It is always a good morning after sitting, especially with the spring sunlight and warmth, temperatures coming up to the 40s and 50s after a sweeping snowstorm covered tens of states.
As the snowstorm was passing through the Midwest, I visited San Francisco, finding spring in full swing with cherry blossoms blooming at the Peace Plaza and along the paths to Muir Woods. Temperatures were in the 60s, as high as 72.
Garyu, reclining dragon, who used to sit with us, took me to the Muir Woods National Monument early in the morning. We walked up the Ocean View Trail in a quiet and cool atmosphere.
Redwoods are the tallest living beings, living for hundreds and even thousands of years and reaching 400 feet. Their root systems, though only 10 or so feet deep, spread 100 feet; intertwined, they support each other.
In 1945, delegates from all over the world met to establish the United Nations for world peace. On May 19, they gathered in the Muir Woods’ Cathedral Grove to commemorate Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who initiated the organization and had passed away a month earlier.
He believed that the love of nature is universal in all countries, and that preserving natural resources is the keystone to establish lasting peace.
We are natural resources and nature itself, when we settle in sitting, serene and solid. However, we are usually limited by a sense of self, society, state, and the secular world.
A “system” sense is the determining factor of our life and the global life system. We witness states struggling for survival, societies striving for security, selves suffering in strife.
We are in a rat race, an arms race, only to find ourselves in bare survival mode, or mass extinction. I forwarded a report documenting the official military budget of the world at 1.3 trillion dollars, including arms sales, etc.
To solve suffering, we must sit and see the true nature of systems, the different degrees and dimensions of them, and settle in them in total perspective and priority based on the ultimate truth.
That’s why Dogen said, “The practice of the awakened one is to practice with the entire earth and to practice with all living beings. If it is not with the entire whole, it is not yet the practice of the awakened one.”
Unless we settle in ultimate truth, beyond the secular sense world, the supra-mundane truth and unconditioned peace where everything settles, we remain limited in the small sense world, and in strife and suffering.
That’s why the Buddha said, “One cannot reach the limit of the world.” We reach it by existential insight and wisdom. Only witnessing the limit of the mundane realms, can we be freed from it.
The system sense is a crucial key for the quality of our individual life/death and the entire global life/death. It determines the quality of truth, goodness, and beauty. This is why we must cultivate our minds constantly.