Zen Farmer

You don’t need to experience a total, complete awakening to feel better about your life. It is helpful to believe that you have the potential to experience a total complete, awakening. It is also helpful not to concern yourself with experiencing a total, complete awakening. If you believe that a total, complete awakening is possible, then the flip side to that belief is that you are currently, at least partially, asleep.

If you believe that you are asleep in some way, then you can give yourself a break. Look and see how cute you are when you are sleeping.  You can treat yourself with kindness and compassion, like you would a small child, and guide yourself lovingly through your slumbering life.

You can also recognize that your friends and family are also asleep. What they think and believe is really important, is not as important as they think and believe, because they are sleeping. You should see how cute they all are in their sleep and treat them with kindness and compassion too.

Once you see that you and everybody else is asleep and cute and you are filled with love and compassion for everybody, you will probably wake up. Then you will see that you are not just cute, but absolutely gorgeous.

Wouldn’t it be great you could just read something and suddenly feel better? Wouldn’t it be even better if you could show those words to a friend and they would feel better too? Wouldn’t it be amazing if everybody who saw those words suddenly felt great and were able to sustain that great feeling? That would be great. That is the quick fix.

Although there is a quick fix, it takes a long time to actualize.  The first rule in fixing is recognizing that something is broken.  If something is broken then fix it. The quick fix that we all want is sitting there right beyond our thoughts.  Words, unfortunately, are thoughts, so they don’t impart the quick fix.  Reason will not figure out the quick fix. If reason led to understanding, then a sentence from the Buddha would wake us all up.

The quick fix is a leap of faith followed by focused practice.  The leap of faith is believing that life is wonderful even though it doesn’t feel that way, believing that awakening is possible. The focused practice is unwavering attention to the present. To get beyond thoughts you have to go through thoughts. After months or years of practice, the quick fix may just occur to you. Fortunately, with faith and practice, you will feel much better, long before the quick fix.

The difference between looking and seeing is slight and large, sight and urge. When you look you see. You cannot see without looking and you cannot look without seeing. That changes when you add an object.  If you are looking for something, you can look for your whole life without seeing it.  If you are looking for nothing, you see everything.

What is the point of all this looking and seeing? What are you looking for? What are you seeing? What are you? What is looking? What is seeing? Is it your eyes that are seeing and your brain that is looking? Is it your eyes that are looking and your brain that is seeing?

These are all ridiculous questions, because we all know what looking and seeing are. We all know what we are. Yet we don’t know. We think we know. To see what we know and don’t know, we must look at ourselves. When we look at ourselves, it is incredible what we see.

If you look for your true nature, what you see is your true nature. Look and see.

Step One: Stop thinking

Step Two: Experience your true nature

Note: Step one is hard.

Wanting to escape from this reality is what keeps us trapped in it. By imagining enlightenment, the reality that exists beyond our current reality, we build a wall between us and reality. If our experience is unsatisfying, then our only option is to experience dissatisfaction.  That is our reality.  That dissatisfaction is a deep reality. There is a lot we can experience there.

That doesn’t mean that we wallow there.  When we are there, we feel it.  We want to escape and we act.  In our action, we find some satisfaction.  We have a new reality. We have escaped. But we are still trapped in our reality.  We know that soon after experiencing satisfaction the dissatisfaction will return.  We want to escape that cycle. We want to escape our desire to escape. To do that, we have to cut off our desire.  That means we have to accept our current reality. To escape, we have to accept that we cannot escape.

In Zen meditation, we sit and stare at walls. We pay attention to our thoughts.  We experience satisfaction and dissatisfaction.  We breathe. That is our reality. All this thinking about escape is just thinking. It gets in the way of our experience of enlightenment. 

Of course not.  What you feel is much closer to what you think.  What you are, you can only know when your thinking stops. You are what you think in the same way that you are the bird singing in the tree.  Your thoughts are a part of your observable universe.

It is amazing to me that we are this fantastic experience, which we can perceive with focused attention, yet we are absolutely blind to it most of the time. If you know that that experience is available to you, and you wonder why you can’t feel it, then set yourself pointedly on the path to feel it, you will feel it. That is what you are.

What’s the big deal about waking up? We do it every day. Is this not miracle enough?  Each night we go to sleep and, if things are going generally well for us, we look forward to that moment. We surrender ourselves to our unconscious world. We dream. Then, if we are still alive, we wake up.

If we are thinking about awakening to a greater consciousness, then going to sleep is a far better analogy for awakening than waking up is. When we wake up in the morning, we begin to resist all over again. We reacquaint ourselves with the tasks and chores of the day. We feel the burdens of our responsibilities. We feel the weight of time upon us all over again. This is reestablishing our delusions, not really awakening.

Going to sleep however, that is really awakening.  We forget our burdens, we comfort ourselves, we cuddle up with the people we love, and we trust in the universe to take care of us while we go unconscious. Complete and total surrender.

So if we really want to awaken, we must be aware when we go to sleep, aware when we wake up, aware when we are awake, and aware when we are dreaming. These are important times for us. 

Life is a dream just as dreams are life.  In our dreams, thoughts and feelings drift through our minds and we create context, stories, to go with the feelings.  In our sleeping minds there is no limit to our ability to create contexts.  That is why we can fly and visit with dead relatives without it seeming strange.

We do the same in our waking lives, only the stories we tell ourselves have strict limits. We still have various thoughts and feelings running through our minds, and we tell ourselves stories to explain those notions. When we are anxious, we tell ourselves scary stories. When we are happy, we tell ourselves soothing stories. We like to imagine that our life situation drives our stories, but we may suspect that it is the other way around. When we experience how this works, we awaken.

Blogging has demonstrated to me an analogy for how I imagine reality.  I experience reality everyday and sometimes find it boring.  Television and movies can be exciting and I imagine that they are more real than reality.  When I see a local landmark in a movie, I am more excited than when I see that landmark in real life. The movie is another layer of imagined reality.

The same seems to be true with blogging. I saw something interesting the other day and thought that I would like to post that.  This imagined reality that I visit in tumblr has seeped into my regular reality. It is amazing to me how easily this occurs.

We tend to experience reality through the filter of our thoughts.  As soon as we see something, we generate an opinion about that.  That opinion removes us from the experience of that object. If we are able to suspend our opinion we can have a direct experience of the object, removing ourselves from the picture.

The way I imposed the blogging world onto my experience is how I function.  I impose my expectation on my experience and by so doing I make the world into what I perceive.  I don’t use my imagination to make mountains pop out of the sea, but I see mountains and the sea, and I use my imagination to make myself something separate from them.  Imagine that.

What are you other than your behavior? If you want to change yourself, you can only change your behavior.  You cannot change your thoughts.  They just come.  If you think that your thoughts are causing you problems, then change your behavior in relating to your thoughts.  Watch your thoughts.  Pay attention to your thoughts.  If you pay attention to your thoughts, they will change.

The major behavior you can use to help you watch your thoughts is to meditate.  In meditation, you are not doing anything but watching your thoughts.  You are not running, not swimming, not listening to music, not texting, tweeting, or tumbling, just sitting. Then, you can see your thoughts.  As you watch your thoughts, don’t judge them, just watch them.  They will start to behave.  That’s why people tell children, “God is watching you”, so they behave.

You can change your behaviors by watching them too, just like you watch your thoughts. Pay attention to what you do. Pay attention to your interactions with people. Pay attention to  what your say. Pay attention to what you post. Don’t judge what you do, just pay attention. If your thoughts are nasty and your behavior is nice, everybody will notice how nice you are. If you are having trouble acting nice, again, just sit. Good things will come.

If you practice paying attention to your thoughts when you are meditating and paying attention to your behavior when you are not,  eventually the two states will merge. You will no longer worry about changing yourself.  You will just float.