Good morning!
Yesterday I read the section “Opening One’s Eyes on One’s Own Life,” in the book Nurturing Together by Uchiyama Roshi. He happened to turn on a TV in an inn. Five college students and two teachers seemed to disagree. A teacher said, “You should think of the grace of our society.” A student said, “I feel nothing of it.” The other students agreed, but the teachers just wondered. Uchiyama Roshi, himself like the students while young, would have told them to live without the clothes, food, and dwelling given by their society.
The subsection “The Great Person’s Eyes and Actions” says that we should not be cooked on the ground of societal promises (agreement/contract), like kids wanting the same toys as others, but “View from the Ground of Life Reality” in the great nature, striving fully in the original life living. He says that education must make the essence of religion, the “Opening the Eye on Life” already provided and functioning in all as its root, though sectarian religions are prohibited to be taught, to let the given life fully flower and fruit.
For half a day I cleared invasive choking vines that were spreading and getting rooted, covering bushes, climbing trees and shading them, following the ground cover plants and now taking them over. They are like the triple poisons of desire, divisiveness, and delusion, unique and typical of human karma conventions. We can pull out vines like honeysuckle with two fingers when they’re tiny, but it’s more difficult as they grow, even with one’s full strength or with deep digging. Chopping them only requires repeated removing.
Delusion of the separated substantial self is so strong in societies, we miss its fictitiousness, together with the fictitious bodies of the modern agents of states, corporations, media, education, and religions, now destroying the wholly wholesome way world with wars, nukes, global warming, mass extinction, etc. The paradigm shift from a uni-directional pyramidal civilization to a cyclical Indra-net culture is essential. It is now inevitable and imperative that we see, still karma and serve and save the Dharma (Norm) of all dharmas (forms).
5/1/16
