The Choice-less State
sanyassin
To set up what you like against what you dislike is the
disease of the mind.
~Sengtsan
As soon as you choose you’ve lost
My Master has always said “Only the confused choose.”
Finally I think I understand what he meant, and means by this
statement.
To choose is to set up what you like against what you dislike, and
like the venerable Sengtsan third patriarch of Zen pointed to:
choosing is the disease of the mind.
Life is always challenging for those who have preferences.
The journey of an ever increasing, integrative wholeness is much
easier for those with minimal preferences; the journey is much easier
for those with minimal cherished opinions. The constant struggle with
your preferences and cherished opinions keeps one imbalanced, keeps
one from being whole.
This point was clearly driven home for me by a lovely young woman I
shared lunch with recently.
She told me I was too resistant and that’s why I was missing the mark,
why the experience was eluding me, and why I was having the
difficulties that I’m having. She also suggested I surrender and go
with the flow. Normally when people give me advice about my journey,
and transformational work in general, I dismiss them outright. My
thinking, in my usual arrogance, is that who does this person think
they are, they know nothing of me and even less of my journey, but in
this situation I valued her opinion and insights into me. I walk where
my feet are, but I have one hell of a telescope. What I mean is
there’s a lot of things about the journey I understand conceptually,
but are still not my experience. An eye cannot see itself, so her
advice opened my eyes to something I was missing about myself,
something I just couldn’t see, something I needed an objective
viewpoint about.
I was choosing this as blissful and that as miserable.
I was choosing this as love and that as fear.
I was choosing this as pleasure and that as pain.
If you even begin to make these kinds of choices; if you even begin to
make these kinds of distinctions, then as the venerable Sengtsan said
“Heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.”
What Sengtsan was alluding to was that when you begin to make these
distinctions, when you choose this over that, when you set up what you
like against what you dislike, then you throw yourself out of balance
and into imbalance. Balance is proportional to wholeness and wholeness
is proportional to bliss.
Be in the choice-less state and experience bliss.
Choose and experience misery.
It’s really that simple.
Choosing comes from a state of becoming; acceptance comes from a state
of being.
Choosing is doing; acceptance is non-doing; acceptance is going with
the universal flow, surrendering to the divine. The journey of an ever
increasing integrative wholeness is much easier for those with minimal
preferences; the journey is much easier for those with minimal
cherished opinions.
So for once I’m going to take some advice to heart, I’m going to pay
attention to what she pointed out to me, and I’m going to stop looking
so far ahead and pay attention to where my feet are.
Trying not to trip over my telescope,
Shawn Conley