Enlightenment and quieting the “monkey mind”

Hello friends. Wisdom comes from many sources, spirituality can be as enhanced from the words of a poet like Blake as the teachings of the Buddha. This poem from 2018 was written at a time when the nation was wracked by a President who enjoyed daily cliffhangers and often threatened to overturn the ship of state.  Finding peace, looking for enlightenment in such desperate times, was a challenge.

Still, the lessons of meditation and mindfulness remain as simple, eternal, and infinite as ever: external forces may overwhelm, but the quiet center is always within. Meditation may seem hopeless in the face of “the now,” but that is where the center lives: both past and future have their place, but enlightenment is in the way we detach our “monkey mind” from present worries. “The extraordinary in the ordinary” — just doing our daily tasks, sweeping the porch, filling the bird feeder, making the tea — will always remain, as Gary Snyder phrased it, the real work. Best, Gene

 

Chop Wood, Carry Water

Before Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
After Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
–Zen Saying

If the doors of perception were cleansed, every
Thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
–William Blake

It’s very hard to open to these teachings
as our longings and fears keep us desperate.

Desperate for life outside the now,
for tomorrow’s success in the common idiom.

It’s so clear in a political season,
as we bow to the strongman for a taste of power.

His fictive dreams will save us
to seek a golden future,

not love and justice now,
at the risk of becoming losers.

We expect to fail at Zen much of the time,
as monkey mind scrambles ahead and behind.

iPhone culture keeps us captive
against the terror of stillness.

Yet the masters would be easy on us,
happy with small gains against the drive of desire,

and let us break into Blake’s infinity
while we chop wood and carry water.