The Traces of Faith

The Ox Herder sees traces of footprints and begins to follow them.

Not much has changed, but he sees something.

What traces do you see?

 What do you follow?

Don't skip this question. You may not know, the Ox Herder doesn't know but he has a "sense" of something because he sees the traces on the ground before him. Do you see the traces of faith in your situation? 

 

Asking your self what you seek tells you where you are? You might say, peace of mind, fun, excitement, a good day or something more concrete, a phone call from a beloved, a check in the mail, to get out of bed, a lover, a child, more money. The object tells you your intention. 

The Ox Herder has a sense of something and decides to follow the traces in the dirt. He sees something and he is intending to follow it. The "something" in his case is a sense of something within himself that needs to be looked at further so he heads out to find out about it. His faith arises and he follows it.

Notice this fellow is looking right in front of him. There is a saying in Zen that everything you need to know is right in front of your left eye. It points to a very close-up spot, a spot never apart from you. Where is your faith?

If you see only the footprints, you most likely do not know for sure what you will find but you are willing to see for yourself where they lead. There is uncertainty but some sense to see more. There is no escape from "not knowing." Although you may from time to time find yourself and others thinking "you do know!" and falling into the foolish arms of seeing yourself as a "know-it-all."

This "not knowing" works both in the world and in spiritual practice. The world, the mundane world is often quite precise. You are born on a certain day, in a certain place, to a certain mother. Sometimes the precision is not clear, because things that seem to work sometimes stop working. Planes that fly sometimes fall out of the sky. One minute a person is alive and breathing and the next minute they drop dead. Although there is a precision to the world it is an uncertain precision. Something seems to surprise us over and over again. It can be as simple as your car won't start.

In spiritual practice it is prudent and encouraged to come to the practice without any striving for a result. There are tips or pointers or instructions, however,  on how to practice and what direction to take in practice but the destination is hard to put into words and no one knows what will happen for you. Knowing the pointers and instructions, however, is important. The result is unknowable.

Spiritual truth, however, can be known, but it is hard to explain or describe. It is perhaps more precise to say the destination of spiritual practice is "hard to say" but not unknowable. There is growth, change, development, steps and process that are recognizable. But spiritual practice leaves behind the confines of an ego-self that needs to categorize and organize and codify things into black and white columns and this shift or realization is "hard to say.""I don't know, I can't say" are hard for you when you hold tightly to your ego-myths and your views of what you think is true.

Holding to fixed views causes much disappointment and dissatisfaction.

If you are reading the book, we are now in Chapter Two.