Song of the Day, Today

This is the movement of the seeker, but it’s also the movement of the me because the me is always interested in opposite and equal reactions, trying to sustain one experience and avoid other experiences.
That’s what the me does.
It chases after the good and avoids the bad.
Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing

Well actually, it was just the song on the radio this morning singing about Sugar.



…Which made me want to look up once again Adya’s comments on spiritual addiction:

A spiritual person can become addicted to spiritual highs and miss the experience of Truth…
There is no drug more potent than spiritual experience. The intellectual component of this addiction is the belief that if you just had enough of these experiences, you would feel great all the time….
Spiritual experiences often become like this, and the mind puts them into its familiar pattern, thinking, “If I had this experience all the time, that would be freedom.”…
That’s the mindset of an addict: “I got it and I lost it. I need it. I don’t have it.”
Once these high and low experiences have played themselves out for a long enough period of time, it starts to dawn on you that maybe the high spiritual experience is just a pendulum swing followed by a low experience. At some point, you may have an ordinary moment and get on to the fact that these pendulum swings are equal and opposite reactions. You realize it’s impossible to sustain one part of the pendulum swing because its nature is to move back and forth.
Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing

…Which made me think of how Life has recently pushed my nose flat into reality.
“This is It.” Are you going to accept and embrace it?
Can you?
Should you?

Long story short - a friend commented yesterday (in an email from her work) that she wished she could go back on vacation. And I jokingly replied, “Vacation is now.”

I wish I could recall where I read that the great thing about travel and going to new places is that they wake you up. Your vision hasn’t gone to sleep.
You appreciate everything around you.

And on the radio today when Norah Jones started her song I flashed back to a quiet, sun-filled coffee house on an island off the coast of Maine. My companion and I were the only people there, save the owner who had spread her maritime navigation books upon the table and was deep in thought. The place seemed magical to us.  The moment is frozen in time.
And what about this morning's drive to work?
Can it be seen as any less vibrant (or mundane) than that coffee shop?

I may have posted this recently (if so, sorry), or it may have never escaped from the draft I put it in… and so, I’ll share these words:

Zen teachers don’t explain anything in an abstract way, which is both the beauty and the terror of it. My teacher’s way of explaining this would be to hold up his staff and say, “This is Buddha.” Then he would bang it on the ground, and everyone would think, “Wow! That’s really wild Zen stuff. I wish I knew what he was talking about.”
Then he would go—bang, bang, bang, bang—and he would say, “This is Zen. This is it!”
And everybody would react, “Oh wow!”
People would wonder, “What? Where?”
But nobody would say, “It couldn’t be that because that’s just beating a stick on the ground.”
Since it’s not all One to the mind, the mind keeps looking for it, “Where is it? What state is it?” Because the “me” references everything to its own emotional state, that’s what it uses to decide what is true.
It thinks that what is true is always a spiritually high emotional state, but this stick pounding is not a very spiritually high emotional state.
Then, to make it worse, to make it more horrifying, he would say, “This is a concrete description of the truth. This is Buddha.”

And this is what I’m beginning to get… as my nose is pushed down to the ground.