{"id":945,"date":"2017-01-03T00:03:34","date_gmt":"2017-01-03T00:03:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zatma.org\/new-wp\/?p=945"},"modified":"2017-01-03T00:03:34","modified_gmt":"2017-01-03T00:03:34","slug":"i-looked-too-hard-for-things-that-arent-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/?p=945","title":{"rendered":"I looked too hard for things that aren\u2019t there"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Yin<\/a><\/p>\n

Yin Ts’ao\u00a0Shakya<\/p>\n

\u2018Avalokiteshvara<\/em><\/p>\n

while practicing deeply with<\/em><\/p>\n

the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore,<\/em><\/p>\n

suddenly discovered that<\/em><\/p>\n

all of the five Skandhas are equally empty,<\/em><\/p>\n

and with this realization<\/em><\/p>\n

he overcame all ill-being.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

\u2018Listen Sariputra,<\/em><\/p>\n

this Body itself is Emptiness<\/em><\/p>\n

and Emptiness itself is this Body.<\/em><\/p>\n

This Body is not other than Emptiness<\/em><\/p>\n

and Emptiness is not other than this Body.<\/em><\/p>\n

The same is true of Feelings,<\/em><\/p>\n

Perceptions, Mental Formations,<\/em><\/p>\n

and Consciousness.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

-The Heart Sutra Thich Nhat Hanh<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

The greatest thing the late Ming Zhen Shakya taught me was the importance of living in a productive, fulfilling way in daily life. This teaching helped me overcome my tendency to cling to metaphysical thinking. Eventually it became the vehicle for my ongoing awakening. I owe her a tremendous debt of gratitude for it!<\/p>\n

Like so many others, I \u201clooked too hard for things that aren\u2019t there\u201d not only in my spiritual practice, but also in life. And after finding nothing, I abandoned the superfluous \u201clooking\u201d altogether. Allow me to illustrate with several antidotes from my daily life.<\/p>\n

At Work<\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

I had a challenging day at work. It was one of those days where there were several things on my To-Do list. While working diligently to complete every last item on the list, in a timely and efficient manner, my boss, without warning, calls and tells me to drop everything immediately.<\/p>\n

The Executive VP needs something done and he needs it to be done now!<\/em><\/p>\n

You know what I mean, an urgent request with an alarming deadline followed by the inevitable question, \u2018can you make this happen before the end of the day?\u2019<\/em> My answer? Well, my answer is always yes, maybe a bit quixotic but still a yes. It comes from my desire to do my best and to do it on time.<\/p>\n

And heaven, by god I soldiered through it and delivered the goods with enough time left over to for my boss to review the work. Before he handed it off to the executives he made sure that human beings would actually be able to decipher it.<\/p>\n

Voila! It was on time and it worked. Yahoo!<\/p>\n

At Home<\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

By the end of the day when good-old Miller Time<\/em> came around, I went outside, sat down in one of our big, plastic Adirondack chairs on the porch, cracked-open a cold one, and watched my dog frolic in the yard.<\/p>\n

Sure, it was a challenging day, with unreasonable deadlines, but I got the job done and enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment. As I sat outside in my chair, watching my dog chase the squirrels that are forever zigzagging and whizzing by her, I thought, I worked hard today. We can pay the rent, and am enjoying a rest in my backyard where I imagined my twins to come will play. <\/em>I felt good.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

When Miller Time was over, I went back inside to cook gumbo for me and my wife, and our two babies who are growing inside her tummy. That took me from feeling good<\/em>, to feeling great<\/em> (it always does).<\/p>\n

On Facebook\u00ae<\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

After dinner my wife and I retired to the living room sofa, to relax and catch-up on what we\u2019d missed on Facebook\u00ae while we were both at work.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when I went from feeling great<\/em> to feeling like I wanted to choke people.<\/p>\n

A friend of mine had posted a link to an article on\u00a0Vice.com<\/a>, entitled \u201cMillennials On Spirit Quests Are Ruining Everything About Ayahuasca\u201d and it caught my eye as I scrolled-through my newsfeed. I should\u2019ve just chuckled and continued scrolling, but I didn\u2019t. Nope. Like a jackass, I clicked on it and started reading. I won\u2019t go too deeply into the details of the article here, I\u2019ll just give the premise and leave it at that-<\/p>\n

\u00a0Apparently, upwardly-mobile young adults who feel unfulfilled in their lives are traveling to South America to hang out with Native Peoples and drink the hallucinogenic brew Ayahuasca, with the hopes of having spiritual visions. This, in-turn, has brought a lot of unwanted attention to the afore-mentioned Native Peoples, and such attention is becoming a threat to their culture.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Like Cain, the anger\u00a0rose up<\/em>, and from that anger I formulated a comment which I left on my friend\u2019s post. It read something like this-<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat’s this\u00a0vision quest<\/em>\u00a0bullshit? Really? These people need a\u00a0vision quest<\/em>? What sheer stupidity! Let me tell you something. There is nothing,\u00a0nothing<\/em>\u00a0more to life than working hard, raising your family right, exercising, and fly fishing (or whatever task you prefer to master). If you\u2019re looking for anything more out of life than that you\u2019re a rube, because it doesn\u2019t exist. Period. Full-stop.”<\/p>\n

Ugh! I know,\u00a0the less a man makes declarative statements the less likely he is to look foolish in retrospect<\/em>. But as no one fully understands the workings of karma <\/em>I was blessed with an experience while washing the dishes not long after I\u2019d posted the comment.<\/p>\n

In the Kitchen Holy Place<\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s no accident that I enjoy spending time in the kitchen, cooking and cleaning. I suppose I could be described as \u201cOld School\u201d in the sense that yes, I believe the old adage that \u201ca man\u2019s home is his castle,\u201d but I take it to include my wife and my forthcoming twins. I do my very best to make it\u00a0our\u00a0<\/em>castle. But there’s one stipulation: The kitchen is where my best Dharma work is done.\u00a0 This translates into the kitchen is my holy place.<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s where everything is cooked up, eaten, washed, dried and put into place. It\u2019s a place of refuge where my consciousness is cooked, chewed, washed, dried and put straight. It\u2019s a mortar and pestle where cause and effect, karma, and the whole universe are ground down and changed in the ordinariness of cooking, eating, and cleaning.<\/p>\n

Everything is fine, there.<\/p>\n

Those words came to me, after I finished doing the dishes, while I stood there looking at the clean countertops and the empty sink, which all seemed to glow in absolute perfection in the\u00a0evening sunlight which\u00a0beamed through my kitchen window.\u00a0I knew the sink wasn\u2019t perfect because I washed all the dishes that were in there, and the countertop wasn\u2019t perfect because I wiped it clean.<\/p>\n

I saw they were perfect because washing the dishes washed me off, and wiping-off the countertop wiped me clean.<\/p>\n

I stood there, giddy\u2026giggling as the experience occurred.<\/p>\n

My consciousness, indeed,\u00a0me<\/em>, arises just the same as dirty dishes arise from cooking and serving dinner. And for some ineffable reason, this realization makes me suffer less, and gives me a deeply-abiding peace and joyfulness unlike anything I\u2019ve ever felt.<\/p>\n

Zen, lovely in its inherent simplicity, gives everything in the here-and-now to experience this joy. The beloved Heart Sutra is a lens to contemplate and follow the Eight-Fold Path in a life in-which to practice.<\/p>\n

What more is needed?<\/p>\n

Nothing.<\/p>\n

Equanimity comes from the experience of keenly discerning that without dirty dishes and dirty countertops, a clean kitchen cannot exist, and if your kitchen is clean, sooner or later the need to eat, along with literally\u00a0everything else<\/em>, contributes to the arising of a dirty kitchen.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s life\u2026 and it’s all fine\u2026 this not looking for things that aren\u2019t there.<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yin Ts’ao\u00a0Shakya \u2018Avalokiteshvara while practicing deeply with the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore, suddenly discovered that all of the five Skandhas are equally empty, and with this realization he overcame all ill-being.\u2019 \u2018Listen Sariputra, this Body itself is Emptiness and Emptiness itself is this Body. This Body is not other than Emptiness… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":946,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[45,18],"class_list":["post-945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english","tag-english","tag-essays"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=945"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":947,"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions\/947"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zatma.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}