Sand and Pearls

As Nish predicted, nothing has changed and everything has changed.

I awake differently, at first waking is the old habit; I am irritated at having to be awake.  Always I want to sleep.  I am a sleepy person.

And then I am awake.  And as I wake up, the joy comes.  It’s like water is to tea.  This water of joy suffuses through me and then there is Self and the world and the dualism, good, bad, tired, exhausted, whatever.  But it is not the same; for now there is Tea.

Perhaps this is the metaphor, or something like it; why Japanese Zen is often centred around Tea.

And now when I practice I don’t need to spend so much time searching.  Now I know what I search for and that it is there, just there.  It does not have to be found; it is there all the time, and so I can explore.  I don’t have to spend so much time  — as Hakuin so graphically describes – ‘thrashing around like a serpent in a teapot’.

I can go directly to the fear of annihilation and feel the grief of not being, directly behind it, waiting.

I am not stuck.  It is clear to me that as I invite my patients to look at themselves, their motivations, their habits of being, their struggles, desires and aversions, the voices in their minds of past experience and relationship and struggle; that I am inviting them to touch this fear:  the terror of Not Being.

And it is this that must make the work so scary for each – and the bravery of being with that terror so inspiring of compassion in me.

And so I will spend some time with this existential Terror, if I can.  It seems that this is the place of being human, perhaps.  The ‘betwixt and between’ of kensho.  The place before one **pops** out on the Other Shore.

This Terror and the Grief behind it is the moment where I have a foot in both places:  in samsara, in the dual world, and in the land across the river.