We shall see what is good, and what is not

[SelfHealedMadman]

~
So it seems Obama signed off on the health care bill.
I've suspended judgement on it as I don't have enough information to even make an educated guess.
I'm simply amazed at the mass hysteria this has generated...
Some details are coming to light on this bill...I suppose I should watch the local news or talk to Ang about it 
It's going to be an interesting year, that's for sure!
Kris

[SelfHealedMadman]

~
This reminds me of an old Zen story...
There once was a widower and his son who lived outside a village and farmed.  The young man wanted a horse. He told his father all of the reasons he should have a horse. "Oh, Father, it would be so good to have a horse. I could plow the fields beside you. You at the ox and I at the horse. We could prepare more land for planting and care for the increased crops. We will have plenty for us, and we can sell the extra in the village. We can save up so you will have ease in your later years. It would be so good".
The old man replied to his son, "We shall see what is good, and what is not".
For the young man's birthday, the old widower gets him a horse.
The young man is thrilled, overjoyed. He goes on and on about all of the things they will be doing with clearing the fields, planting and raising the crops. How the old man will not have to work hard in his later years. All the time saying "This is so very, very good".
The young man wakes up early every day to care for the horse. He brushes him out each morning and each evening. The two begin to clear extra land, in preparation of planting more seeds. Each day the young man comes in after brushing his horse out in the evening, telling the old man "This is so very good", and each time the old man replies "We shall see what is good, and what is not".
One morning the young man goes out to the barn to feed and brush out his horse, to find the horse is gone. He runs back to the house telling his father, "This is so bad, so very bad. How are we going to be able to clear the rest of the land in order to plant all the crops, and then till the land and care for the crops without my horse? This is bad, this is so very, very bad."
The old man replied to his son, "We shall see what is good, and what is not".
The young man feels very defeated. His father works the ox while he pulls the horses' plow behind him. The plow is so very heavy, the young man finds it difficult to even raise his head while plowing the field. He starts to fall behind his father with the ox. As the young man looks up to find his father and focuses his eyes, across the field at the edge of the woods, he sees his horse! He sees his horse has brought with him a mare!
The young man drops the plow behind him, running towards his father and yelling, "Oh father, this is so very good. Not only will we be able to finish clearing the extra land and planting the extra crops, now that my horse has returned. It is sure that we will also have a colt to sell in the village. We'll have the extra crop money and the money from the colt. You will be well taken care of in your old age. This is so very, very good."
The old man replied to his son, "We shall see what is good, and what is not".
The young man brings his horse into the barn and the wild mare follows him in. The young man begins to think that this wild horse could also be trained, ridden and pull the plow. He starts to dream of not only his father being well taken care of in his old age, but setting himself up and attracting a beautiful woman from the village to be his wife. He decides to break the wild horse himself.
He feeds and brushes out his horse and the mare. That night he tells his father of his hopes and dreams for the new mare, being able to set himself up as well as taking care of his father. He's very excited, all the time saying time and time again, "This is so very, very good".
First thing the next morning, the young man feeds and brushes out the mare and then his horse. He decides to forgo the plowing that day, and get to break the mare. It is not long before the mare has thrown him and he has broken his leg. He cries out to his father, "OH Father, this is so very, very bad. I should have plowed the field with you today. Now I have broken my leg and I can not either break the mare or help you in the fields. With what little bit we've done, we will be lucky to have enough to eat this winter. The colt will be of no help to use to us this winter while we starve, since it won't be born until spring. This is so very, very bad".
The old man replied to his son, "We shall see what is good, and what is not".
It just so happened that the magistrate had sent out his army into the villages to "recruit" all of the young men, forcing all able bodied men to join the army and prepare for his up coming war. The widower was too old, and the young man's leg was broken, so they were left behind while the others were forced to leave to fight the war.
The young man turned to his father and asked, "Is this good, or is this bad?".
Right now here in the USA we're asking, is this good, or is this bad?

[SelfHealedMadman]

~
Acting.
Whether we realize it or not, acting figures very strongly into each of our lives.
We are always concerned with acting in such a way, presenting ourselves in such a way, that our spouses, our friends, our clients, our employees, our employer, our colleagues, our discussion group buddies, accept us in the way that we would like our projection of ourselves to be accepted. We are very much engaged in this all of the time, both unconsciously and even consciously.
Of course, how much we are aware of depends upon how aware we are of what we are doing, on all levels. And then we are also engaged in trying to manipulate and control others, in the outside world, to have them fit our image of what we think they should be.
Now: I say the word “act.” What does that mean, “to act”?
In the beginning, I thought that acting was different from real life. I thought acting was a false representation, and that daily life was real, because I wasn’t clear about what the word “act” meant.
This is important because, as an example, when we write on a discussion board, we are acting.
Now, there is such a thing as bad acting and good acting. What do you suppose the difference is?
I am saying that acting, on stage, or acting when you are writing to a discussion group, or even acting when you are eating dinner or driving to work is all the same.
It is all acting. It is all just doing something. But, as I'm learning from Sensei, there is doing something without mind and body unified, which is false, and there is acting in a true way. We call this “true action.”  Or, “Gods Mind,” or “One With The Universe.”  Pick your poison 
It means not making the Universe into your own image or trying to fit yourself to someone else’s image of the Universe.
Can you see how that allows for true action?
Because of our habit of being untrue, we think that being true is something that we need to manufacture or represent. We cannot represent that which is true. It is not in our capability, our lexicon, our quiver.
In fact, that which is true is the very opposite of any kind of representation. It is not something that we can manufacture at all. It is only what is here when all of the effort to create it drops away.
We must let go of all of our compulsion - I am talking here about letting go of the attachment to the conditioned personality itself. This is the attachment that has to go before the true can be present.
Once again per Sensei, the true is our Original Condition.
It is the way we already are, without anything added on. Doesn’t that just sound great?! So why do we feel compelled to add something on?
We don’t know? Our compulsion is habitual?
So we are saying that we are forced to add on something, because this is habitual. It kind of sounds like saying “We do it because we do it.” Isn’t that circular thinking?
A big hint is that the answer to the question resides in the correct understanding of identity. We have to be careful that we don’t think about life from a distance, as if it is a story. This is looking from conditioned memory, not seeing what is immediately in front of us.
The reason we tend to think in circles when asked a question like this is that our consideration is secondary to the cause. There is a primary cause. What is that? There is an original error that all human beings have made through all of time and that will continue as such. What is that error? What is the mistake that compels us to choose minus, to add on top of what is, to fake it?
We find ourselves in an identity crisis. And you don’t have to do something about that.  Just recognize it. Seeing it is everything. You don’t have to chase the negative away.
You don’t have to beat Satan. If you go into a dark room, what do you do with the dark?
You turn on the light! It is just darkness. It actually doesn’t exist as such, but only as an absence of light. It is not a substance. But we tend to come into the room and feel frightened and then try to do something with the bad darkness. The solution is just seeing, just recognizing the condition that we are in. That is what turns on the light. It may not do so instantly, like a light in a dark room, but it begins the process of change.
And then at some point all the darkness indeed is gone, in one moment of blinding light.
From then on everything is different for you. It still looks the same to everybody else.
And you still have to go through everything. It is not the end to your troubles, exactly. It is simply that the awakening event is actually the beginning of true practice for you. You still have to earn a living, raise a family, drive yourself to work, etc. It doesn’t mean there are no more things to work out. It is just that you see life utterly differently. You can now practice being free of the attachment to the result of it all. Do you see that this is possible for you?
This is why we want to engage with each other, why we discuss a subject about being a warrior or whatever it is.  We want everyone to get jump-started into this process, because we only have old-fashioned circular thinking otherwise. This process of being a 'warrior' is the process of seeing so that you can let go of the darkness.
Does that sound familiar?
“Oh yeah.” So everybody is engaged in this and everybody knows it? Does it sound like I am talking about you, or do you think maybe I am talking about some other people, not you, but someone else?
There is a story about a Zen monk that is cooking in the kitchen and the master comes in and says to him, “Go to my room and look just above my desk, in the tokonoma.” The student has just recently cleaned the master’s room, and thinks he must have left something amiss. So he runs to the room and searches the whole room very carefully, to see what is wrong. But he can’t find any dust or even a drop of water left over from the cleaning. So he runs back to the teacher and says, “Roshi. What did I do wrong? It seems perfectly fine to me. I’ve checked it out very carefully. Your room is clean.” And the master says, “No, you fool. I picked a flower this morning and put it in the tokonoma. I wanted to you to see the flower. It’s so beautiful. Did you notice the flower?” And the student says, “No, I didn’t see any flower. I was looking for what was wrong.”
We are so busy, looking for and then correcting, what isn’t even wrong, that it is very difficult for us to see what is right in front of us. We often see something wrong and think, “I’m seeing what is.” But is this seeing "what is"?
Kris

[SelfHealedMadman]

~
~
So whatever we are doing, we are acting.  It doesn’t refer to some sort of false representation. We are always acting all of the time.
In Aikido, we say good acting is being in a state of mind/body unification, in other words being true, not being false.
Bad acting is attempting to fit yourself into a socialized mold that you have figured out over a period of time. We see that some things seem to work some of the time, so we are trying to figure out how to act so that everything works all of the time. And that effort is what I am calling false representation. We are trying to create our own nirvana.
This kind of thing is an utterly fruitless endeavor, and yet, tragically, most people, even you folks, are to some degree engaged in that process. The revolting development is to see how stupid we are and then to realize that we are still stupid.
First, we have to see how foolish we are. I mean by “foolish” or “stupid” that we promote bad acting in our own character, a false representation of what is, in hopes that that will give us some success. We hope to fool some of the people some of the time, but we can never fool all the people all the time.
When we see our falseness is not working, then we think, “I had better polish my acting skills. My falseness better get more convincing so I can fool all of the people all of the time.”
If you are lucky, one day you get to meet someone who says, “That will never work, because that’s false.”
It may hurt when you hear that said, and you may fight against it, you may resist it. You may not like that idea. “How dare you say I am false! How dare you say I’m a fake!” And yet, that is bad acting, the way most people are engaged most of the time.
You are in a reactive state, a false state. That anger comes about because you are trying to create a certain image and someone has contradicted that image. They are not respecting that image that you are holding up there. So the whole issue is one of bad acting.
In good acting there is often nothing to say. Good acting is just responding to the need of the moment. Just like in good Aikido, there are no moves to be made unless there is finally a physical attack of some kind, and then the response is true, compassionate, efficient, to the point, and satisfactory. We’re OK, as long as there is no bad acting involved. So the question is, can we be free of bad acting.
And our practice is that very thing, to be true.
From my view, there is a difference between reacting and responding:  reacting is the self protecting itself, or attempting to preserve or increase itself in some way. That’s always bad acting. But a response is true. In other words, often people think, “Well, if I don’t engage in reacting them I am just going to sit here hiding and do nothing.”
But **** still happens, you know?
So, we want to respond, be true, good actors. 
Then why don’t we do it? We say we know what it is and want it.  If we want that and we know how to do it, then why don’t we just do it?
Do what you want, and see what the results are, and see what that leads you to.  That’s what led you here to this discussion group, or this teacher or that teacher, so be true to that.  We can’t wake someone up that is pretending to be asleep.
Let’s be honest with ourselves here, folks. The reason we are not doing what we say we want to do, is because we don’t really want to do it.  We want the teacher to support us, as a student who is sincere and wants to do The Work. That’s what we present to the teacher. But that is not entirely true, is it?
And this is why all of us are here, because we are wrestling with that. To be honest with our self takes a lot of courage. And it takes a great deal of attentive capacity to be able to stay in that and look at it. If your mind is flitting around, giving yourself various excuses, and saying “I’m not so bad,” you’re not going to come to any kind of great reckoning. By the way, that’s the worst phrase that a student can utter, “I’m not so bad.”
We are a village. There is not just the one who wants to do The Work and the one who doesn’t want to do The Work. In every aspect of relative thinking, there is a pro and a con. And we chase back and forth on this relative scale, like mad rats, always trying to figure out how to be on the successful end of things.
And it never ever happens. Just talk to someone who has billions of dollars. It doesn’t do it. No matter what your aspiration is. It might not be to be a wealthy wo/man. It might be to be a great teacher, or it might be to be a great writer, or a great artist, or a great lover.
But it all turns to dust because it’s just an image, something we are trying to create. It’s those two things, it’s representing something that everyone will think is cool, which is meeting society’s expectation, or trying to adjust everyone else to fit your idea.
When we are angry at someone, reacting, we are attempting to re‐adjust him or her to recognize how good you are, how you should be
respected. And s/he is not following along with your program.
Follow life. Whatever comes up, respond truly to that.
But Curtis Sensei said “Do nothing.” What?!?
What's the difference is between “do nothing” and “just do.”
No difference.
When Curtis Sensei says “do nothing,” he means don’t organize and control and run your own program. Instead, follow life. Whatever comes up, respond truly to that.
That’s why in Aikido we practice otomo, for instance, so we can have an opportunity to do that with someone who, presumably, we respect; our teacher. And then once we sort of get the hang of that, we have that experience, and we see what it’s like, then we might be able to transfer that way of responding to everyone in our life, and every thing in our life, so that at every moment we are just being an open conduit for the wisdom that’s in every one of us. Every one of us knows.
It’s just that, like I said, you can’t wake yourself up when you are pretending to be asleep. We have to admit that we are not asleep.  Which means that we have to admit that we know, and take responsibility for that knowing. That takes a lot of courage. We’ve been pretending all of our life to be asleep.
Kris

[SelfHealedMadman]

~

"It's not the people around you who are at fault, they cannot help themselves. The fault is with you, because you can help yourself, but you are bent on judging them, at a deep level of silence. Any **** can judge. If you judge them, you will only get the worst out of them. All of us human beings are prisoners, and it is that prison that makes us act in such a miserable way. Your challenge is to take people as they are! Leave people alone.  You may not understand what I'm talking about. If you're not conscious of your desire to judge them you are in even worse shape. This is the flaw of warrior-travelers when they begin to resume their journeys. They get cocky, out of hand".

Carlos Castaneda
The Active Side of Infinity

[Mornings Son]

It’s just that, like I said, you can’t wake yourself up when you are
pretending to be asleep. We have to admit that we are not asleep.  Which
means that we have to admit that we know, and take responsibility for
that knowing. That takes a lot of courage. We’ve been pretending all of
our life to be asleep.We have been conditioned to pretend, to fit in the social order, to believe that this is 'good' and that is 'bad'.
How can we break free?... and what is the price of awakening and stopping the pretending game?
Stopping the inner dialogue might do wonders. Right?
Kris do you think that everybody knows or can see that they are pretending to sleep?

[SelfHealedMadman]

~
Mornings Son:  How can we break free?... and what is the price of awakening and stopping the pretending game?
SHM:  How?  Raising our awareness.  The price?  The loss of the 'old self'. 
Mornings Son:  Stopping the inner dialogue might do wonders. Right?
SHM:  Yes.  Yet let me as you or anyone else who cares to reply.
We've all been 'taught' to stop the internal dialogue.  Let me ask a question though.  How many have ever really taken a look at their internal dialogue and really listen, really check out what it's saying?  Perhaps it's just me, but I've found as many wonders in actually listening to my ID as I have in stopping it.  Just curious if anyone else has worked with this...
Mornings Son:  Kris do you think that everybody knows or can see that they are pretending to sleep?
SHM:  People are living their lives.  What their 'lives' are, well.......

[snowblind]

There is an exercise that is quite enlightening dealing with inner dialogue. I have done this and it is painful yet oh so revealing. Set a stopwatch for 15 minutes, and when the timer goes off free write for 2 minutes and close the book, do not read what you have written. Do this for one day while awake. When you are ready read what you have written at one time. It is extraordinary. Lose the inner editor. When you read what you have written it is extremely difficult to rationalize your feelings...you get a snapshot of the river of consciousness that lies just under the surface of reality.

[Mornings Son]

How many have ever really taken a look at their internal dialogue and
really listen, really check out what it's saying?  Perhaps it's just me,
but I've found as many wonders in actually listening to my ID as I have
in stopping it.  Just curious if anyone else has worked with this...In numerous hours of zazen I listen and there was brilliant ideas at times also sick ****.. like a TV shifting channel all by itself to whatever there can catch my focus.
I have this picture that its the flyer I am talking with or the ego if you like.

[Guest]