Walking the waking

For thousands of years you’ve banged your head against a problem, or against a world that refuses to answer your best questions. Then you go to sleep, or into a trance, or on a spirit journey – dropping body and mind, dropping your routines, or at least dropping the problem. Then you return, and there’s the answer! You may have learned to say that it came from the spirit world, or the Muses, or God, or that your body knew it. What difference does it make what you say about it? It’s what you do with the answer that counts. A ‘religious experience’ may startle you out of your slumber, but it doesn’t take hold until you begin to live by it.

To really believe it is to belive it.

In practice-enlightenment (Dogen), the whole mind is physically realized, and the whole body psychically realized. Now realization continues by dropping off mind and body.

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