Training to Accord with Life Unfolding
*transcript generated by AI
Yeah, it’s a delightful path for practice, right?
Zen is a beautiful structure because it comes down to such fundamental principles that it accommodates any relative reality, any individual perspective, any individuality is accommodated because your individual nature is created out of these universal principles.
And Zen is basically a practice of discovering the universal principles behind the way everything works.
And then once you get those, then you can make whatever numerous adjustments you want to make.
Or you can say, oh, nope, I don’t want to make any adjustments.
I’m good just the way I am, thank you very much.
And if you have a relationship with a Zen teacher, they would probably challenge that perspective.
But that’s a different Dharma talk.
I can’t entirely leave it there.
Part of the reason for that is because life is evolution.
And when we think we got it and we’re static, then we’re denying the life impulse to evolve.
So this is why our practice, part of the reason why we do the exact same thing every single time is so that you can become minutely better at it forever.
If you change your practice regularly, you can notice how much you improve very quickly, but you never can actually attain perfection because you’re not making the small micro-evolutions over time.
And so what happens in the arc of Zen training is that you come in and it’s new.
And everything’s kind of hard and confusing.
You don’t really know how to do kin-hen.
You don’t really know how to sit well.
You don’t really know how to meditate.
You don’t really get all the instruments and you don’t really know the service.
So you get this deluge that if it doesn’t scare the shit out of you and make you never come back, you eventually get excited about learning.
And then you get to a point where you know it and you can come in and you can do it mindlessly.
And then if you have a good sangha around you, they’re going to start nitpicking the shit out of you so that you start to grow and evolve again and you discover this love of micro-evolution and these infinitely recursive cycles of just seeing, if my foot was just a little bit more this way when I stood up, then my bow could be that much more elegant.
And that becomes like the most deliciously delightful discovery.
And then when we take that into our lives, then we adopt a whole lifestyle of continuous evolution.
And now we’re in accord with the idea that life is evolving.
Life is unfolding.
There is no static fixed position that you can hold.
The idea of making a decision five years ago and still doing the exact same thing today without questioning it becomes completely absurd because you’re different, the world’s different, your situation is different, the people you’re talking to are different.
And that really creates a very different quality of life and well-being than what we get when we try and lock things down and keep it the same.
I just jumped into a totally separate Dharma talk right there.
Yeah, because it’s all one, baby.
All right.
And with all that said, thank you all very much for your practice and training today.
I’m deeply grateful for the time together.