Shake Your Thought-Wings Free

One's real life is often the life that one does not lead. - Oscar Wilde in the Zen Calendar (March 14, 2002).

You knock at the door of Reality.
You shake your thought-wings, loosen your shoulders,
   and open. - Jelaluddin Rumi in the Zen Calendar (May 25, 2002).

Day 345.  I can't shake this feeling of being a short-timer.  I am also trying to avoid interpreting "short-timer" as a synonym for "slacker."  It is immensely difficult to remain at work to blog, but even more challenging to leave for a rest and dinner and then extract myself from home to return to the office.  Blast my hesitancy to plunge into more debt and buy a flippin' IPad on credit.  Blast my propensity for doing things the hard way.  I blame years of picking up Christmas tree needles by hand while a perfectly good vacuum cleaner sat in the pantry . . .

Fortunately, I have a specific experience on the cushion to describe.  Before chanting yesterday, I picked up the copy of "BuddhaDharma" given to me by my good friend Amy.  This particular issue focused on women Buddhists and their contributions to the study of Buddhism, particularly in the United States.  The quarterly publication was dramatically inspirational and somewhat intimidating.  There is SO MUCH occurring in the world of Buddhism that reaches SO FAR beyond the sofa cushion facing the wall of my bedroom. I was torn between a sense of thrilled invigoration and daunted paralyzation. The sheer quantity of teachers, students, places to study, university programs, retreat opportunities, publications, and countless other Buddhist activities made my head swirl.  Where should I go, who do I study with, what can I write, what do I possibly have to contribute, which events to attend . . . ?!?  Buddhism in Oklahoma seems so . . . well . . . finite.

I put the magazine down and tried to still my beating heart, feeling a bit like Dorothy when she awoke in Oz.
Then I took the whirling mass in my cranium to my cushion and sat down.  Stretched, bowed, formed a mudra, drew a breath.  Drew another.  And another.  Softened my gaze to three/quarters shut. Sensed my meditative mind penetrating new terrain.  Without exactly asserting my will, I followed it.

Perhaps it was the recent immersion, at least from an academic viewpoint, into the enormity of Buddhist thought and study through the magazine I had just perused that contributed to a quick and profound experience of vastness.  At the fringes of my thinking self, I conceived that I had somehow entered (or was at least standing on the threshold of) Original Mind.  The sense of enormity was incomprehensible.  As I attempt to describe it in this moment, the image that comes to mind is one of those plastic, fake spills of ink (or worse) that can be purchased in novelty shops.  Rather than the spill being eight inches or so in diameter, however, it was as though the ink "spot" expanded into infinity.  It just spread and spread and spread, smearing to the outer edge of my being and then continuing beyond.  And beyond Beyond.  And beyond THAT.

Time fell away.  Not my experience of it in the moment; rather, Time as a concept literally ceased to exist.  In my deep state of, uh, whatever it was, I almost chuckled at the absurdity of something as fallacious and naive as measurements of time.  From where I sat (literally), there was no such thing as discernible time.  The dimension had become this immeasurable continuum of nothingness and meaninglessness.  I could not distinguish the moment I was in from every single moment that had preceded it (beginningless time) to every single moment that would follow (endless future) -- and it completely didn't matter.  A faint elation, accompanied by wary relief, accompanied my escape from the illusion of time. Very weird stuff.

This is the point in the blog where I hesitate to speculate or analyze further.  I feel a strange guardedness, sort of like:  What happens on the cushion STAYS on the cushion.  Which is ridiculous.  I don't feel an inclination to jubilantly shout, "At last!! Enlightenment!!" which is good, because my teacher Frank always admonished against such a response should we ever, in fact, arrive at Nirvana.

I do feel inclined to say that I may have knocked at the door of Reality, shook my thought-wings free, and opened.  Opened right up.  Opened wide.  The gynormous vastness of Original Mind is super cool.  Way cooler than the little cramped space of my tiny human brain that I usually occupy.  I can say this for certain:  In the Vastness there is Joy.  Infinite Joy.  Abundance.  Infinite abundance.  Solutions to every problem encountered since the dawn of time and well past infinity.  And it is all right there waiting for us.  At the door of Reality.  We just have to step over the threshold.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc