I am posting
this beautiful piece from the Moon Mountain Sangha Newsletter on how we see
reality by Spiritual Director Dorothy Hunt.
It is something I have been contemplating lately…
Moon Mountain Sangha Newsletter
Volume 71, October 2013
Using the mind to look for reality is delusion.
Not using the mind to look for reality is Awareness.
--Bodhidharma
from The Zen Teachings of
Bodhidharma, transl. Red Pine
"The mind of separation imagines it sees reality when, in fact, it is only
seeing through its own conditioned filters, the “virtual” reality its mental
constructs, interpretations and judgments create. Look at anything in the
room you are sitting in right now. Look at it using your mind. It
will tell you the name, color, shape, whether it is pleasing or not pleasing to
your conditioning, whether the moment seems boring or interesting. The
mind will deliver its opinions, and probably quickly move attention on to other
thoughts that tell you how you really should clean your desk, or answer another
e-mail, or have a cup of coffee.
Now look at the same thing “not” using the mind. What is the
experience? For one thing, when the mind stops moving, stops telling
itself what it sees, stops reacting--even for a moment--we become deeply
present. We see from a different dimension. When we are simply aware, it
does not mean we lose our ability to remember names, shapes, and colors.
It means that we are seeing from the dimension of our being that is undivided,
that does not place a “self” between the seeing and the seen. We become aware
that the name is not the thing, and neither are our beliefs about it. The
moment becomes more vivid and “alive,” more mysterious, and our experience more
intimate. Awareness itself is free of self and free of division. It does
not “think,” yet is the light that illumines thought.
Look at the reality of “you,” who you take yourself to be. Using
conditioned mind to look, you will find many ideas and images of a self, a self
you like or do not like, a self that is always the focus and center of your
attention. There are many things about this self and the world it sees that
your mind judges, resists, denies or attaches to. Awareness, our own
awake essence, sheds light on conditioned consciousness, sees it for what it
is, but it sees without judgment, without separation, and without a need to
escape a single moment or a single experience. The reality it sees is
simply an expression of its infinite ways of Being. There is a seeing
that is timeless and indefinable. And in this clear seeing, there is
freedom to respond to any moment from Openness.
Conditioned consciousness is not our enemy. It just does not happen
to define us. Conditioned mind has been programmed to think, feel, and behave
in particular ways, some of which have been very useful in surviving and
thriving, some of which bring great suffering. Conditioned mind cannot be
avoided, as we are born conditioned humans in a conditioned world. However, conditioned
mind cannot free itself from itself.
At some point, if we are looking for reality, for the freedom of our true
nature, the egoic mind that thinks “it” will be the liberator, has to realize
the futility of its own struggle. We have to open to a power, a seeing,
an awakeness, a compassion, a love, a grace beyond what the mind can produce or
even fathom. Whether we call this the grace of Truth, Awareness, or the
Divine, it seems to appear when we have surrendered our demands on reality, our
intellect’s insistence on its views, and have opened to the Unknown. In those
moments, we may discover that we are the abiding reality we have sought, and
that our mind is simply a phenomenon."
© Dorothy Hunt, 2013
Photo:
Raindrops on screen,
digitally colored