..."This is the real meaning of the practice of zazen, or sitting Zen: to sit in the center. As you begin sitting meditation the first thing to do is to find your center, and become comfortable with it, so that you are neither leaning forward nor sitting back. When one’s body is balanced in this way the forces of high and low, the heart and breath, and mind and feeling merge at the center. To sit in zazen in order to perfect a technique for attaining enlightenment, however, is fundamentally a mistaken approach. Sit just to sit. And why not sit? You have to sit sometime,and so you may as well really sit, and be altogether here. Otherwise the mind wanders away from the matter at hand, and away from the present. Even to think through the implications of the present is to avoid the present moment completely. When you are meditating, it is perfectly fine to be aware of anything that’s around: things on the floor, the smell of the atmosphere, the little noises going on. Be there! But when you hear a dog bark, and that starts off a train of thought about dogs in general, about your dog, or somebody else’s dog, then you have wandered away from being here. Of course you finally will come to the point where you realize there is no way of wandering away from being here, because there is nowhere else to be. Even if you think about somewhere else, past or future, this is all happening now. Through this you will also come to understand how to be a scholar and a historian, if you wish to, and still live in the present. That was how D.T. Suzuki was able to be scholarly and intellectual, and yet at the same time not to depart at all from the spirit of Zen, which is beyond the intellect. You can intellectualize in a Zen way, just as you can sweep floors in a Zen way, but of course the key to the matter is centering — being really here. Because this is the point of origin of the world, and it is at the same time the destination of the world." ~ Alan Watts... Art by: Goro Fujita gorosart.deviantart/
Posted on: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 21:34:08 +0000
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