I was listening to Thich Nhat Hahn last night, talking about how the present contains the past and future. It’s a perfect reflection as we transition into a new year, reflecting on everything good we take from 2006 into 2007 and everything good we will create in 2007 from 2006. When there is no separation in time between past and future, the present becomes the opportunity to heal past and dream future.
With classes, products, and spas, yoga has become a $3 billion industry. Zen, not so much. I guess people whose whole practice is dedicated to “sitting and doing nothing” are less interested in anything beyond that. Even the Zen aesthetic when popularized in commercial venues offers people minimalism at its finest. If a “zen industry” ever emerges, it will go largely unnoticed by pop culture. Gratefully, it already has.
It doesn’t take a lot of deep self-reflection to notice how suffering is related to unmet expectations. The great ah-ha comes when it dawns on us that we can’t choose how life will respond to our expectations. We can only choose which expectations we will use to guide how we use our time and talents.
The practice around this principle is making a list of expectations that life is most capable of fulfilling for us. Possibly things like:
I expect that good things to come and go, change and return in different forms
I expect that everyone has a different capacity for understanding and appreciating me
I expect that on some days I will receive more joy from good acts than good outcomes
I expect that the creative among us will continue to surprise us
I expect that the only time we will every have is the flowing present that never stands still.
If we understand the size of the universe, we understand that a complaint is my truth, but never the truth.
Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.
Ranier Maria Rilke
In the ignorance of evil, nothing is sacred; in the light of consciousness, everything is sacred.
With over 30,000 different groups just in Christianity, could one religion in the world ever become possible? Could, as the Dalai Lama suggests, kindness be the one religion all aspire to? Given nature’s infinite tendency toward diversity, we could still have as many differences in how we approach kindness and build a world from it as a fundamental design principle.
“There’s nothing more personal than a vision, yet the visions that ultimately prove transformative have nothing to do with us as individuals.”
from Presence by Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, and Flowers
