As I am preparing to go off on a silent walking meditation as a poor mendicant in India´s hinterlands, I visualize that some of You might want to enter mindfull meditation into your Life. So let this post be a way… to tell and teach a way to your heart´s mending.
I journey mindfully into the lives of people living and working for less than a dollar a day. There is more than two billion people living like this across our world, but with a great soul like India´s poor I feel best to walk silently and meditatively with just the clothes on my back and my ten days wealth of five hundred Indian Rupees. That is approximately ten US dollars and is the core element of this journey into how people live and how this can be my Life too.
But we wouldn´t be doing these things if it wasn´t for mindfullness. Understanding how the other half lives. How the bottom of the pyramid poor people live cannot be a treatise from MIT or Harvard or from an Aid agency brochure, but it must come from my experience if am to be able to affect people´s lives positively by changing my own. Living on a dollar a day, I know that after ten days, I can change that… but for that bottom Billion or two of humanity this is a constant daily experience unalterable in their own lifetimes.
Meditate on this…
Meditation is a remedy for many things and even the heart ailments that killed a dear friend just this Saturday, but mostly is just a way to change your Life.
Just sit.
Sitting just and still is the beginning.
Open eyes, closed eyes, walking, driving, talking or even working can easily become a meditation just as Life is a process of thought and action in an unconscious stream. Albeit a continuous stream.
Time to interupt this stream and launch in a mindful moment.
You don´t have to renounce your Life. Please don´t do it and then go blaming me as some dear friends find easy to do…
Just look inside a bit:
Zen based on Buddha’s experience of the past is the main point of zen teaching that is just to become present in the process of Life itself.
This is something you acquire after you have done zen meditation. It is not a concept of the process, but rather is to focus on the process itself. It is very difficult to understand this because even though we are always in the process, we don’t focus on it. Zen meditation is to focus completely on the process itself. It helps that actually the process is you. And life is you also. So meditation is best to be effortless.
Zen meditation is a completely different form and process than other meditations and especially simple and elegant in that you can engage in it always and anywhere without any removal of self or negation of tasks at hand or responsibilities and commitments or even joyful games and life´s dramas….
We can meditate when writing software or when riding or repairing our bicycles. We can meditate when we are heading to a meeting and especially in the meeting or when we operate machinery in our jobs. We can meditate when we answer the myriad emails or tending to our childrens needs. We can simply meditate when we are just living.
Go on try it…
It is not a matter of philosophical or metaphysical discussion, zen meditation is just living Life fully. All we have to do is do what we are doing, right now, right here already. Whatever kind of experience we have through zen is secondary. Whatever happens, all we have to do is to be constantly present right in the middle of the process of Life.
This is the beginning and also the end.
You can do it.
It is open to all people, whoever You are.
This is acceptance for all of us.
All of us fully including the good the bad and the ugly. Fully including all my misguided friends and ´enemies´. Including people we´ve never met nor are likely to meet. All those we renounced and aren´t going to meet again. It is for You and your children alike, although they have the edge on you in this present mindfullness meditation….
We are all already exactly peaceful and harmonious. But still, when we do zen meditation, we want to be peaceful. Trying to be peaceful is no longer being peaceful. Just remove all effort. Allow it to happen.
Just sit down. Calm your monkey – Calm your mind. We do not have to try or not try or say that we do not care. If I say something is this way, immediately you rush and try to grasp it. And then if I say it is not this way, you immediately try to grasp that. Then I say it is not that either, and then you are confused. Finally, you say you are neutral, but that is not good either. What we have to do is realize we are people just like Buddha was a person so is You. Like Buddha was a teacher, so are you.
This is a big lesson for us. This practice is called for now in our trying times and is our interruption for our whole life. There are hundreds of practices of meditation, but the zen practices of walking mindfull awake and working meditations are just leaves and branches of Life itself. That is all.
The root of all evil is greed. Greed for one more conquest; greed for one more business deal; greed for one more moment of work; greed for one more dollar or greed for one more milion or billion dollars; greed for one more day; greed for one more moment of Life…
All this is our daily evil quotidient. We have to understand this.
As I dedicate this ten day walk to the memory of a dear friend who passed away this last Saturday, I am reminded of the walks we didn´t find the time to make together. Those meditative walks we failed to materialize.
Those ways we would change the world together with, just by walking…
Mind You, we planned carefully for those walks. We made appointments and scheduled them through our PAs… Oh we planned for those wlks for sure… for sure, but we were interrupted by a simple life process.
So I am going with his memory as a constant companion and the process of life with me serving as my guide and relying on the kindness of strangers and the Indian soul.
This is perfect peace, perfect harmony. Need nothing more of Life.
Yours,
pano
PS: Focus: We are always thinking about something, always trying to acquire something. Some people criticize me, because I tell and teach everybody not to expect enlightenment, or anything super extraordinary but to just sit down.
My friends say if one cannot expect enlightenment, then why are we doing all this?
Even very intelligent people do not always understand what just sitting is. Then they get upset and mad at themselves and all others.
Failing that, if they are criticized, their belief system starts to wobble. This is very common. This is to be a human being, and includes not only my friends, and others, but it includes me. If someone criticizes us, then our faith starts to wobble. If we look around, there are many things for people to be interested in. Very naturally, we think some other way would be better. So we pick it up and use it. But if we are still wobbling, our feet are already not completely grounded. It is just like walking during a big earthquake. Even though we believe we are walking stably, we are not. Our feet are made of clay.
We are all leaves of the same tree. Choose the strong faith you have and stick to it. Just smell the local flowers and whatever faith you have that grounds you in a fully conscious amd meditative way to lead your life…keep it and thrive in it. Just don´t forget that others much like Yourself, smell their local flowers of faith too. And although their shape, or colour or parfume might be slightly different, don´t fret. For they are just as pleasing to them as they are to me and to the common God…
Come join me for the walk or at the very least meditate with me these next ten days….
I long trasure the memory of the last walk with my friend around a lake in Seattle and his question to me: When will You grow up?
