Looking Into It
4/15/2024
I picked up Ursula Jarand’s book of talks, Infinite Ocean, for the first time in 2019, and put it down repeatedly as I was literally dumbstruck by its depth, wisdom, and simplicity. I was flying home from officiating a wedding in Stinson Beach with this book in my hands, and remember something like a physical impact from her words, then silence and stillness inside me. I’d set the book down on my tray table, struck by the paradoxical reverberation of that silence until I recovered my senses and found myself eager to continue reading.
Ursula is the only living teacher I have come across with this level of power and clarity that could reach through a page and turn me directly toward my own True Nature. Directing me toward my own True Nature is of course really only directing me toward what is already here. Perhaps adding another perspective could be helpful by triangulating on the experience: directing toward True Nature could also be said to be seeing without interference for a moment. As the Abbot of Daishu-in West said last Sunday with Ursula sitting at his side, “it’s not so much remembering what we are; you can’t remember what has never been lost. It’s really a forgetting – forgetting the mistake that we are something other than our True Nature.”
If you’ve joined this community, I know you have also encountered profound people, read impactful books, and wondered about the great mystery of this life. Why are some of us compelled to go deeper into this mystery, while most are not? Why do we each resonate with some teachers, traditions, and practices, and not others? How will the moment of our physical death be affected by the work we have devoted to these questions, and how will it benefit others? Are we making the best use of this one precious life we are currently experiencing?
As Ursula would say, “look into it.”
Do you hear the implied promise, like I do, that the answers can be known by way of this attentive looking? My experience with most aspirational sayings in Zen is that they evoke this sense of promise – a carrot held out to seemingly offer fulfillment in the very next step. This carrot analogy is normally employed to convey motivation toward the future, but I don’t think that is what Zen masters intend.
The carrot only stays in our “future” because we don’t realize we can stop reaching – that we already have the metaphorical carrot in this very moment.
Let’s pause for a moment on the word “realize,” emphasizing a distinction between realizing as an intellectual understanding of a concept versus realizing as knowing and embodying that realization.
In this True Nature community, we will return to this point again and again, as we seek to know ourselves in the latter sense more than the former.
Intellectual and psychological understanding of patterns, relationships, and ourselves are happy byproducts of this practice, allowing our lives to operate with less friction and more satisfaction over time, but there is more. This “more” is our focus in True Nature.
I thank you for joining me as we look into this mystery together.