Going through a stack of notes, I came across this scribbled quote, “To most of us a person, a human being, is the ceiling of reality. But a person is no superlative.“ Can we humans encompass the entirety life with our minds? We are not at the top of the chain of being, merely another morsel of it, albeit consequential. We tend to concretize our place in the raw immediacy of the present moment, in all its dimensions. We live human life among infinite forms of life, in an unknowability of the universe, boundless space and the mystery of time. But we don’t behave that way.
We stand in our place and assume that our experience is the whole of reality. But we don’t really know. Our belief about reality is founded on the information that our senses offer us. These senses, our biological equipment, select a set that we assume is the whole of reality. We forget that it is a conditioned selection.
Engaging in a regular zazen practice transforms us. We become more open, aware, sensitive. We notice more fully how we have been identifying with a conventionally held and limited set of impressions. These make up how we experience and interpret our experience. With continuous practice, the confines of our habitual awareness become ever more apparent as a conceptual universe . . . we can only imagine within our concepts. But when we begin to recognize our thoughts and concepts for what they are essentially, and relax beyond our habitual, automatic knowing, then the Dharma eye opens and we can become aware of many more possibilities.
