Finding the Still Point by John Daido Loori

Author:John Daido Loori [Loori, John Daido]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2020-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

From birth we have been conditioned by different events and people—our teachers, parents, country, culture, neighborhood, friends, and peers. Everything we cherish—our positions, attitudes, opinions, all of our attachments, all the things we think give our life identity—is found in our conditioning. Now here we are, decades later, trying to live our lives out of this random programming we call “my life.” We feel so strongly about parts of the program we are ready to die for it. And it is all created in our own mind.

There is no escaping the fact that getting beyond this accumulated conditioning is a long process. Thirty or forty years of programming takes time to work through. We look at the thoughts, acknowledge them, let them go, and come back to the breath. Day by day, we uncover what is underneath all of the conditioning. What we discover is called freedom. It is called human life. It is called wisdom and compassion. It’s the nature of all beings.

This inherent nature is the spiritual fire that brings us to ask questions, to probe, to sit zazen. It keeps us from being satisfied with pat answers and platitudes. We don’t need a rule book to go by. We’ve come into this life fully equipped as a buddha, an awakened being, and we’ll go out fully equipped as a buddha, realized or not. Some will realize it, some will not, and whether we do or don’t is up to each one of us. It depends on how much we are willing to practice our life, how willing we are to search deeply enough to realize it directly.

Once realized, all the questions dissolve. Differences merge and a whole new reality, a whole new way of understanding ourselves and the universe, begins to develop. Reading this book is a drop in the ocean, a beginning. If you use that drop, practice that drop, then it will eventually be the ocean that covers the earth, encompasses the heavens, reaching everywhere, touched by everything. That is your life.

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