The way one feels really does always boil down to the way one perceives things, so that being the case, why is it so difficult to make those tiny adjustments? Well, i feel everything goes hand in hand, and nothing happens overnight, so patience and faith are crucial.
Some say that forming a habit takes a minimum of 30 days. For instance, a diet, quitting smoking, waking up early, or even changing the thought processes that make up your brain. In other words, without patience, it is difficult to reawaken, and without faith, one may seldom see the light that recreates the self.
Read this piece, hopefully it will kickstart an awakening in you too =)
mikey
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The World of Intensive Practice
- Kosho Uchiyama (1912-1999)
Regardless of conditions, what is essential in doing zazen is just to sit, aiming at zazen and waking up to zazen. In just sitting and waking up to zazen, the various conditions going on in our heads simply become the scenery of our zazen!
The world we live in is not something that exists independently of our thoughts and ideas. Our world and these thoughts and ideas appear to us as a unified whole. Depending on what our thoughts and ideas are, our world may appear to us in completely different ways. These thoughts and feelings constitute our psychological condition. Moreover, our psychological condition is at the same time our physiological condition. When something breaks down inside of us physically, our minds no longer remain clear. And if our minds are not clear, then the eyes with which we see the world and our views of life become dark. Our lives and the whole world take on a gloomy appearance
On the other hand, when we feel healthy our minds brighten, and consequently our outlook on everything becomes brighter. Furthermore, our physiological conditions are tremendously influenced by the environment in which we live. The changes and conditions of climate and weather both affect us. This cause and effect relationship is particularly easy to see when you lead a life as unvaried and devoid of distractions as the sesshins at Antaiji.
The essential matter here is the attitude of just striving to wake up regardless of the conditions you are in. It is not about arriving at some state where all thoughts have disappeared. To calmly sit amidst these cause-and-effect relationships without being carried away by them is shikantaza.
Like the weather, there are all sorts of conditions in our personal lives: clear days, cloudy days, rainy ones, and stormy ones. These are all waves produced by the power of nature and are not things over which we have control. No matter how much we fight against these waves, there is no way we can make a cloudy day clear up. Cloudy days are cloudy; clear days are clear. It is only natural that thoughts come and go and that psychological and physiological conditions fluctuate accordingly. All of this is the very reality and manifestation of life. Seeing all this as the scenery of life, without being pulled apart by it-this is the stability of human life, this is settling down in our life.
This is the same as the zazen we do. We always try to sit zazen aiming at being steadily awake here and now. Yes, it's not a matter of being able to adhere to the sitting, since we inevitably slide away from it. So we move away from sitting and then we wake up again; we move away again, and wake up to it again. Zazen is the very posture of forever waking up. As long as we have this attitude, all thoughts that occur to us when we move away from the sitting become the scenery of zazen. The times when we can strictly maintain the posture and awareness of sitting are also the scenery of zazen. It is not that the cessation of all thought is satori and good, and the arising of thoughts and the tendency to chase after them is delusion and bad. Just sitting, transcending good or evil, satori or delusion, is the zazen that transcends the sage and the ordinary person.
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