Sunday, March 27, 2011

Day #84

Today’s favourite poses: Cat, Dog, Cobra, Tiger, Spider?

Minutes with a relatively quiet mind: Hours and Hours

Today’s interesting/thought provoking reading: (Taken from At Home in the Muddy Waters by Ezra Bayda)

POTATO SALAD

Everything we observe is in some way related to something else, which in turn is related to something else again. In other words, each element of our life is part of a system, and each system is a part of another system. No single theory can ever really explain or even describe the complexity of this interrelatedness, nor can it take into account the subjective filter of the person explaining.. yet we constantly try to figure out our world by categorizing, simplifying, and generalizing.

Furthermore, we think we can experience this world only through our perceptions. But as filtered pictures of a perceived reality, our perceptions are never accurate. We think we see reality, we think we sometimes even know reality, but what we see is our own bubble of perceptions, filtered through the mental constructs of time, space, and causality, as well as our associations, desires, language, and conditioning. We don’ see things as they are, we see them as we are.

On the day-to-day level, when what we perceive fails to match our ideas of how things should be, we experience emotional and physical distress. When what we experience is contrary to what we want – and what we want almost always involves being free from discomfort and pain – we experience suffering.

Suppose for example, that I expect my mate to protect me. What happens when my mate doesn’t protect me? In fact, what happens when my mate not only doesn’t protect me, but criticizes me instead? Most likely, I’ll experience some form of distress – an emotional and bodily reaction that won’t feel good. Reactions like this are frequently based on unfulfilled expectations, rooted in clouded perceptions and simplistic notions of others, ourselves, and human relationships.

Even though we know we’re living in a complex world of interconnections, we tend to focus on just one element of any given situation. Why is this happening to me? Who can I blame? How can I fix this? With a subtle arrogance, we reduce the web of interrelationships to a simplified version of an answer we can never really know. We could just as arbitrarily attribute our distress to the potato salad we ate for lunch.


When life isn’t going as we wish, practice is neither to seek explanations nor to assign blame. We can practice simply being with the “what” on as many levels as we can, rather than looking for the “why”. Once again we ask the koan, “What is this?” the answer to this question is always our experience itself. This standing lies: not in the mental world of “why”, not in intellectual description, but in experiencing directly the ambiguous perceptual complexity of the present moment.

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