The Zen of Seeing: A Dozen Random Observations About the Way Things Are

The Zen of Seeing: A Dozen Random Observations About the Way Things Are August 21, 2016

annunciation

Just some random observations from a Zen life. Some come whole cloth from somewhere in the depths of my heart. Others I heard some or all of, but eventually they became my own. Take what you think is helpful. Leave the rest for someone else…

1. Look at your checkbook and you will know what your religion is.

2. Ideas always betray you.

3. Each of us is precious, all of us are connected; there are no exceptions.

4. Within the Western season of Passover and Easter there is an even older observance of a goddess whose name translates as healing, as salvation.

5. Sit down, shut up, pay attention. See the connections. Then get up and do something.

6. You do understand you’re not actually in charge, right?

7. All religions are false. And its corollary: All religions are true

8. The project is attending to the shape of our hearts, noticing how we encounter the world, and living into our real lives.

9. The world follows patterns. Yes, the very small and the very large parts of the universe are seriously weird, but the part we live in follows pretty consistent patterns. Pay attention to them, particularly how they play out as you.

10. God is a hole in the language into which we throw all our hopes and fears. And its corollary, God is a whole in the language into which we throw all our hopes and fears.

11. It’s not material. It’s not spiritual.

12. We, each of us, just as we are, in our temporariness, in our momentariness, are one hundred percent it.


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