It is natural to look for things you want outside of where you are now. That is the whole point of a journey. Yet this moment is all anyone has. So if freedom, love, beauty, grace, and whatever else is desirable are to appear, they must appear in the now. It would be nice if they appeared in the now you have now. And if they are to appear and endure they will have to be found in ordinary circumstances, since ordinary circumstances fill most of life. The marvelous, the lovely, will have to be right here in the room where someone is reading, someone is sick, someone is coughing, two people are making love, or a man is yelling at a dog. It will have to appear in the sound of rain splashing off trees, of a truck laboring up a grade, of TV from another room. It will have to appear in the sight of a child running, in the feeling of a headache, in the anxiety of preparing for exams, in worrying over a sick child, it will have to appear in what is ordinary, usual, commonplace, and right under your nose. [Here is where you experience] the heaven of the ordinary.

John Tarrant, Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans that Will Save Your Life (2008, pp. 50-51)

Thank you Ty. This is a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while.


(via tyminds-deactivated20130226)

In Zen literature the word intimacy is often used as a synonym for enlightenment. In the classical Zen enlightenment stories, a monk or a nun is reduced simultaneously to tears and laughter as he or she suddenly recognizes that nothing in this world is separate, that each and every thing, including one’s own self, is nothing but the whole, and that the whole is nothing but the self. What are such stories telling us if not that love is much wider and deeper than an emotion? Love is the fruition of, the true shape of, one’s self and all that is.
Norman Fischer, Taking Our Places: The Buddhist Path to Truly Growing Up

The Five Fundamentals

(As laid out by the Center for Sacred Sciences.)

The five fundamentals are a modern expression of the basic principles taught by the mystics of all the great religious traditions of the world. Although the mystics have expressed this Truth in various symbolic terms appropriate to their time and place, the fundamental principles expressed by all these teachings are the same. The five fundamentals are a modern expression of these same principles, appropriate to our time and place. Because the Truth they point to is ineffable, these fundamentals are merely fingers pointing to that Truth, and are not the Truth itself.

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To be intimate means there is no separation

By definition, “intimately” means that there is no separation. To “be intimate” means to be the thing itself.

In intimacy there is no internal dialogue letting you know that you are sitting well or not sitting well, constantly evaluating, comparing, analyzing, judging. The witness disappears—there is no body, no mind, no self, no other. No subject or even object of your attention exists. When you are the thing itself, it pervades the whole universe. When the thing itself pervades the whole universe, the reference system that we use to evaluate, analyze, judge, understand, and know is gone.

Painter, brush, canvas, image, subject—they are not many. The painter is the brush, the image is the painter, the subject is the object, the canvas is the paint. Those things only separate themselves when we separate them by the way we use our mind. Whether you are speaking of a painting, Mu, a tree, a Buddha, or a plum branch— how you see it, how you relate to it has to do with how you live your life, with the question of life and death itself.

—John Daido Loori, The Eight Gates of Zen

Thank you dearworld-letmebeme.

Note: I believe Daido Roshi is referring to the definition within Zen practice, as opposed to the etymology of the word in English.

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