of all fully accept them as projections that I am creating and then realize that it is all awareness and awareness is me.

Realizing the dream. In the heart or in the head, it is just more dream-work, but in the reality of existence. In experience that is neither the heart nor the head but within the context of who I really am.  This too, whatever it is, is a dream. For it is already gone. So now what?

Zen: No Easy Living Here!

Zen is a difficult practice that defies belief! Beliefs won't work in Zen anyway..  A lifestyle that is yet so rewarding and liberating at times. But (as Zen practitioners) we have to look at what we want to be liberated from and looking at karma, is well….  looking at karma.

Karma is karma and we do not need to look at the pleasurable karma in our lives as because it wasn't resisted, it's disappeared already.  The stuff that sticks is the stuff that we have not resolved and we didn't resolve it because it more than likely, contained pain.  What we resist we get attached to. Stuck. Unable to move. Operating mechanically and reactively from conditioned minds.

What we  are attached to, we will, sooner or later, Zen practice or no Zen practice, be revisiting to resolve it. Zen offers a tremendous challenge that is certainly not for those who seek bliss or easy living, although bliss and easy living can exist, enhanced in a Zen life. Zen doesn't judge or favour anything.

In Zen, Living here and now with mindfulness, we will bring up much karma to be resolved, in the here and now. But we will not be creating more karma in such mindfulness. But we may have many lifetimes of karma to resolve. But if we could just really get it, that all the past, a few moments ago and past lives, are gone. They  are an illusion. Then, if we can really see this, beyond reason, we can transcend karma.  Unreasonable, I know.

The Body as a Device.

The vehicle of experience, yet I can get that I am more than this. But what am I without the body? Simply, I-am. I can experience this providing I do not strive to do so, for to strive to do so takes me out of reality. What reality? The only reality there is. Here and now - is that not all there can ever be? And now the paradox...

Striving takes me into the mind that draws me into the future... out of the here and now, the only reality.

Just let the experiences of the body be right now. Just observe them and see if you can detect where your Self is?  In your head, in your arm, your foot.. anywhere?  Can you see that you are no-thing -  the awareness that is observing? Is it too uncomfortable and does the mind want to get back to something that is more reasonable?

The Dream. The Illusion of Time.

I am seeing that the universe doesn't rationalise in terms of right or wrong, but in terms of manifest and un-manifest.  Storm are destructive, but nature doesn't see this as wrong, but as a storm. Is that not the way it is in life?  For if we are not life, what else are we?

To look at life is to look at all of life. If we begin to pick and choose what we want to experience surely we will not be living wholly. Not that we have any choice other than to choose the manifest, as there is only now. How can we master it, if we don't choose to accept and experience it?  

So I would need to take care in the habit of thinking positively about the future, for every manifestation manifests wholly with both opposites of good and bad, or it would not be whole.

However, this is the illusion, for the future is now unfolding in every disappearing moment, which immediately becomes the past..That is the dream.  That is the illusion of time.

Knowing, Not Knowing

In zazen today.... We can know the unknowable through awareness, experientially. It is far from making sense because it is far from reasonable. Only the mind is reasonable. The Self simply is.

Stream of Conscious or Just Plain Mind Antics...

At touch of stream of consciousness here.. Or maybe better to call it the narratives of the mind…

I am aware of the need to focus on the here and now, to be aware of when my mind gets totally absorbed in the daily tasks that I perform. Totally engrossed in the material world and leaving behind the spiritual awareness that I have developed in zazen.  I am thinking right now of zazen.  But is that the zazen what was, and not zazen of the here and now? The mind being aware of itself?  What tricks!

Of the mindfulness that I attain in zazen...  I can recognize that I am closer to centred-ness in zazen than I am when the world sucks my attention into itself. Or perhaps truer to say that the world doesn't do anything as it is after all... me!

It's just that when I am sucked into the world, I am a space filled with the physical story of my existence and not giving my attention to...  I - the being who is experiencing experience.

However, right now I am aware that there is a fight already beginning within me. A "reasonable" fight where a part of the mind is saying, "I have done my zazen already, therefore it is important that I get on with life and write this." 

What a crazy statement! Obviously comes from my mind as if zazen isn't part of my [other] life. So how do I stop this?  I don't…   It is all me.

For to resist is to desire that I change whatever is so in my existence of any given moment.  To try and change is a form of desire to rid myself of desire in the secular world. 

Desire [no matter what it is for], is the source of all suffering. So said the Buddha. And I am seeing proof after proof of the truth of it.  But enough of so many inadequate words.  This is Zen.

How Can This Date "Thing" Get To Be So Real?

Well, here I am at the 2nd Day of December. That is just a name. Just a label. Is just a story about December. A story I hold in my mind. A unique story, but a story that I share with the rest of humanity - well the majority of humanity that shares the concept of a calendar that is believed to be real. .  My narrative that I have learned. That is nothing new or mysterious unless I move into the question about it. What is it really? 

Numbers on a piece of paper on a wall. But where else is the actual reality of the calendar.  I can look outside and see frost on the grass and that tells me it is December?  No… Naturally speaking that tells me it is cold outside.  So I say this is the date.. What is?  It is not anywhere to be found except for in my concepts.  In my mind.  A idea created to help us know… what?  The date of course! And everybody else who knows about dates will agree with me that it is the 2nd Day of December right now.  But we've invented it! A concept. An idea... and we call it reality.  It doesn't exist anywhere else outside of the mind.  How could this date thing get to be so real?

In zazen, if I completely drop the idea of "date" existence continues.  If I could possibly throw it right out of my mind and forget that it ever exists, there are some people who would say that whether I know it or not, the days come and go, and that means that the days have dates and they come and go.  But to me they have been forgotten.  We need to forget our self, so that we can remember who we really are.. How much more "Zen" can one get?