I’ve had a nicely mixed day. In touch with people I respect and have great cognate with as well as new found friends who I’m getting to know and some prickly acquaintances I’ve known for a bit and never quite know what to make of; yet, I try to grow the connection and hope for the best in terms of me deepening my acceptance of people just as they are, not how I would think they would be better. Yes, that does come up a dismaying number times. Yet, that is really the point of all this Buddhism. First to learn to accept oneself. First to be compassionate to oneself. First to not judge oneself, And so forth; simply because the basic Buddhist teachings tell us when we know our selves we also know all others, because we are all the same. No exceptions! We may act and look and think differently, but we are, at our core, all the same. Motivated by exactly the same things and moved by exactly the same things. The minutia and details of our individual Greed, Hate and Delusion may vary, but those are the things that rule us all until we begin the process of allowing those Three Fires to be converted to Love, Compassion and Wisdom. Yes we allow. We don’t do it.

We participate in it as being the natural process of all existence. We are not God and there is no particle of us or any other thing or being that is not of God. I know the use of a “theistic” term gets some “Buddhists” all het up, but that is only being caught up in words.

Anyhoo. I had a reasonable day, and some lovely conversations and got a fair amount of things done or set in motion that were good to do. So, I plan to get off my high horse and have a light dinner,  a few more phone calls, a few pages of “The Honourable Schoolboy” by Le Carre and then, with any luck, some sleep, or at least rest. Part of my koan and result of my history is that I have a sort of hyper-alertness usually has me sleeping about four hours a night, which has been fine for many years but I’ve found a way to sleep 5-6  hours a night, not straight through but aggregate, and it has made a bit of a difference in my general outlook. Whooda Thunk?

I sit. I type, I write. I make

No sense, although some

Times I do, anyway, but

When I do I’m the only one

Who knows, sometimes; and

Then I try to explain while

The whole world has moved

On, and gone about the Busy-

Ness of life. Yep. Of Life. So

I go and sit with myself and

See I’m not by Myself. Rest.

A nice quiet Sunday. A good friend and Zen monk who live in nearby St. Maries ID came for a visit and we had lunch and chatted. We’ve been very close friends for almost ten years, he moved to the area about six months after we did. I had known him by reputation for many years since he was head of Berkeley temple just before I began attending there. He is a quiet and serious person with a deep and incisive sense of humor that just sparkles, he also contains that depth and surety in the training that allows for ready and true refuge for those of us who seek it. A true Master of Zen.

When I first was attracted to Buddhism and started reading about it I was always taken by those books by people who hobnobbed with Zen Masters; picked them up at airports and such and had all sorts of marvelous encounters with them, That’s what I wanted to do, hang out with Zen Masters. Well sadly, in the days when I was reading those books, I was way too distracted by a variety of lifestyle choices that kept me truly removed from serious spiritual seeking or training and probably not the sort of person a Zen Master, or too many other people wanted to hang out with, but I did enjoy reading about that sort of thing, it was almost like doing it, or so I thought.

At some point I dropped a lot of those choices I had made and got clean and sober and was able to take up more serious pursuits like Zen training as a layperson. After training for some time we had a yard sale at the temple I was attending at the time and I realized I could sell all those Zen books because I was doing it.I no longer needed to read about other people doing it.

I had made it real for myself and it was nothing like I had read about or imagined. It was, and has been, very difficult and as it gets more subtle it also gets more gritty and grainy and sometimes, very unsettling. After I got sober and started staying that way and meditating and training with a real practice I began to feel better and that was the good news. The bad news was that I began to feel everything better, including the pain and discomfort of daily life that I had become adept at covering up through drugs and alcohol and, in this later stage, covering up with unawareness and distraction.

A great revelation did indeed occur for me, seeing life clearly can be painful, and very joyful, and exhilarating. Sometimes in rapid succession and in no particular order. Heady stuff indeed.

Today that process continues and I am appreciative of two Zen “motto’s” that I find helpful.

1.)  Fall down seven, get up eight.

2.)  Hope for the best.  Expect nothing.  Do the Possible.

and here’s one of my own:

Mid-stream is a silly place to change horses.