Today I wanted us to all gain clarity around this essential truth. Have you ever felt rested, calm and full of love and taken a comment from someone with humour? Have you ever felt frustrated, anxious and exhausted and taken a similar comment as an absolute insult?
The world is an inside-out phenomenon. So many ancient lineages, philosophies, and modern teachers explain this in so many different ways. But it’s the same truth across them all, that we generate the world we experience with our thinking, and our thinking is not the truth, as it changes all the time.
How we feel about something an hour after it happens, a week after, a month after and a year after is completely different. It’s always changing. So our ‘being disturbed’ by the world is dependant on so many things, that keep morphing and shifting.
When we can see that we continually change our judgements about absolutely everything, then we can begin to see how fluid they are, and we can understand clinging to them is not helping us, but in fact, disturbing us. It isn’t the events themselves but how we are perceiving them.
“Don’t want anything, then you get everything” are the words of Korean Zen monk Seung Sahn, whose writing and teachings I like immensely.
He also said “Even if you understand all the Buddha’s speech, if you cannot demonstrate this understanding when called upon, it is worth nothing. Dry cognition cannot help your life. Even if you read all the eighty-four thousand sutras and attend dharma talks regularly, it will not help you as much as experiencing one moment of clear mind. At the moment of your death, what will your intellectual understanding do for you? In the future, you will eventually lose this body: at that time, how will your academic knowledge help you get a new one? All of our understanding is only somebody else’s idea. No matter how great this understanding is, if it hasn’t been digested and become yours through the practice of meditation, it cannot help you.”.
Which I particularly like, as it’s best we don’t get too dogmatic and ‘knowing all’ about all of this. There is a big difference between ‘knowing all’ and ‘all knowing’ and there can be far too much intellectual pursuit around spirituality and not enough embodying. Seung Sahn calls it ‘don’t know mind’; where no opinions, no judgements being held onto, and we get very comfortable in the present moment, without labelling anything.
How could ‘don’t know’ mind serve you today?
Sent with love,
Jac x
EXTRA NOTES
Also for the lovelies online for the Recharge Session yesterday, the Seung Sahn books I recommended were ‘Dropping Ashes on the Buddha’ and ‘Wanting Enlightenment is A Big Mistake’
MELBOURNE MEDITATION COURSE AND SESSIONS
If you’re in Melbourne and wish to either learn Vedic meditation with me as a new student or attend as a Bridging student and access our entire Integrated Meditation program please see more information HERE! Free Introductory Talk and Group Meditation and Knowledge Meeting are happening next Monday evening also in Melbourne, love to see you.