Everything Is Workable by Diane Musho Hamilton

Author:Diane Musho Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Shambhala

12

Everything and Nothing

I’d like to offer something to help you, but in the Zen School, we don’t have a single thing.

IKKYU1

ONCE IN A WHILE, without any effort, our thinking mind completely drops away. It could happen when we are taking a long, quiet drive through Nevada, falling into a moment of loving another person, or just sitting deeply in meditation. It could be that we have suffered so much over a breakup that one afternoon we finally just drop it all—the whole catastrophe as they say—and sit quietly on the couch, watching cars slowly pass by in the evening light. A tender calm prevails; all struggle is gone. We aren’t sure where the struggle went, but for a change we are completely free of the compulsion to make anyone wrong or bad. In fact, we are free of wanting to change anything at all. Our mind is totally free. We rest in an open field of presence. The moment is full, immediate, and strangely OK just the way it is.

This letting go can be a momentary experience, a gradual change in perception that accrues through practice (perhaps over lifetimes), or it can be a sudden, life-changing event. In her TED talk “A Stroke of Insight,” neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes such a dramatic experience caused by an aneurysm in the right hemisphere of her brain.

As the blood vessel burst and the bleeding began, Jill watched from the inside an event she had studied as a neuroscientist from the outside. She recognized that she was having a stroke, but rather than panic, she remained calm and observed as she was trained to do. She watched as her sequential, linear, cause-and-effect view of reality faded. Gradually, as she tried to dial 9-1-1, she lost her ability to talk or make sense of numbers. At the same time, she began to notice a powerful perception of wholeness that was free of time. The feeling was utterly expansive, utterly joyful. What some people experience through years of meditation was happening spontaneously as a result of an injury to her brain. It was a profound and life-changing experience. She lost all of the stressful reference points: who she was, what she wanted, and what she had to do.

Like seekers of old who were suddenly enlightened, Jill can’t contain her joy when she speaks about this experience. She is inspired and funny as she brings out a real human brain for us to look at, spreading the good news that “we are all one.”

How do we refer to this kind of openness, a space so large that it contains all things? In the Zen tradition it is sometimes called Big Mind. To describe this in words misses the mark, but let’s just say that our perception opens to a boundless, energized space in which we feel whole and utterly complete. Everything is included: This means me, you, us, all of us, all of it. One seamless whole. This experience is what so excites Jill Bolte Taylor in her TED talk.

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