The Buddha said, “desire is the at the root of all suffering”.  But then, it is said in Zen, that life is like a classroom where suffering aids our spiritual growth and development.

So what I learn from this is that I am here to experience whatever there is to experience and living in a physical world, I have physical needs and it is those needs that create my desires, which in turn creates an element of suffering through my possessions.

Wherever I am situated on the path to enlightenment, I feel that is would be a very unbalanced view to discard all I have achieved and acquired in this life. The balance would be correct when I can still achieve things in the material world, but doing so mindfully and without desire - without attachment and hence lower suffering - which gets my vote every time!

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Technorati Tags: achievement, attachment, balance

When I consider what the Zen masters call “being in bondage” or “attachment”, I can see how I am holding to past events of guilt and blame as if they are reality, yet what is done is done. To blame self or other feels like a waste of consciousness. Yet, how can I waste consciousness when it is something that cannot be measured? So I begin to see that the whole of my perception is illusory! It is a dream. The moment of now cannot really be perceived, only experienced, because the instant it is perceived it is gone! The moment of now is so subtly powerful, and it is pure and can only be experienced and not analyzed.  The dictionary defines perceive as,  “to become aware of by one of the senses”. It seems that the experience of the moment of now is just that, once it is made sense of, it is no longer now.

In zazen, I often get into that space of just being, not thinking, not understanding or analyzing; just watching as my mind continues to do it judgements of self and others that is no more, and then by a state of forgiveness, I feel detachment. This forgiveness is not something I do, or ought to do. It’s just like these guilt and blame-ridden experiences that sometimes I haven’t thought of for decades just vanish. Nothing matters any more.

Technorati Tags: attachment, blame, guilt, zazen, zen