Everyday Zen: Love and Work (Plus)

Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.

So the crux of zazen is this: all we must do is constantly to create a little shift from the spinning world we’ve got in our heads to right-here-now. That’s our practice. The intensity and ability to be right-here-now is what we have to develop.

There are two kinds of thoughts. There is nothing wrong with thinking in the sense of what I call “technical thinking.” We have to think in order to walk from here to the corner or to bake a cake or to solve a physics problem. That use of the mind is fine. It isn’t real or unreal; it is just what it is. But opinions, judgments, memories, dreaming a

It’s that kind of attention which is necessary for our Zen practice. We call it samadhi, this total oneness with the object.

Our whole life consists of this little subject looking outside itself for an object.

A mind that is not aware will produce illness. That’s not a criticism, however. I don’t know

No matter what the work is, it should be done with effort and total attention to what’s in front of our nose.

I am who I am right now. And that very state of being is the Buddha.

I’d like you to shut your eyes and just sit there. What’s going on? All sorts of things. A tiny twitch in your left shoulder; a pressure in your side…Notice your face for a moment. Feel it. Is it tense anywhere? Around the mouth, around the forehead? Now move down a bit. Notice your neck, just feel it. Then your shoulders, your back, chest, abdomin