What Lies Beneath

We need to look deep inside.

Intellectually we may realize that we need to look deeply inside,
yet we don’t really know it. There are people we laugh at because they
can’t see the most obvious things about themselves. Well, those people
are us! We have to acknowledge that we often simply don’t want to see
the aspects of ourselves that cause us distress. We basically want life
to please us—to feel comfortable and secure. Our last priority is to
expose our own shaky (and 'sharky') supports, the tenuous beliefs that stand between
us and unknown territory. Why? Because investigating ourselves at this
level doesn’t necessarily feel good. But until we become aware of all
the ways in which we keep ourselves oblivious to what lies under the
ice, we will continue to simply glide along with no direction.

–Ezra Bayda, from Being Zen: Bringing Meditation to Life (Shambhala Publications)

Responsible Grown-up

Responsible Grown-up

We are not innocent children victimized by a big bad world; if our world is big and bad, we made it that way. This is what the Buddha taught. The "other" is the child's boogeyman, the projection of our own fears onto a terrifying object of our imagination, which in turn terrorizes us. Our ignorance is not seeing that we are the other. We cannot afford to confuse innocence with this ignorance. Violence is not a permanent, immutable, fixed object. It is a state of mind, an expression of ignorance, with no more solid substance than a cloud. We cannot make a frontal attack on violence. Even protecting ourselves from it fuels its boogeyman existence. But the Buddha taught that we can change. This was his good news: that there is a way to alleviate suffering by freeing our minds from greed, anger, and ignorance. Yet until we apprehend the ways in which we are Oklahoma City, the bombs and the baby bears, the victims and the violators, we will continue to blame "them," all the while proclaiming our innocence and evading our responsibilities.


--Helen Tworkov, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Vol. V, #1