Happy Day to ALL,
I’m off for massage and some R&R today after a very busy week.
Tomorrow is our zen In the Garden event and I’m really excited and looking forward to sharing with the students to increase awareness, balance, have fun, and of course, stack rocks.
I hope you enjoy my Tao-Te-zen sutra: Relationships Help Ones Become Zeros
Relationship begins when the whole of All
Meets the whole of none.
Like water meeting rock
They dance and they thunder
Each becoming the other One.
She wants him hard
She wants him strong
Yet when they love each other
He knows his identity won’t last long
TAO-TE-zen practice is the letting go
Of the one that thinks it needs the other
To truly have fun.
Zero is the place of the WHOLE and the GONE
Meditate and create until your soul needs
Nothing to lean on
That is zen
Let’s take a moment together here and break this important Sutra practice down.
“Relationship begins when the whole of All meets the whole of none.” This means that there are only two qualities to the absolute or in the Buddhist sayings, the ground of being.
The ground of being is inclusive of All that is. Therefore anything that is tangible as something, and since something can only come from nothing, the ground of being is equally Absolute in its nothingness and therefore the whole of none.
“Like water meeting rock they dance and they thunder, each becoming the other One.” The wholeness or the Oneness of the created universe meets the emptiness of the uncreated.
All things are in a state of transformation. We begin to die as soon as we’re born. If you think of the All of the divine as a sugar cube and the none as water, when they meet one becomes the other.
So this passage of use in the Sutra practice is reminding us that it is the nature of the ground of being to be both everything and nothing, and it is the nature of the ego to forget that it is made of both of those things.
They are essentially prime source or elemental forces by which we become into being. Yet the truth of us is that we were inextricably all and inextricably none at the same time.
Water meeting rock is an example of how that which is seemingly hard and permanent is easily dissolved by that which is seemingly soft and malleable.
Next the practice reads “She wants him hard. She wants him strong.” It’s a play on words and on identities.
She wants him hard. She, yin or woman, wants him, masculine, hard and strong, yet ultimately the woman wants Mr. Hard and Strong only so she can dissolve him into her loveliness where the two lose self recognition and become neither hard nor soft.
At the moment of orgasm there is a stopping of the mind and there is neither you nor the other. There is either fullness as One or emptiness as none; either of those is peaceful.
“Yet when they love each other, he knows his identity won’t last long,” means that no matter how tough a man is every one of us has a female or two in our life that can see right through the illusory shell of the male ego, and this just simply means that water will transform rock so it’s not a question of if, it’s just when.
“TAO-TE-zen practice is the letting go of the one that thinks it needs the other to truly have fun.” It means that we must take responsibility for our own inner state, our own joy, our own happiness, and as long as we need somebody else to have fun, we’re in a codependent relationship and we are not growing at an optimal rate if we are aware that is where our spiritual healing lies.
“Zero is the place of the WHOLE and the GONE” because zero is three things: the whole of everything, that which is no thing, and that which is neither empty nor full. Just as a coin has a heads, a tails, and that which is in between, the side that is heads is not tails, the side that is tails in not heads, yet what is in the middle is essential for heads and tails to exist yet is neither heads nor tails.
“Zero is the place of the WHOLE and the GONE. Meditate and create until your soul needs nothing to lean on.” It means as we grow through meditation and creation we become progressively more whole in our self reliance in that we realize that there is no separation from that which is within to that which is without.
When one reaches that place, the soul does not need to lean on another for codependency as a crutch. It realizes that it is the tree, it is the fruit, it is the sheep, it is that which is on the dinner plate, and therefore it is as though the One, who has woken up, realizes there’s nobody to lean on but oneself.
Therefore one learns little things that were not so obvious, but are obvious.
Don’t do more than you can do and you won’t have to lean on other peoples.
Don’t do less than you should do and you won’t have to lean on other people. Be present with yourself for the needs of Mother Nature are your needs.
The needs of other people are your needs. Your needs are their needs. Nature’s needs are your needs.
And in that realization we learn to manage ourselves so as the snake does not over consume its tail and it does not under-consume its tail and therefore we find balance in relationships.
That is zen.
Cultivating this mindset allows the heart to be more receptive and allowing of the soul’s path.
Enjoy your weekend!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
