In facing difficulties, confusion and suffering, we have the opportunity of noticing missing life. In making and clarifying our practice effort we are opening to exactly this life that we are. So the Ancestors have said, 'ordinary mind is the way'.
What keeps us from being who we are is our holding to habits of emotion, feeling and thinking. We usually call these ordinary and natural, though they are not. We do not see these habits for what they are because we are so used to them. More significantly, we do not see that in holding to habits, reacting from them, and living out of them we hinder and limit this ordinary functioning we are, and so suffer and experience all sorts of difficulties. Living out of habits, out of self-centered views, we turn activities into something that serves expectations and conditions. And we usually blame difficulties and suffering that arise on people and things 'out there'. Even hearing the phrase 'ordinary mind', we limit the word 'mind' to thinking and concepts, and get stuck in this misunderstanding.
Ordinary is being ordinary functioning. It is being the ordinary intimacy of what ever we are doing. Ordinary functioning is not a particular state of mind. In each and every aspect of our life, this is exactly who we are. Because of emptiness all things are possible. Because of ordinariness, being ordinary, everything is possible. Being plain water, we take on any form, taste, shape, color because we are ordinary, because we enter intimately into the moment, because we give self away to the arising circumstance moment. This is the simplicity and the richness of sitting-entering the moment. This is the emptiness that responds to suffering; that clarifies how self-centered habits of body-mind create and perpetuate suffering.
Our practice needs the effort to notice what is added on to the ordinary moment-if need be to over and over see the words and ideas we make this into, that we try to squeeze reality into. Seeing exactly what we are up to allows this ordinary functioning that we always are. From morning to night all we encounter are forms of emptiness, our original face. Clarifying form is emptiness. This is the whole of our life. Whatever arises is taken care of. Being clear how to take care of this is the functioning of ordinary. Every one of us as we are is ordinary; not when you attain some other skill but as you are, not as anyone else is, not as any picture you have of what other people have told you how it is, but exactly as you are. There is not a single thing you lack in being this ordinary functioning.
Intention enables us to truly taste and savor the life we are, to see to the extent we can. Being who and what we are is this opportunity, this ordinary functioning, this ordinary life, nothing other than the life of the universe.
By/ Elihu Genmyo Smith
Salam,
Cherine
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