To Shine One Corner of the World
A clinical
psychiatrist questioned
Suzuki Roshi about
consciousness.
“I don’t know
anything about consciousness,”
Suzuki said. “I just try to teach
my students how to hear
the birds sing.”
Posts Tagged → beauty
this switching trick
You fear losing a certain
eminent position. You hope to gain something
from that, but it comes from elsewhere. Existence does this
switching trick, giving you hope from one source,
then satisfaction from another.
It keeps you bewildered
and wondering, and lets your trust
in the unseen grow.
be like a beautifully laid-out park
you are ladybirds and the smell of a garden
You should expect grace,
that which makes life more than
manageable, but you look elsewhere,
wanting some delight other
than that.
Your conscious being,
with what you’ve been given,
should be like a beautifully laid-out park
with wildflowers and cultivated wonders,
a swift stream with places to sit
and rest beside it.
When a grieving person
sees you, he or see should recognize a
refuge, refreshment, a generous house where
one need not bring bread and cheese.
There will be plenty.
look to what is pure
fertilizing my bamboo grove with horse manure
Give up religiosity
and knowledge, and the people
will benefit a hundredfold. Discard morality
and righteousness, and the people will return
to natural love. Abandon shrewdness
and profiteering, and there
won’t be any robbers
or thieves.
These are external
matters, however. What is most
important is what happens within:
look to what is pure; hold to what
is simple; let go of self-interest;
temper your desires.
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watch keenly all aspects of life
Sattva, the activity that always results in good, is the controlled activity, when we have a rein over it. This is the most difficult to attain, and needs the work and effort of a whole lifetime. All the saints and sages have had to journey through these grades and learn from experience, and they understand how difficult it is to attain control over our activity in life.
There are two ways in which we may attain control over our activity. The first is confidence in the power of our own will; to know that if we have failed today, tomorrow we will not do so. The second is to have our eyes wide open, and to watch keenly our activity in all aspects of life. It is in the dark that we fall, but in the light we can see where we are going.