“Danger Lives In Words”

I hope you are all happy and well.

Yesterday, I got up early and went for a run in the hills. I was hoping I’d get to visit my rattlesnake friends, but I think it was too early and cold for them to be out of their dens.

I did get to see a beautiful big coyote though! I really get a kick out of the fact that as I’ve developed my inner-calm from tai-chi that I can sneak up on them. This big beautiful coyote was standing there looking over the area and I came up behind him and gave him a scare. The look on his face was one of pure surprise! They are so beautiful.

My HLC 3 class started yesterday and we have 22 Amazing people in class. There are three CHEK Level 4’s in class, which is a rare gathering of people of such caliber in one room!

My students are all beautiful, alive and ready to go deeper in their training. We had a lovely productive day yesterday. We began with Vidya, Angie Lustric and I rattling, singing and dancing with the students. It was great fun.

Today we will get into breathing mechanics, infant development, and much more.

I hope you enjoy the next Tao-Te-zen lesson today: “Danger Lives In Words”

If you see the word god written on the side of a mountain,
Does it make you want to go there?

Many mounds of books written by authors with good intentions
Have been burned by those with cross-purposes
And sometimes the authors too!

Libraries are full of books
And people read them
Yet the book does not carry context
That must come with the reader.

The reader must learn the context from a skilled teacher
Or the words may be misleading to you
And all whom you touch with them.

TAO-TE-zen practice is not based on words
It is a silent listening or sitting
By a creek or waterfall
A listening to the wind and the birds.

It is the sound of a rake scratching Mother Earth’s back
The teapot whistling.

Zen is to practice merging with the flower of the moon.
These are always novel experiences
That cannot come by way of words.

Spiritual practice does not come by way of maps
Only by presence in divine territory
Zen is best expressed in and as silence
For Danger Lives In Words.

Zen is best expressed in mind as silence, for “Danger Lives In Words.” Silence and god mean the same thing. All sound emerges from silence. All things created, are created of vibration.

Through the practice of meditation and merging with the forces of nature, meaning is conveyed through experience. That meaning and that experience is multidimensional and is beyond contrived meaning.

You cannot fit the experience of the ocean into any given word, passage, or even book.

For to write of the wholeness and the totality of the ocean itself would fill an almost infinite number of volumes of books, yet paradoxically, all of that information is conveyed to the practitioner of zen or anybody sitting next to the ocean in a state of inner quiescence in which the mind stops trying to divide and interpret.

Great meaning comes not by way of word, but by experience.

This week I invite you to look past superficial meanings, to become aware of artificial division.

Give yourself permission to merge with nature, to become present with people, present beyond their words, and what you will frequently find is a deep loneliness, longing, and emptiness for the experience of wholeness.

Yet to the very degree that one is intellectually programmed or identified through words as opposed to the actual experience, to that very degree, the person is in a perpetual subconscious search for meaning.

Thus we have a world with more people that have master’s degrees and PhDs then ever in the history of man and we are dangerously, pathologically ill as a society at large.

TAO-TE-zen practice is a gift of meaning through experience, and to the degree we find meaning through experience, we come to know the truth of the word codependency. All living creatures depend on water, and air, and earth, and warmth.

That is codependency and interdependency. Life is the overarching meaning to the degree that our intellectual pursuits create deviations in acts of living that lead to the destruction of the foundation of
the experience of life itself.

We may be considered to be confused.

Through stillness and presence with what is true beyond contrived meanings, we can easily and quickly come to realize that we are part of a wholeness, and to the degree that we divide the wholeness, we divide ourselves.

To the degree that we divide ourselves, we are unable to perceive wholeness through the intellectual mind, for it is a dividing machine itself.

I invite you to move beyond contrived meanings into the world of experience, and if we all have experiences together, we can share them and we will not have to depend on contrived meanings.

For when we all point to the experience of sitting quietly in nature, to the degree that we’ve all had the experience, we all have intimate knowledge, we all can relate to the beauty of such experiences without the need for words.

When we become the presence, the presence is within us. To become whole is to convey wholeness, and just as the wholeness of nature underlies the use and practice of destruction by way of word, yet the programmed mind is unaware of what is happening.

To the degree that we carry life, truth, wholeness and beauty within us it becomes apparent in the other as an experience that is likely to be more subconscious than conscious.

One does not necessarily have to know that they’re taking medicine for it to be therapeutic.

One could move from Denver, Colorado to Carlsbad, California, which has far cleaner air, and without realizing that the air in Carlsbad is therapeutic and therefore medicinal, they may see a change in their condition of asthma for the better.

They may think it’s because of a given food or pill they have taken since they’ve moved to Carlsbad.

They may likely attach false meaning to that pill when the truth of the matter is that which is below their conscious – fresh air is a healing force.

It is my dream that all practitioners of TAO-TE-zen become a silent, subconscious, healing force, for that is a safer way to impart wholeness to the conditioned mind than to go by way of word, which is the disease itself.

Thank you for sharing with me this week. I look forward to your explorations with this sutra as always. Enjoy!

Love and chi,

Paul Chek