Watch out for ripples

I like to think my Zen Fits are a Grand Illumination; they are for me. I don’t know if they are for you. I say Grand Illumination because Friday night Blackstone has its Grand Illumination when the Christmas lights are turned on in the town park. Its a big event with everyone standing in the dark waiting for the grand flash of lights. Suddenly the everyday trees passed each day unseen are decked in lights and Blackstone is turned into wonderland, and the park is seen as if for the first time. That is what a Grand Illumination is, really. Seeing life, seeing your town, seeing your family for the first time, and when you do that you are seeing yourself for the first time. You are returned to Ground Zero and the world is wondrous again.

How do you have a Grand Illumination? Well, as this talk suggests, you become aware of the ripples in your everyday life, the things we say that are off-hand remarks, insignificant in themselves, and quite normal we believe.

Like Mark Twain, the River PIlot in his book Life on the Mississippi said: To a passenger, a ripple is just a ripple but to the pilot, it means a sunken tree or rock or sand bar. Watch the ripples for they can reveal the sunken logs upon which we have wrecked our ship of life over and over again.

Become a river pilot. You don’t fix the ripple, you don’t repress the ripple, and you don’t deny the ripple. You notice the ripple as a ripple with curiosity, a Grand Illumination, if you will, and then that illumination, that SEEING reveals that sunken log you have been hitting all your life. Oh, what an awakening!

But like Mark Twain, the River PIlot in his book Life on the Mississippi said: To a passenger, a ripple is just a ripple but to the pilot, it means a sunken tree or rock or sand bar. Watch the ripples for they can reveal the sunken logs upon which we have wrecked our ship of life over and over again.

When our ME gets divided into two rivers of duty, both of which are valid but opposite, we pull ourselves apart, but the One ME cannot be two ME’s, unless we create a dual personality neither of which knows the other exists. This stretching of the ME creates pain: guilt, anxiety, all the negative emotions. We must get ourselves back to the ONE, and the way we do it through active or passive strategies. The active strategies are usually some violence, like anger. The passive is through denial and repression, and addictions. Both strategies must happen because the One that is divided cannot stand.

But there is a Middle Way, the way of Zen for me, and that is through SEEING. When I can find a hilltop of stillness—like Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita— I can see the two I’s below like a river divided into two streams, of a train trying to go on separate tracks at the same time. This SEEING is ONE. Seeing cannot be divided, so SEEING is Knowing, and knowing is action. In the Knowing, in the SEEING I restore my ME. Oh, what an awakening!