A New Years Rsolution?

"When you do things from your soul, you feel a river in you, a joy."  - Rumi There isn't  a teacher in the world that has not been asked one time or another, "How do I know?"  I have learned that there will be many events in one's lifetime that even the teacher may ask, "How do I know?"  We all want to know.  However most of us never find satisfaction not because no one knows, but because we look for the answer to the question in all the wrong places.  Some of us will look in our Faith, some in a book, a motivational speaker, a priest or rabbi, or science.  Not that any of these sources don't have a clue, but the best and only source to ask, "How do I know?" is YOU.

Karma Shmarma - Sifting Through it All

Nearly ten months ago my world came crashing down around me like a 9.9 magnitude on the Richter scale.  Life as I knew it for nearly two decades is gone, and the aftershocks keep coming.  One of the very first questions we often ask ourselves in such moments is, "Why did this happen to me?", "What is the meaning?", or as some people ask, "What is the lesson the Universe or God is trying to teach me?"  In addition to asking such questions at times myself, I have given much time to inquiring into the nature of such questioning.  We humans are complicated beings, or at least we surely can make our lives complicated.  Whenever we do not understand something, or when we need to have some meaning to events we often enter into some kind of cosmic search for the answers.  We are also very good in such creative abilities as to "create God in our own image".  Whether you call It God, the Universe, or Buddha-nature, in the west we mean the same thing - some larger power is mysteriously involved with what's happening in our lives.

The Three Pillars of Practice - Faith

By - Rev. Richard Emyo Bizub

With the opening of the 2011–2012 training period, or Ango last week, I thought it would be timely to focus on three fundamental elements of Zen Buddhism.  They are Great Faith, Great Doubt and Great Perseverance.  They are sometimes referred to as the Three Pillars of Practice.  So during the next few Wednesday nights I am going to spend some time on each one of these essential elements of Zen.  Tonight we start with Great Faith, by introducing the topic with excerpts from an essay by Abraham Heschel.  

“Faith is sensitiveness to what transcends nature, knowledge, and will, awareness of the ultimate, alertness to the holy dimension of all reality.  Faith is a force in man, lying deeper than the stratum of reason and its nature cannot be defined in abstract, static terms.  To have faith is not to infer the beyond from the wretched here, but to perceive the wonder that is here and to be stirred by the desire to integrate the self into the holy order of living.  It is not a deduction but an intuition, not a form of knowledge, of being convinced without proof, but the attitude of mind toward ideas whose scope is wider than its own capacity to grasp.”  

“In  the light of faith we do not seek to unveil or to explain but to perceive and to absorb the rarities of mystery that are gleaming softly from all things; not to know more, but to know what is more than anything we can grasp.  How can our soul be insensitive to the fragrance of the unknown that is bestowed upon our life?  What is most dear and real is neither known nor knowable.”  

“Faith does not spring out of nothing. It comes with the discovery of the holy dimension of our existence.  Suddenly we become aware that our lips touch the veil that hangs before the Holy of Holies.  Our face is lit up for a time with the light from behind the veil.  Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy.  It is almost as though God were thinking for us.”