After All These Years

by Rev. Mas Kodani - Los Angeles Senshin Buddhist Temple

1. The world and the "things" in it are not what they appear to be.
2. Because I imagine myself to be real, I imagine everything I perceive as real.
3. Because I set up my own terms of reality, misperception and the pain that comes from attachment to those misperceptions is inevitable.
4. Seeing the true nature of the "self" enables one to drop attachment to it as real and hence suffering that is linked to such attachment.
5. Can the "self" then, in a sheer act of will, see itself as fundamentally empty when it has a vested interest in its being real?
6. Cannot the "self", in defending its own "reality" create endless rationalizations for its own existence even into creating its own "emptiness, nothingness etc, etc" ?
7. If so, then the eye cannot see itself, neither can the "self" see the "self".
8. In the same way that the eye needs a mirror to see itself, we need others, powers other than our own, to show us our "self". These powers, whether other human beings, other animals, rocls, trees, ideas (written, sung, played, or danced) move us towards waking up. And waking up is a present progressive verb, not a process to a permanent condition.
9. Life is a waking up with a lot of help from our friends and enemies.
10. Hermits and loners are poorer for their lack of such contact.