Part 2- The truth of your teacher

I was doing dishes in my kitchen, trying to decide what to do next, and then heard myself ask myself to make the decision based on love: which action would involve meeting my relatives with love?

“Darnit!” I thought. “I’m doing it!”

See, a couple of nights before, I had been listening to a dharma talk on line in which my teacher had asked the people in the audience to think about what had brought them to practice. He asked them to think of the simple answer, the one that came to mind first, not necessarily the right answer or the one that sounded good. My answer was love, which I was okay with, which actually sounded quite accurate to my experience with practice.

But then he asked us to consider what it would be like if we based our actions on this intention- if we acted in a way that met this intention, that this intention guided or motivated our every act throughout our daily lives (or something to that effect).

When I heard that part, I kind of freaked out. “No way,” I thought. “That’s too scary. I can’t always act out of love. I’ll be too vulnerable. I’ll be in uncharted territory. I’ll be helped by others, involved with others, I can’t base all of my interactions on love- that’s a little too much.”

And then, of course, the very next day, I heard myself asking myself, when in a place of decision, Are you responding to this person with love? If so, then do it, if not, then don’t. And for the most part, I was okay with that too.

But then this morning, when I heard myself doing it, I got kind of pissed off.

“How does he do that?” I asked myself. “How does my teacher say these things that I hear but refuse to do and then, later, end up doing without even meaning to? How come what he says, I do, even when I don’t want to do them? Why am I doing this?”

And then I answered myself, “Because it’s the truth. It’s coming up and you’re acting it not because it’s right or it’s wrong but because it’s you. He says things and the things that resonate with you show up-  not because of anything he says or the way that he says them but because they’re you, showing up. You can’t help it- you want to, your conscious mind is fighting it and freaking out because that’s kind of what humans do when faced with the truth but your subconscious, your actual you, hears it and is encouraged by this acknowledgement so it decides to assert it self a bit, nudge you a bit, and you respond because it’s you.  It’s not him, it’s you- it isn’t the way that he says it, it’s your response to it. It’s true, without his offering of these things, your self wouldn’t have these things to respond to, but the response is from you, the action is from you and other people are responding to different things and taking action on different things because they have different selves.

And so maybe that’s why zen tends to be so vague, so that it can cast a broad enough net to offer something that lots of different selves can respond to, that lots of different selves can feel seen by.