Jan Sendzimir JDPSN: Dharma Letter
Recently I found an old book of fiction that surprised me in how it anticipated how we live today. It described a world dominated by one idea: who you are is defined by how others see you. People spent all their time ranking themselves in comparison to others in how they look and what they do. This felt like an uncannily accurate forecast of how social media has come to transform our world, and it resonated with our concern for teenagers who sink into depression because they compare themselves to artificially perfect images of others.
Comparing and competing with each other has always been a part of life. Children love to run, but sharing that thrill adds extra spice as we race and hide from each other. Sharing helped us learn more and more about each other and ourselves. But look what trouble arose when we took the race too seriously. We lost the sense of play by holding on to some idea of ourselves or our friends. All the competition and noisy bustle of life was never the problem …..up to the moment when we fixed and froze the world around an idea (good/bad, win/lose).
This lesson of letting go of ideas and simply watching with an open mind never stops arising in our lives. Our Zen practice allows us to see clearly how we live and swim in that lesson every moment of every day. But even after years of practice some will give up practicing because “I am not getting anything out of it.” How does this happen? Perhaps it only felt like a useless burden because their “practice” was never aimed right. One feels like one is always trudging up a hill if one always is judging “success” by what feelings arise: elation when you feel calm and serene, depression when one is bored or uncomfortable.
Our practice moves us beyond measure when the mind comes to rest and stops, rooted in the question: “What am I?” Take a look at what appears then. The whole symphony of human experiences (feelings, emotions, sensations, thoughts) arise and then disappear naturally. There is nothing to fix, nothing to clean up. But there is something more, much more. Something so vast that no ideas or words can catch or even glimpse it.
How can one approach something beyond words or ideas? Imagine you awoke to realize that all your ideas surround you like a tent, keeping you from the fresh air, the stars and the moon outside. Seeing this already requires some perseverance and effort. It’s a very important step, and many people are so distracted they never reach it. But if you reach there, then how do you follow through? How do you step out of the tent into the moonlight? If you let this question reach all the way down to your bones you will recognize that every step carries you out into the fresh air under the moon.