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Today's
quotation:
Put
down your opinion, your condition, your situation, then you
will
not be
stuck. Always stay open. Working in a gas
station will be
no problem, or
cleaning someone's house. If you are holding your
idea, "I want a high-class job,
or a house, or a car," then you
will have a
problem. Zen means put everything down. Then you can control any situation or condition.
Seung Sahn
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Today's
Meditation:
Zen so often
seems to be contrary to Western thought. When he
says "put down," he means "stop carrying
around with you." Stop judging everything by
what you think it should be, and accept it for what
it is, and you'll find yourself feeling happier and
healthier, with much less stress in your life. So
much of what brings us down in life happens to be our own
thoughts, being critical of our own situations and
conditions because we think they should be something
different than they are. But for now, they aren't.
When
you accept things for what they are, then you can work to
change them, but nothing can be changed until it's
accepted, after all. Putting down our desire for a
better job allows us to do our current job much better,
and it allows us to be open to new possibilities and
opportunities. But if I'm working as a teacher and
I'm thinking I should be a CEO, then I'm going to have a
problem focusing on my work rather than focusing on what I
think I should be (but am not). I can become a
better teacher and do my work well and keep at it, or I
can do my work well and start to work towards becoming a
businessperson-- either way, right here and right now, I'm
a teacher, not a CEO, and I won't be happy as such when
I'm thinking I should be something else.
Sometimes
we like to wish things were different than they are.
There are even self-help "gurus" who tell you to
do things like "fake it till you make it," which
is telling you to pretend that things aren't as they are
until they change, most likely on their own, since all
you're doing is pretending that they aren't what they
are. I think a more practical piece of advice is to
accept what is for what it is, and then figure out what
changes you want, and then do something practical to make
those changes come true.
Things
are as they are-- that's simply a truth of life. That
doesn't mean that they need to stay as they are, of
course. We can always do something to change them,
but not until we acknowledge and accept them just as they
are. Life is a beautiful experience full of many
wonderful things, but until we put down our thoughts that
things should be different than they are, we're living a
kind of illusion that is more than likely far from
healthy.
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