Beyond the Opposites

Once upon a time an elder monk and a young novice monk were traveling together. They came to the bank of a river and found the bridge was damaged. They had to wade across the river. There was a pretty lady who was stuck at the damaged bridge and couldn’t cross the river. The senior monk offered to carry her across the river on his back to which the lady accepted.

The young monk was shocked by the move of the elder monk and was thinking “How can the elder brother carry a lady when we are supposed to avoid all intimacy with females?” But he kept quiet. The senior monk carried the lady across the river and the novice monk followed unhappily. When they crossed the river, the senior monk let the lady down and they parted ways with her.

All along the way for several miles, the young monk was very unhappy with the act of the elder monk. He was making up all kinds of accusations about the elder monk in his head. This got him madder and madder. But he still kept quiet. And the elder monk had no inclination to explain his situation. Finally, at a rest point many hours later, the young monk could not stand it any further, he burst out angrily at the senior monk. “How can you claim yourself a devout monk, when you seize the first opportunity to touch a female, especially when she is very pretty?” All your teachings to me make you a big hypocrite. The elder monk looked surprised and said, “I had put down the lady at the river bank many hours ago, how come you are still carrying her along?”

LESSON: This very old Chinese Zen story reflects the thinking of many people today.

We encounter many unpleasant things in our life, they irritate us and they make us angry. But like the young novice monk, we are not willing to let them go away. There is no point in remaining hurt by the unpleasant event after it is over. The mind has a tendency to dwell in the past or wander into the future. The mind forges a chain to bind itself to the dead past, because it is fixed, while the present is in a state of flux, therefore constantly avoiding the present.

Life is neither lived in the tomb of the dead moments of the past nor in the womb of the unborn moments of the future. Life is not a continuous procession of past regrets and future anxieties. Life is lived in the dynamic present. The present moment is all that we have at our disposal. The mind should be freed from the past (which exists but as memory) and the future (which exists but as worry, a mixture of fear and hope). Only the present is. It is a present from God.

A boy and a girl were playing together. The boy had a collection of marbles. The girl had some sweets with her. The boy told the girl that he will give her all his marbles in exchange for her sweets. The girl agreed.

The boy kept the biggest and the most beautiful marble aside and gave the rest to the girl. The girl gave him all her sweets as she had promised.

That night, the girl slept peacefully. But the boy couldn’t sleep as he kept wondering if the girl had hidden some sweets from him the way he had hidden his best marble.

Moral of the story: If you don’t give your hundred percent in a relationship, you’ll always keep doubting if the other person has given his/her hundred percent.. This is applicable for any relationship like employer-employee, roommates, friends relationship etc., Give your hundred percent to everything you do and sleep peacefully …………..

Years ago a farmer owned land along the Atlantic seacoast.He constantly advertised for hired hands, however, most people were reluctant to work on farms along the Atlantic. They dreaded the awful storms that raged across the Atlantic, wreaking havoc on the buildings and crops.

As the farmer interviewed applicants for the job, he received a steady stream of refusals. Finally, a short, thin man, well past middle age, approached the farmer. ‘Are you a good farm hand?’ the farmer asked him.

‘Well, I can sleep when the wind blows,’ answered the little man. Although puzzled by this answer, the farmer, desperate for help decided to hired him.
The little man worked well around the farm, busy from dawn to dusk, and the farmer felt well satisfied with the his work. Then one night the wind howled in loudly from offshore. Jumping out of bed, the farmer grabbed a lantern and rushed next door to the hired hand’s sleeping quarters. He shook the little man and yelled, ‘Get up! A storm is coming! Tie things down before they blow away!’

The little man rolled over in bed and said firmly, ‘No sir, told you, I can sleep when the wind blows.’

Enraged by the response, the farmer was tempted to fire him on the spot. Instead, he hurried outside to prepare for the storm. To his amazement, he discovered that all of the haystacks had been covered with tarpaulins. The cows were in the barn, the chickens were in the coop and the doors were barred. The shutters were tightly secured. Everything was tied down. Nothing could blow away. The farmer then understood what his hired hand meant, so he returned to his bed to also sleep while the wind blew.

Moral: When you’re prepared spiritually, mentally and physically, you have nothing to fear. Can you sleep when the wind blows through your life?

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity,
Answered “Man.
Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.
Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.
And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present;
the result being that he does not live in the present or the future;
he lives as if he is never going to die,
and then dies having never really lived.”

A wise man once sat in the audience and cracked a joke..
all of them laughed like crazy..
after a moment he cracked the same joke again & a little less people laughed this time.
He cracked the same one again & very few laughed this time.
When there was no laughter in the crowd then he smiled and said ”when you can’t laugh on the same joke again & over again then why do you keep crying over the same thing over & over again”

FORGET THE PAST AND MOVE ON.

Meditation is Boring!! … You bet! A wonderful interesting read on meditation and how boring meditation can get and yet very excitingly useful in life! Life is an Oxymoron.
And No this isn’t a boring read 😉
-nik

ZEN IS BORING

Let’s face it. Zen is boring. You couldn’t find a duller, more tedious practice than Zazen. The philosophy is dry and unexciting. It’s amazing to me anyone reads this page at all. Don’t you people know you could be playing Tetris, right now? That there are a million free porno sites out there? Get a life, why don’t you?!

Joshu Sasaki, a Zen teacher from the Rinzai Sect, once said that Buddhist teachers always try to make students long for the Buddha World, but that if the students knew how really dry and tasteless the Buddha World actually was, they’d never want to go. He’s right. Look at Zen teachers. Not a one of them has any sense of fashion. They sit around staring at blank walls. Ask them about levitation, they won’t tell you. Ask them about life after death, they change the subject. Ask them about miracles and they start spouting nonsense about carrying buckets of water and chopping up fire wood. They go to bed early and wake up early. Zen is a philosophy for nerds.

Boredom is important. Most of your life is dull, tasteless and boring. If you practice Zazen, you learn a lot about boredom. I remember the first time I sat Zazen, I was real excited. I figured I’d be seeing visions of four armed Krishnas descending from the Heavens, or I’d be fading into The Void just like the old Beatles song, or reach Nirvana (whatever that was) or some great wonderful thing. But the clock just ticked away, my legs started aching, and stupid thoughts kept drifting by. Maybe I wasn’t doing it right, I thought. But no, year after year it was the same. Boring, boring, boring. After almost 20 years it’s still boring as Hell.

People hate their ordinary lives. We want something better. This, our day to day life of drudgery and work, is boring, dull and ordinary, we think. But someday, someday… There’s an episode of The Monkees* where Mike Nesmith says that when he was in high school he used to walk out on the school’s empty stage with a guitar in his hands thinking “Someday, someday.” Then he said that now (now being 1967, at the height of the Monkees fame) he walks out on stage in front of thousands of fans and thinks “Someday, someday.” That’s the way life is. It’s never going to be perfect. Whatever “someday” you imagine, it will ever come. Never. No matter what it is. No matter how well you build your fantasy or how carefully you follow all the steps necessary to achieve it. Even if it comes true exactly the way you planned, you’ll end up just like Mike Nesmith. Someday, someday… I guarantee you.

Your life will change. That’s for sure. But it won’t get any better and it won’t get any worse. How can you compare now to the past? What do you know about the past? You don’t have a clue! You have no idea at all what yesterday was really like, let alone last week or ten years ago. The future? Forget about it…

People long for big thrills. Peak experiences. Some people come to Zen expecting that Enlightenment will be the Ultimate Peak Experience. The Mother of All Peak Experiences. But real enlightenment is the most ordinary of the ordinary. Once I had an amazing vision. I saw myself transported through time and space. Millions, no, billions, trillions, Godzillions of years passed. Not figuratively, but literally. Whizzed by. I found myself at the very rim of time and space, a vast giant being composed of the living minds and bodies of every thing that ever was. It was an incredibly moving experience. Exhilarating. I was high for weeks. Finally I told Nishijima Sensei about it . He said it was nonsense. Just my imagination. I can’t tell you how that made me feel. Imagination? This was as real an experience as any I’ve ever had. I just about cried. Later on that day I was eating a tangerine. I noticed how incredibly lovely a thing it was. So delicate. So amazingly orange. So very tasty. So I told Nishijima about that. That experience, he said, was enlightenment.

You need a teacher like that. The world needs lots more teachers like that. Countless teachers would have interpreted my experience as a merging of my Atman with God, as a portent of great and wonderful things, would have praised my spiritual growth and given me pointers on how to go even further. And I would have been suckered right in to that, let me tell you! Woulda fallen for it hook line and sinker, boy howdy. If a teacher doesn’t shatter your illusions he’s doing you no favors at all.

Boredom is what you need. Merging with the Mind of God at the Edge of the Universe, that’s excitement. That’s what we’re all into this Zen thing for, right? Eating tangerines? Come on, dude! What could be more boring than eating a tangerine?

Some years ago some psychologists did a study in which they sat some Buddhists monks and some regular folks in a room and wired them up to EEG machines to record their brain activity. They told everyone to relax, then introduced a repetitive stimulus, a loudly ticking clock, into the room. The normal folks’ EEG showed that their brains stopped reacting to the stimulus after a few seconds. But the Buddhists just kept on mentally registering the tick every time it happened. Psychologists and journalists never quite know how to interpret that finding, though it’s often cited. It’s a simple matter. Buddhists pay attention to their lives. Ordinary folks figure they have better things to think about.

If you really take a look at your ordinary boring life, you’ll discover something truly wonderful. Our regular old pointless lives are incredibly joyful — amazingly, astoundingly, relentlessly, mercilessly joyful. You don’t need to do a damned thing to experience such joy either. People think they need big experiences, interesting experiences. And it’s true that gigantic, traumatic experiences sometimes bring people, for a fleeting moment, into a kind of enlightened state. That’s why such experiences are so desired. But it wears off fast and you’re right back out there looking for the next thrill. You don’t need to take drugs, blow up buildings, win the Indy 500 or walk on the moon. You don’t need to go hang-gliding over the Himalayas, you don’t need to screw your luscious and oh-so-willing secretary or party all night with the beautiful people. You don’t need visions of merging with the totality of the Universe. Just be what you are, where you are. Clean the toilet. Walk the dog. Do your work. That’s the most magical thing there is. If you really want to merge with God, that’s the way to do it. This moment. You sitting there with your hand in your underwear and potato chip crumbs on your chin, scrolling down your computer screen thinking “This guy’s out of his mind.” This very moment is Enlightenment. This moment has never come before and once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. You are this moment. This moment is you. This very moment is you merging with the total Universe, with God Himself.

The life you’re living right now has joys even God will never know.
FOOTNOTE

*Forthose of you not up on old US pop culture, The Monkees was a TV comedyshow about a rock and roll band that ran from 1967-68 and was rerun throughout the 70s. The Monkees were supposed to be just like The Beatles. Mike Nesmith was the “leader” of the band, the John Lennon character. To everyone’s surprise, when The Monkees, a fake rock band, went on tour they attracted almost as many squealing teenage fans as The Beatles had a few years before.

Source – http://www.katinkahesselink.net/tibet/boring-zen.html

Sitting in the Geography class in school, I remember how fascinated I was when we were being taught all about the Dead Sea. As you probably recall, the Dead Sea is really a Lake, not a sea (and as my Geography teacher pointed out, if you understood that, it would guarantee 4 marks in the term paper!)

Its so high in salt content that the human body can float easily. You can almost lie down and read a book! The salt in the Dead Sea is as high as 35% – almost 10 times the normal ocean water. And all that saltiness has meant that there is no life at all in the Dead Sea. No fish. No vegetation. No sea animals. Nothing lives in the Dead sea.

And hence the name: Dead Sea.

While the Dead Sea has remained etched in my memory, I don’t seem to recall learning about the Sea of Galilee in my school Geography lesson. So when I heard about the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea and the tale of the two seas – I was intrigued. Turns out that the Sea of Galilee is just north of the Dead Sea. Both the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea receive their water from river Jordan. And yet, they are very, very different.

Unlike the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee is pretty, resplendent with rich, colorful marine life. There are lots of plants. And lots of fish too. In fact, the sea of Galilee is home to over twenty different types of fishes.

Same region, same source of water, and yet while one sea is full of life, the other is dead. How come?

Here apparently is why. The River Jordan flows into the Sea of Galilee and then flows out. The water simply passes through the Sea of Galilee in and then out – and that keeps the Sea healthy and vibrant, teeming with marine life.

But the Dead Sea is so far below the mean sea level, that it has no outlet. The water flows in from the river Jordan, but does not flow out. There are no outlet streams. It is estimated that over a million tons of water evaporate from the Dead Sea every day. Leaving it salty. Too full of minerals. And unfit for any marine life.

The Dead Sea takes water from the River Jordan, and holds it. It does not give. Result? No life at all.

Think about it.

“Life is not just about getting. Its about giving. We all need to be a bit like the Sea of Galilee.”

We are fortunate to get wealth, knowledge, love and respect. But if we don’t learn to give, we could all end up like the Dead Sea. The love and the respect, the wealth and the knowledge could all evaporate. Like the water in the Dead Sea.

If we get the Dead Sea mentality of merely taking in more water, more money, more everything the results can be disastrous. Good idea to make sure that in the sea of your own life, you have outlets. Many outlets. For love and wealth – and everything else that you get in your life. Make sure you don’t just get, you give too. Open the taps. And you’ll open the floodgates to happiness.

Make that a habit. To share. To give.

And experience life. Experience the magic!

Source – Received via email

A wonderful read about how we can make a difference even if faced with adverse situations. Here the man who is mugged shows the mugger compassion and see the turn of events.

A Victim Treats His Mugger Right
http://www.npr.org/2008/03/28/89164759/a-victim-treats-his-mugger-right