you must be most attentive

2012-tawny-eagle-0

right where you stand

 
The essential thing in studying the Way is to make the roots deep and the stem strong. Be aware of where you really are twenty-four hours a day. You must be most attentive. When nothing at all gets on your mind, it all merges harmoniously, without boundaries — the whole thing is empty and still, and there is no more doubt or hesitation in anything you do. This is called the fundamental matter appearing ready-made.

As soon as you give rise to the slightest bit of dualistic perception or arbitrary understanding and you want to take charge of this fundamental matter and act the master, then you immediately fall into the realm of the clusters of form, sensation, conception, value synthesis, and consciousness. You are entrapped by seeing, hearing, feeling, and knowing, by gain and loss and right and wrong. You are half drunk and half sober and unable to clean all this up.

Frankly speaking, you simply must manage to keep concentrating even in the midst of clamor and tumult, acting as though there were not a single thing happening, penetrating all the way through from the heights to the depths. You must become perfectly complete, without any shapes or forms at all, without wasting effort, yet not inhibited from acting. Whether you speak or stay silent, whether you get up or lie down, it is never anyone else.

If you become aware of getting at all stuck or blocked, this is all false thought at work. Make yourself completely untrammeled, like empty space, like a clear mirror on its stand, like the rising sun lighting up the sky. Moving or still, going or coming, it doesn’t come from the outside. Let go and make yourself independent and free, not being bound by things and not seeking to escape from things. From beginning to end, fuse everything into one whole. Where has there ever been any separate worldly phenomenon apart from the buddhadharma, or any separate buddhadharma apart from worldly phenomena?
 

Yuanwu

zen letters

 

brighten your virtue

school of rock and light and air

 

You progress like the rising sun.

The brighter your virtue,

the higher you rise.

 

This hexagram announces a time of significant and easy progress. Your influence and understanding grow by leaps and bounds as long as you maintain your alliance with the Sage, for it is from that alliance that the current progress springs. The only limit to growth now is your devotion to higher things: if this is true and complete and steady, there will be great gains now.

The image of the hexagram is that of the sun rising over the earth. To our view, the further it moves away from darkness, the higher the sun rises. The same is true of us: the extent to which we progress is determined by how far we distance ourselves from inferior influences.

It is important, when success comes, not to fall into the traps of the ego: taking credit for gains, resting on laurels, indulging in desires, or plotting towards ambitions. The superior person instead uses times of progress to brighten his virtue, recognizing that it was his commitment to proper principles that brought success in the first place.

Continue to purify your thought, attitudes, and conduct now. The greatest power in this beneficial time accrues to those who serve the Higher Power in every moment.
 

The I Ching, or Book of Changes

Hexagram 35, Chin / Progress

 

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a clear and open state of freedom

hexagram 23 po ☯️ splitting apart

 

Cogitation,

making judgements,

following patterns, firing arrows,

engaging in endless ideation and emotional

behavior — all these are to be abandoned

and transcended on the

Way.

 

Be still.

Do non doing.

A clear and open

state of freedom

will appear.

 

Wei wu Wei Ching, Chapter 23

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as soft and yielding as water

like streams flowing into the sea

 

Nothing

under heaven is as

soft and yielding as water.

Yet for attacking the hard and

strong, nothing can

compare with

it.

 

The weak

overcomes the strong.

The soft overcomes the hard.

Everyone knows this, but none

have the ability to

practice it.

 

Therefore

the sage says: one who

accepts the dung of the nation

becomes the master of soil and sustenance.

One who deals with the evils of the

nation becomes king under

heaven.

 

True words seem paradoxical.

 

The Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu

Chapter 78

 

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