I often say that I'm grateful to Buddhists for coming at awaking, at being fully alive, in a rich but different way than we have in the Christian tradition. Not because it's necessarily better, but because it's complementary. The East offers the West a different perspective on the 'how' of spiritual formation. And it's a very earthy, nuts & bolts perspective. They offer lots of training, lots of 'try this..., try that...'
Right now I'm reading Pema Chodron's Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change. Here's a gleaning from yesterday's reading...
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The path to awakening lies in being completely present and open to all sights, all sounds, all thoughts--never withdrawing never hiding, never needing to jazz them up or tone them down.
This is a tricky idea to grasp, no question. That's why we train in the first two commitments, with the building blocks of
(1) refraining from harming with our speech or actions and
(2) not closing our mind and heart to anyone.
We need that deep training to reach the place where everything becomes the path of awakening.
Much of the training in the first two commitments involves minimizing our tendency to pin our labels and preconceptions, our views and opinions on everything we perceive.
With the third commitment (to embrace the world just as it is), we take this still further. It's not that we can't have views and opinions about oatmeal or snow--or anything else for that matter. It's just that we don't cling to those views.
Instead, we try them on, have fun with them, like an actor or actress in a play. We can dance with life when it's a wild party completely out of control and we can dance with life when it's as tender as a lover. We work with whatever we have, with whoever we are, right now.
...Imagine what the world would be like if we could come to see our likes and dislikes as merely likes and dislikes, and what we take to be intrinsically true as just our personal viewpoint.
