Hello from the far side

I have been very pre-occupied with my own situation, function and relationship lately and I apologize that I haven’t been posting as regular as I once did. It is interesting to look into our situations and our functions during the course of life unfolding. As I own my business I am responsible not only for myself, but for others as well. This has a huge impact if one has a heart and must deal with the shrinking economy that has evolved as a result of the greed of the world. It is sad that our “Western Culture” has polluted so much of the world that I am quite saddened at the prospect of an entire planet of people who believe in this “Capitalistic” view of life.

This, itself however, is the source and the food for our practice. We in the West (excuse me if my following comments don’t include you and you have been experiencing a bad situation for a very long time) have had a good situation for many years, and many of us grew up in the West believing that our good situation would never end. My teacher, Zen Master Seung Sahn often said to me, “A good situation is a bad situation. A bad situation is a good situation.” This is what he meant. On my many trips outside of the US I can remember my interactions with the people of those countries. The closest I have come to a third world country has been in Cambodia and also perhaps in Egypt. I have also been to many other places like China, Korea, Europe, etc.., but these don’t qualify for places experiencing a ‘bad’ situation.

I can explicitly remember the people of Cambodia and Egypt, most of whom I met were for the most part smiling and seemed genuinely happy; although, many of these people didn’t know where their next meal was coming from or how they would fend for their families in the next moment. This is the raw and unadulterated truth that most of us in the West fear. What I realized from these experiences is that this is what made these people alive and happy. It seems like a paradox, yet we can hide all sorts of emotions and feeling inside of our ‘security.’ That ‘security’ is merely misplaced anxiety and can’t help us when our certainty of the future has been stripped away.

Our practice of experiencing this moment is the only gift of the truth that our teachers gave us. Please understand that our ideas, our opinions, our situation, our expectation, all of our thinking collapses because the future and our ideas have perhaps crumbled into the ocean. This is when we need to believe in the truth that the Buddha taught; which is not dependant on any of these things. God bless all of you and just know that life is very tenuous and precious; please don’t waste any of it.