hakuin said, if you sit there where the path of words ends and the course of mind dies out, this is called the hell of mired perception.
when i was 12 i went to a birthday party at the local vfw, late in september, and met my high school girlfriend for the first time, i don’t know where she was before that. she was walking towards me in a dress i still remember in detail, crossing a checked linoleum tile floor, the colors matched her dress. as it happened, as she was walking towards me, into my life, all the floodlights of self-reflective self-consciousness came on, i was somehow present when what we call consciousness first kicked in, it is still distinct in my memory, creating before and after. and the first words that i heard from that conscious mind, as i took in her body walking towards me, were: i am never gonna be bored.
check it out: it plugs in via neural mechanisms whose effective action, effective mechanism, call it generating floodlights, can be unplugged, without hurting anything else. when the floodlights of conscious awareness are unplugged, that doesn’t mean all the lights are out, quite the contrary. it’s just that the klieg lights are no longer there, too.
when i was born, the delivering doctor laughed and said, welcome to hell, little boy.
my wife and i were together for forty years, we hated being apart, her name was easy on the eyes of all who see, EZ for short.
when i was a kid, we used to go down and throw stuff into the acid creek, which ran out of the mill and into the ohio river about a mile away. the ohio ran into the mississippi, the mississippi ran into the gulf of mexico. the acid creek was deep, wide, fast-moving, and pitch black, deep black, it didn’t look like water.
the ocean current dynamics that drive the circulation system of the atlantic ocean have declined by fifteen percent. when they decline another ten or fifteen percent, the dynamics will break apart, and the circulation system will stop. that current circulation system is what keeps europe temperate, and when it stops, extreme weather events will increase in frequency and intensity.
the antarctic ocean, the cooling engine of the world, is undergoing its own changes in dynamics, it is near, or may have already passed, a threshold in which it gives off more carbon dioxide than it absorbs, in effect creating a third uptake channel for CO2 into the atmosphere, in addition to melting permafrost, wildfires, and emissions.
mind, intellect, consciousness and emotions all unplugged doesn’t mean things don’t have discriminant characteristics.
wu-chun said, if you seek some special life outside of daily activities, that is like brushing aside waves to look for water.
hui-chung said, all things are originally uncreated and presently undying. just let your mind be free, you don’t have to restrain it. conditional existence is the site of enlightenment, insofar as you know it as it really is.
all places are gates by which avalokiteshvara enters the truth.
householder zen 