Be Uniquely Perfect

To live is to exchange energy and pattern abundantly.

To live is to admit flow, to move and to be moved.

To live is to take apart and to combine, to seek, out of a sense of disbalance

or discontinuity, to find and resolve or complete.

To live is to create and be created. We are here to live and make alive.

 

We are aroused. We are stirred. We are prompted. We are attracted or repelled.

We are motivated out of a sense of longing or yearning,

out of a sense of need, deficiency or loneliness.

We change, we grow, we develop – with a direction.

We have the opportunity; we have the power – to be more. We progress!

 

Freedom or liberty attracts us.

As we harmoniously interact with our environment,

we gain or experience a kind of freedom or liberty, a peace or calm,

a gracefulness, even an elegance.

 

To live is to react or respond, but to live is also to initiate.

To live is to adapt to a constantly changing environment.

We change the environment. The environment changes us.

But we do not change the environment in such a way

that only our design operates, the nature of our environment combines

with the patterns we offer to determine the nature

of the changes which are yielded.

Nor does the environment change us without our nature

affecting the nature of the change within us.

There is always a hybrid change, a hybrid transformation,

a kind of breeding involved in the change.

Man pursues happiness.

Man seeks joy.

Man turns from sorrow and avoids pain.

But somehow, man is separated, alienated from his environment

and from his fellow man.

Man uses cognitive representation to mediate his environment and his fellow man.

Those representations, those mediations become the means of separation,

the means of alienation.

 

We must dim or diminish those representations, those mediations,

the separation and alienation of the isolated and defined self.

Zazen directs us to withdraw our attention from the physical definition of self.

 

Today we want to go back to the foundations of our meditative practice

and understand this directive.

 

You are the ideal.

The physical is the form artefact of the process.

The physical self is a feedback.

But we have the power not to accept the physical as a constraint,

but rather as a guideline to the effects of our thought.

 

Be uniquely perfect, without desire, content,

without wanting something for one’s self.

We must function fully.

We must acknowledge our unique part as the environment for those we support,

nourish, uphold in our environment.

The unity of thought and action is not a unity

where the thought is identical to the action.

The thought is the ideal.

The action is the form artefact of the thought manifest in an environment.

The action is a hybrid.

 

Man is bounded, defined, obstructed or limited, but man seeks

to extend the experienced boundaries, to redefine himself in greater terms,

to remove or circumnavigate obstructions, to overcome his limits.

Man uses the mediation of representation to attempt this with reason

or rational processes.

The alternative is to stop talking in our heads.

The alternative is to discover the concentric path of manifestation

which is not distorted by mediation.

The function of focus in Zazen is to achieve this discovery.

 

In all this life and living, man perceives and conceives of his fellow man

and / or his environment as an ally, suggesting cooperation, or as an adversary,

suggesting struggle, competition or even conflict.

Somehow, man regards other species, other life forms,

upon which he is dependent, as expendable, within his powers.

As man attempts to shape his environment and control his experience,

he dominates and intrudes upon his environment in undue measure,

with desire, with discontent, with wanting for one’s self.

 

The consequences of man’s actions or neglect are sometimes slowly reflected.

But as man’s power and numbers have been increased,

the impact of his actions and neglect has become greater

and the consequences are coming sooner.

Man must learn not to concentrate his activities in the midst of an environment

that supports his life, separate from that life-supporting environment.

 

This urban concept reflects the separation and isolation,

even the alienation of man from his environment.

The urban environment is the image of man apart from nature.

The urban environment is the image of man mediating his proximity

to his fellow man and the life forms upon which he is dependent.

Man goes forward from the urban environment armed with conquering machines.

The stages of civilization have sequenced from nomadic dependence

upon profuse, if not diffuse life support.

 

Nature released oxygen for man’s breath.

Nature cycled water through the biosphere.

Nature fixed and stored energy in the carbon cycles.

Nature provided food, requiring only of man his harvesting:

hunting and gathering.

Then man began to husband plants and animals and settled,

but there has always been neglected functions left for nature to supply,

beyond man’s awareness.

Now we must be aware, of all the functions of nature

and man’s part in nature, as a participant.

 

copyright 2011, 2013, ECOhealth / Eve Revere