Monday, December 30, 2013

Big mind, small mind, same.

"That everything is included within your mind is the essence of mind. To experience this is to have religious feeling. Even though waves just arise, the essence of your mind is pure; it is just like clear water with a few waves. Actually water always has waves. Waves are the practice of water. To speak of waves apart from water or water apart from waves is a delusion. Water and waves are one. Big mind and small mind are one. When you understand your mind in this way, you have some security in your feeling. As your mind does not expect anything from the outside, it is always filled. A mind with waves in it is not a disturbed mind, but actually an amplified one. Whatever you experience is an experience of big mind." - Shunryu Suzuki, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind"  

Or - I'm a wave in the big mind.

Friday, December 27, 2013

some tea thoughts....

Tea embraces the embodied paradox that we live moment by moment.

There's no struggle, only calm joy arising from the recognition of the simple practice which frees the mind into the heart, the expanse of being in the interior of our embodied experience. Apparent limitation, density, contraction and matter are seen as a continuum from tea cup to our lips to our being.  We flow from the finite to the infinite and back again, spiraling into presence through a simple act of bridging nature into humanity, through the meeting of all time and space into a simple cup of tea.

Tea, the moment of the dance, the bridge, the nexus, the crucible of calm joy, living souls experiencing immortality through the most limited experience unlocking the expanse of cosmic awareness.

As the poetry in motion, flowing through the cup, each drop separate or connected? Each leaf in your cup, separate or united? Or both? These are the insights which arise from the joy of the leaf meeting water meeting human meeting nature.


Here we are – all in our "separate" times and spaces, yet the paradox of tea connecting us all together – joins us in the day to day living – with technophiles – and technophobes – alike – all joining in unison with the merging of the interior of space as we watch the tea fall into the abyss of being through the portal of our lips.

Thy self is in all, all is thy self.

Yagnavalkya said in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad said this no dual statement: “That which breathes in is thy Self, which is within all. That...