Love, Get Real

Mother Clings to Her Dead Baby

When your mind is free from all clinging and thinks of neither good nor evil, you should be careful not to sink into a sheer emptiness and stick to a deathlike stillness; you should rather try to broaden your learning and increase your knowledge, that you may become aware of your own mind and thoroughly comprehend the essential teaching of all the Enlightened Ones; you should cultivate a spirit of congenial harmony in your fellowship with others and free yourself of the cramping idea of the “self” and “other” until you attain complete enlightenment and realize your true nature which is immutable. Hui Neng

I love dogs. I love their nature, their constant sniffing out life and curious energy for “what’s happening” around them. They know how to get along with one another without wordy reproof or written law. They use yawns, bowing, averting their eyes and exposing the soft underbelly to signal what they are sensing.   They share, plot and plan and play wildly with the simplest of stuff. They learn and let go of mistakes and never hold a grudge. They teach each other. And they are great companions. It’s all we need to know about them, to care for them to let them sleep with us, eat with us and rest on our couches and chairs.

Ordinary life is Buddha life, it does not happen somewhere else, someplace different than everyday life. It is in the ordinary, everyday stuff of life that our mind clings, divides and sinks into miseries of all kinds. We can act like dead sticks and freeze our bodies and minds in attempt to “look like the still, stone images” of Buddha, but this is not the awakened mind, this is the imitation mind.