Nowhere is there anything hidden

 

From the hut window, I spotted a Cooper's hawk diving into the alley. It reappeared, settling on a power line, holding a stunned garter snake. A scrub jay flew over, parked within a couple of feet of the hawk, and clearly was talking to it, bobbing obsequiously, as much as to say, "you gonna eat all of that?" The hawk, seemingly a bit miffed, lifted its wings and made off to a distant walnut tree to eat in peace.

I gave the scene a little gassho.

What was that?

Sometimes we are the hawk; sometimes we are the scrub jay, and sometimes we are the snake.  Sometimes we are the suddenly snakeless grass. 

There is much to bow to.

When we gassho, one hand is us and the other is ... the other person, the thought we just had, that fleeting feeling, that old familiar pain, the mountain, the river, the hawk, the snake, the jay, the grass, leafless walnut, strumming wire between power poles, wind, hair falling in front of our eyes, a sudden truth revealed, a vulnerability, an unexpected strength, the altar, the universe. One with, one with, one, one, all, all, unspeakable, hence gestured, a candle flame at the ends of our arms, supporting, accepting, being supported and accepted, vanishing into and becoming all past, present and future support and acceptance. 

Nowhere is there anything hidden from the gassho.

-- shonin

Right singularity

I've been covering, in my idiosyncratic way, the eight points of the eightfold path promulgated by Gotama when he snapped out of his long bout of meditation, determined to save the world. We've arrived at the last one, and it's a doozy.

Meditation is said, when undertaken correctly (whatever that might be), to get you the whole enchilada.

Well, it does. But it's generally offered embedded in pietistic hooraw: that "various levels or modes" thing can easily, and I suspect very often, be the money clause: "This stuff takes years, kid. Support me the whole time and I might get you there."   

I like and recommend meditation's ability to show, experimentally, such reality as we're equipped (as brains with sampling systems -- eyes, ears, etc.) to appreciate. And it takes some appreciation of what's what for there to be some justification for the other seven aspects of the path.

But it would be a mistake to go sit with the idea of "attaining" some kind of holiness. Attempting to become someone special (which is patently impossible) is exactly what Gotama would have you not do -- it would be the very illusion he returned to his friends to warn against.

So let's do a simple intellectual exercise. 'K?

You can imagine animals and plants arising from the biosphere, not as anything separate from the biosphere, the planet, the galaxy, the universe, but as aspects of all of the above -- it's all one thing, taking a variety of shapes, like thoughts in a mind. Yes?

But, wait -- are you an observer, outside of this image, or are you in it? The center of the universe, or an aspect of the universal?

I think we have to understand ourselves as, in our individuality, provisional beings at best, an aspect of the universal, to go on from here to the twelve principles that have been adumbrated as those of Permaculture. As foraging and farming and trading beings (which we have to be to live) we intervene with the plants and animals around us for our own benefit. How we do so may matter: what if they are our equals? What if it's important to show some respect? Hmm?

We know we have been destructive. How do we become less destructive, or are there even ways in which we can be constructive? If we are going to undertake to change the world for the "better," it's awfully important that the results be, umm, for the better.

'Cuz if we don't have good evidence for what we're doing, better we shoulda stayed on that couch, watching the commercials.

The field of boundless emptiness is what exists from the very begin­ning. You must purify, cure, grind down, or brush away all the ten­dencies you have fabricated into apparent habits. Then you can reside in the clear circle of brightness.

  -- Hongzhi, tr. Leighton

(To be continued)