The Great Intention

I recently heard a dharma talk where the speaker reminded those listening that intention comes before attempt which is followed by actualization...What is the Great Intention of your life. Forget for a moment all the thoughts and beliefs that you have heard or taken in and ask your self in the privacy of in between your own heart beats...what is the great intention of my life? It might prove to show you the attempts and actualizations arising...I don't know.

I know that for much of my life it has been pretty stupid and that stupidity was attempts to actualize something beyond acquisitions and protections and defenses...although at very early ages I turned away from getting and having I often found myself with my fingers in the cookie jar. How about you?

I am at the present time turned towards freedom and liberation. Asking and looking at freedom brings up more silence than words.

Living a stupid life

A student went to his teacher and whined, “I live a stupid life.”
“From the very beginning.” replied the teacher.
Surprised, the student repeated, “from the very beginning?”
“Yes! And, I suspect, without neglect.”

From the very beginning…without neglect.
What is it that is from the very beginning, without neglect?
The call of goodness to the true situation. This student, although whining about his life and surprised by the teacher’s reply, sits in the middle of the cloudless sky, but is unable to fully know it. The student, although unaware of the cloudless sky, cries out the truth when he says, “I live a stupid life.” The teacher knows the student is unaware and hears the cry. The teacher brushes away the clouds with her true response, “from the very beginning.” The student, jolted, repeats the teacher’s reply, “from the very beginning.” The teacher, with another sweep brushes again with an emphatic “Yes! Without neglect.” In other words, from the very beginning this student, like all of us, lives stupidly and lives stupidly without neglect. The juxtaposition of the whine and the response of “yes” awaken and free both the teacher and the student in the sharing. It can not be otherwise.

Awareness is everywhere and ever available. It is also at this meeting that the student determines which direction to turn, either towards the continuation of the whine or the realization of the call to dive into the true situation of finding oneself continuously stupid. Every moment is like this. It is like a turnstile spinning in either direction for each one of to enter. Can the student hear the call of buddha? Can the student take what might seem a backward step into the whiney cry and say “yes.”[1] The student, if ready, turns inward and sees for oneself his stupid ways of living. And with his own voice and in the light of awareness remark to himself, “Yes, indeed, I live a stupid life and I live it since the beginning without neglect!” Buddha within hears “the whine” as a cry of ignorance, nothing more, and nothing less. It is an exclamation of “not fully knowing” the true situation. Yet, it is transformed and illuminated once realized by the student as where he actually is. Buddha hears Buddha.

Before the transformational confession is echoed the student may be hindered by self-centered obstacles. The student, for example, may find a wish to be right, a defense to run or avoid, a wish to be in oblivion, a reliance on a habit or a fear of knowing the oceanic truth. The student may feel angry or hurt or misunderstood. The hindrances to the call arise as an endless myriad of shapes and colors and it takes a buddha to see each shape as a response to a call to turn toward the homeless home. It takes a buddha to hear a buddha, to see a buddha. The whines, the begging, the complaints, the howls, the scoffs, the rageful fits are some of the cries from a caught human being. It is like an animal in a trap. These cries are attempts to get free just as an animal yowls and rips and tears its own flesh to free a snared paw. Human beings do the same. How can it be otherwise? Although the truth is right in front of us all the time; we are trapped and snared by our inner delusions. Each step, each response is a response which may or may not be one of being awake, but even so, it is an attempt to free ourselves. Buddha is always calling us, always. Although it may feel and seem like it is Mara or the devil, buddha is there right in the middle of the devilish fevers. Our confused and sometimes upside-down response is our naïve yet noble attempt to find the Way, to set our self free of the inner traps of grasping, pushing, and pulling at our own ensnared attention. We imprison our self over and over again with our constricted views of our life circumstances.

Just as an animal “instinctively” bites its own leg to free itself, human beings “instinctively” try to find the Way, ignorantly and instinctively. It takes the big ears of Buddha to hear the cries as they really are, to see the Buddha being seized by a stupid life and to help the Buddha get freely awaken in stupidity.

A story.
Ed told me this week that students sometimes say, "I don't want to smile sometimes, I am too angry or hurt or sad to smile." The response to such a heart might go like this,"well, could you just find a little smile for the one who does not want to smile?"






[1] Dogen, Fukazazengi