Peace, Peace, Peace — Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti... Shalom. As-salamu Alaikum. Peace be with you.
I call out to myself through the voices of others—teachers, gurus, roshis, rishis, mentors and guides, the old fisherman, even the voice of the computer nerd. They all echo back to me, offering their take on life. I listen. I watch. I learn. I assimilate. I practice.
And in the end, none of it really matters—because here, in what feels like the final phase of this journey, I am still groping in the dark for answers.
Do I hear the calls?
Do I read the signs, heed the warnings?
This journey has always been about understanding—not just what I’ve learned, but also what I must unlearn. Letting go of obsolete thoughts and patterns that no longer serve this unfolding reality. Thoughts, dreams, perceptions… these are merely tools I use to share this worldly experience. But I am not these.
I am transcendent.
I am the watcher, the witness, the observer.
I pay attention to the phenomena of existence with bare attention, detached, yet involved. Wu wei. Like plucking a lotus without wetting my fingers.
But easier said than done, this spiritual act of detachment. It demands a deep, often painful, understanding of consciousness. Few are blessed with full awakening in this lifetime. The rest of us? We stumble forward in grace and ignorance, seeking light in shadows.
This life is a gamble, and the rules are only clear to those who’ve paid attention. Some abuse the gift, squander the grace. I am guilty of greed, desire, of never feeling “enough.” These are karmic illnesses, deeply rooted, along with hate and ignorance.
But I am aware.Of my flaws. Of my past.
Of the songs I sang, the meals I ate, the naps I took while watching the grass grow.
This, too, is who I am.
Breathing in, I know I am breathing in.
Breathing out, I know I am breathing out.
If I stop breathing, I know I am dead.
And this, too, is part of who I am.
Just another scene in this ongoing dream.
"Sometimes it happens," my Zen teacher once said after we saw a tray of bowls transform into a white lotus of a thousand petals at Green Gulch. I looked into his thick glasses, and we bowed.
"Sometimes it happens," he uttered and walked away.
In Memoriam: Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022)
A Vietnamese Buddhist monk and one of the world’s most influential Zen masters, Thay spread messages of mindfulness, compassion, and nonviolence across the world. He was exiled from Vietnam for his stance against war, and yet became the beacon of Engaged Buddhism—a path of real-world activism rooted in spiritual practice.
Thich Nhat Hanh dismissed the illusion of death.
“Birth and death are only notions,” he wrote in No Death, No Fear. “They are not real.”
“The Buddha taught that there is no birth; there is no death; there is no coming; there is no going… We only think there is.”
“Do not try to find the solution with your thinking mind. Nonthinking is the secret of success.”
I had the blessing of sitting with Thay twice during his visits to Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in the 1980s. We talked, one-on-one, mostly about the Vietnamese refugees on Pulau Bidong off the Terengganu coast.
One day, I rang the Big Bell at the wrong moment during Vipassana. Instead of scolding, Thay made me the Bell Master—tasked with returning others to their breath every 15 minutes. A punishment that turned into a lesson in presence.
When I apologized, he said, “Don’t worry too much about the consequences of your actions. Just keep being who you are, as you are.”
His teachings were simple, but they pierced deep. Walking in silence behind Thay in his saffron robes through the muddy paths to Muir Beach, hearing only the sound of flip-flops and footsteps, it felt like we were truly in the Buddha’s land.
He embodied the Bodhisattva virtues—compassion of Avalokiteshvara, the wisdom of Manjushri, the mindful skill of Samantabhadra. He became a chakravarti, a spiritual and temporal king, a Buddha in a world of kings.
May his teachings continue to ripple through the hearts of all who still sit, breathe, and listen.
Ommm Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.
#WitnessConsciousness #NonAttachment #WuWei #NoDeathNoFear #ThichNhatHanhTeachings #EngagedBuddhism #Manjushri #Avalokiteshvara #Samantabhadra #Chakravarti #Transcendence #SpiritualAwakening #StillnessSpeaks #SacredPresence #MindfulLiving
No comments:
Post a Comment