Chattanooga Pulse

I believe it is a wonderful and healthy thing to stretch our minds to new ideas about who we are and about this life we share with others; to embrace spirituality in all its colors and voices; and to walk a journey rich with a-ha! moments and diverse experiences.  Eastern philosophy calls this “opening the hand of thought.”

I want to share with you some excerpts from a lecture by Zenkai Blanche Hartman given earlier this year at the San Francisco Zen Center.  The images are rich and beautiful, and you will likely find your mind happily navigating its way around the metaphors and language.  I love these passages, and my own mind instantly goes into a sort of excited dance as it awakens to new expressions of thought.  See what this experience might do for you.

The first passage is about oneness with the universe.  The second addresses awareness and living in the present.  And the third is about how we see ourselves and life.  All are concepts you’ve read in this column before, but rarely expressed with such poetry. Enjoy!

1.  “We have many difficult experiences in our life.  From a distance, a waterfall looks like a curtain, thrown from the top of the mountain. The water was not originally separated but was one whole river.  But it is separated into many tiny streams as it falls.  Individual droplets of water in a waterfall take a very long time to reach the bottom.  Only when the water is separated does it have this difficulty reaching the bottom of the waterfall.

“Before we were born, we were one with the universe. After we are separated by birth from this Oneness, as water falling from a waterfall is separated by wind and rocks, then we have feeling.  We have difficulty because we attach to the feeling we have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created.  When we do not realize that we are one with the river, or one with the universe, we have fear.  But whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water.  When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore and have no actual difficulty in our life.

“There is great value in the experience of realizing that we are always one with the whole universe.  This idea we get that each of us is separate and distinct from the whole of life, this division into ‘self’ and ‘other’ that we are capable of making with our mind creates a lot of anxiety and difficulty.  As we begin to notice that this separation is something we do with our own mind, that in actuality we are all breathing the same air, we realize the Oneness in which we exist.  The more you consider this as a possibility, the more you feel the connection with all other living beings.”

2.  “In breathing, [Zen Master] Suzuki Roshi emphasized the exhale.  ‘Just follow the exhale,’ he’d say.  ‘Let it go out, let it go out, let it go out.  And just watch it and at a certain point it will turn into an inhale all by itself.  You don’t have to reach for it.  It just becomes an inhale.  And you can say, “Oh!  I’m still alive!”’
“We know how to breathe.  We’ve been breathing since we were born.  We don’t have to direct the breath or control the breath.  We just have to be aware of it.  In practicing being aware of it we can begin to bring our mind here to where we are, and be awake and aware of what’s happening, within ourselves, in each moment.”

3.  “So perhaps you think, this life has not been the way I wanted it.  You can do this if you want to.  But if you notice yourself doing this, you might say to yourself, ‘Every time I tell myself this, I feel really bad.  H’mm, maybe I don’t want to tell myself this story anymore.  Even if it’s true, every time I tell myself this story, I feel awful.  Well, gosh, maybe I have some control over what stories I tell myself.  Let me see if I can not tell this story this time.’  And each time you pick it up, you notice you’re chewing on this same old bone again.  You can say, I don’t like the taste of this bone, and you can put it down.  Some of us have stories we’ve been telling ourselves for years!  We identify ourselves by our stories; that’s who we think we are.  How can we not get stuck in these labels we paste on ourselves and on others?  Perhaps we can give ourselves the opportunity to see things with beginner’s eyes, with fresh eyes.  Let’s see what’s here now. Be awake each moment.  Don’t waste this life.  Appreciate and recognize that it’s a gift.  Revere life now.”

Until next week:  “Without leaving my house I know the whole universe.”   — Lao-Tsu

Dr. Rick Pimental-Habib, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist, minister, and educator, in private practice in Chattanooga, and is the author of “Empowering the Tribe” and “The Power of a Partner.”