It is so amazing that humans want to be more than they are. We have crossed the sea's and touched the stars and yet we all seem to want to be more than we are. We are seldom content with being as we perceive ourselves to be. Don't seek enlightenment, let it seek you, but never is this less true than when we first start to wonder what we could be.
It is said that one day while entering a small village someone asked the Buddha if he was a god or a saint, it is said he simply laughed and said no. Well they demanded, "what are you"?
" I", replied the Buddha am simply "awake".
It would seem to be so little to ask, so minor a thing to accomplish this just being awake. How hard could it be? Not to ask for powers or wealth or to be able to heal the sick or raise the dead, but to simply be awake, to be able to really see the world and ourselves as we truly are seems so doable. But here we are almost three thousand years into the quest and so few, so very precious few have managed to wake up.
It is one of the most startling revelations of Zen that just siting is so dam hard. We sit and it hurts. We sit and we are board. We sit and then we stand and then we sit again. Sometimes we see things in the walls and the floor and other times we can only hear our heart beating like a great clock slowly going around and around and we ride it in great circles going nowhere, or so it seems. Of course we ask ourselves why we bother, it is so frustrating and so confusing that to just sit down and be still takes so much effort and so much will power. Somehow it doesn't seem fair and it doesn't make sense that such a simple and natural act as sitting is so dam hard.
Who would have thought that one of the evolutionary efforts towards the progress of man would be learning to just shut up and sit down? I wonder if a million million years ago some half fish like beast lay gasping for air on a beach his brain fogged by hypoxia as he struggled to find a way to live out of water , saying to himself, "what's in it for me?"
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