Heartcore Dharma

Photo from the ID Project

I am participating in a distance learning Interdependence Project 10-week class called Heartcore Dharma. As part of the class, I am making a vow to commit to daily meditation practice, making a vow every 7 days. I have struggled the past month with consistency in daily practice, and I am glad to have something concrete, and an anchor of a weekly podcast/class to help recommit.
I just downloaded the first podcast and am looking forward to learning. I love the ID project weekly podcasts, and Ethan Nichtern's outlook on Buddhism in the 21st century. I often wish I lived somewhere that had a larger dharma community, with places like the ID Project!

Opening

There is a moment when in zazen when I sense that I am not the one looking through my eyes, or hearing with my ears. That the universe is looking through me. Perhaps this is pretentious, but it is a physical knowing and I can't shake it. I have been trying to probe this lately, and just keep coming back to this same knowing. I wonder if anyone else senses this.
I makes me think of the mice in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Mice are really just the smallest manifestation in this dimension of huge multidimensional beings. Like their toe is the only bit that dips into this universe, and it happens to take the form of a mouse. These beings are using Earth as a computer to explain life, the universe and everything.
So in those fleeting moments, when I feel the universe looking through, I sometimes feel a bit like a mouse, just barely sensing my multidimensional iceberg body. Or maybe as a byte in this existential computer.  Or maybe just 42.
It points back to the interdependent, interconnectedness of the universe. This has been a recurring motif in much of my insights. It feels a bit like someone hitting me over the head again and again, or waving one of those lightsabres they use to direct planes. Wake up, you fool, the universe is non-dual. Form is emptiness, emptiness form.  And yet... and yet....
But right now, the cat is determined to put her input in, despite my efforts to dissuade her from walking on the keyboard. Maybe she will have an insight. Cats usually do have an opinion about mice, no matter the dimension.

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Thanks for the post, Artemis.

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.
Buddha

Post from the Past: Diving in Hippo Shit

Diving the hippo pool today. About once a month I am assigned a dive day in which I get into the hippo pool with scuba gear and suck up hippo shit with big hoses. It was a very cold day, but the water was 72 so not too bad.

Lately, I have been focusing on mindfulness. Being aware of my surroundings, and inevitably, the beauty and connectedness of things. And so, I tried to be mindful that I was starting my day diving with more fish then I would see on a reef, turtles and the clearest water possible. Sunbeams gleamed through the freshly scrubbed glass, illuminating and making transparent the stained glass of fish fins.

So despite the 3 feet of hippo shit, I was pretty happy. I am not sure if it was that forced kind of happiness though. Like ‘now I am a spiritual person so I am going to smile and be happy at my new spiritual nature. See how clever I am to be happy about sunshine in glass and fishies!’ It seemed real, but I always question myself. I suppose that is the essence of mindfulness.

Being mindful is the opposite of putting on rose colored glasses, and ignoring the reality of the world. I never forgot that I was literally swimming in hippo shit. But swimming in the sewer of hippos also has sunshine, and fishes, and ripples on the surface, and being alive, breathing underwater. And I think that is the point. At least that is how I understand it.
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I remember one of my coworkers asking at a dive meeting “Why don’t you just stop putting hay in the water?” Everyone laughed.
Hippo shit is very recognizable as hay. That hay has passed through the hippo’s broad mandibles, down the throat, through the stomach, fermented in the gut and passed out the other side. It just happens to still be mostly hay. Thus her mistake.

I remember reading in a zen book once. The question was “ What is the Buddha?”
The answers were koan in nature. Things like “if you see the Buddha, kill him’, ' I am the Buddha' 'Three pounds of flax' and the like.
But the answer that always made me laugh was “Dried shit-stick”.

I was in my mystic phase and was coming aware of the non-separateness of things. That the grand tree is the human is the beaten dog is the discarded food wrapper is the shit stick. And thus, is the Buddha, or spirit, or god, or universal energy or whatever.

We are all hippo shit. And even closer, human shit.. I am a food body. I am a dying mass. I am a meat popsicle. I am a shit machine.

But I am also the lotus flower, and the kite with many tails. I am the sun, and the atom. I am dark matter. I am Buddha.

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Speaking of hippo shit. Khalil Gibran writes about love treating you like a head of wheat, reaped by the beloved, ground on the stone of love, hulled, kneaded and baked, until we no longer resemble ourselves, but are still the wheat, that captured sunshine and rain and earth, but changed by the force of love.

And let me tell you. That hay is still hay. Even after being loved so greatly by a hippo.

"We are all given a divine invitation, and no one can refuse. Will you come dressed for dancing? Or will be you be delivered on a stretcher to truth's ward?" ~Hafiz

A Dream

I had a dream last night that I was leading a group of my friends and some strangers in a meditation session. A woman was there who was the dharma teacher, and she passed the bell to me. I was worried about getting everything right, and kept dropping the bell, and its random attachments. I was worried about messing things up, and proving myself to the teacher. The dream was very long, and most of it was me trying to gather people in the right place, picking up the dropped bell, worrying about screwing up, etc. And when I actually started ‘teaching’ I woke up talking, saying what I wanted to say in the dream. It was weird.
But in hindsight, this is often how go about meditation, and many things in my life. It is a lot of ‘well, I will do it later when I can get everything perfectly right’, or ‘I can’t devote the time it needs now, so I will put it off’. I procrasinate or not do things all together because it isn’t the exact right time. From laundry to meditation.
But there will ALWAYS be dust bunnies in your meditation corner. Or animal fur on your zafu. Or fat on your body. Delaying meditation/love/change for the perfect situation will always delay happiness. The quote ‘sit like your hair is on fire’ could apply here. Every minute delayed cleaning your bathroom or finding the right incense is another minute your scalp burns, another minute your life ebbs away forever.
So waiting until some perfect time to dedicate myself to practice, or giving into love, is futile, and attachment to perfection. I don’t need the permission of perfection to find happiness. I have a right to be peaceful, a right to care for myself, right to be happy.
Finally! Permission to just act! No need to decorate myself in false perfection, in imagined shining emperors clothes. To just be! As I am. Just fine. Right now.

May ALL beings find happiness

This will be a journal/blog following my journey as a student of meditation, the dharma and a senior zookeeper at a large zoo in Florida. I am only a beginner on this path, but the animals I work with teach me more about the dharma than any teacher possibly could.

I have a few random writings from the past that I have saved and will post occasionally, so things may be out of order chronologically.

Peace, Love and Enrichment.