Rusty's Days 4

1/31/11: The Buddha presumably said, "He who masters the body also masters the mind." There is also a story of the Buddha telling his bright, intellectual followers who were striving mightily for enlightenment and mystical experiences that the servant who put all his attention into polishing their shoes was much closer to Buddhahood than they were.

The story seems quite clear. Many gurus, Zen masters, and other spiritual teachers demonstrate the importance of the story by not noticing they exploit their students in various ways. In this country sexual exploitation of young female students has some tendency to hit the news, but that is far from the only kind of exploitation. One reason for this exploitation is the failure of many spiritual organizations and gurus to realize the importance of every day life, every day habits. They become gurus in the cloisters and have little outside the cloister experience. The book After Zen tells a number of stories illustrating the point.

Those two paragraph come from my personal experiences and beliefs. They also come from recognizing the vast amount of intellectualizing I do, as evidenced by these articles and the thoughts about what I might write when I'm not writing. I too am far too much up in my head and need to continually bring myelf back to my body.

The quote from the Buddha is not as clear. What does the word "masters" mean? It appears twice in the sentence; the first seems to be the cause of the second. A synonym of "master" is "control." He who controls the body controls the mind? Unlikely since many with masterful control of their body in one setting are reported in the news to have little control of their mind or body in other settings. Alcoholic sports figures, performance adepts who fail repeatedly in relationships such as Charlie Chaplin come to mind. Probably the Buddha meant "masters the body" in all settings.

2/1/11: Both "masters the body" and "masters the mind" probably means "masters (or controls) his/her attention." That's something I'm still working on. Klutz removal, mentioned previously comes to mind. After a zero day, I had a 3 day including a spill my dog Spike cleaned up for me. The other two were minor drops, one being the toothpaste tube cover. Today so far a klutz count of 1. I look on every klutz I perform as a failure to pay attention.

Another way I am working on mastering my attention is by incorporating my memory and feel of the tai chi movements into many of my daily movements. When I learned Sophia Delza's version of tai chi, learning and doing it took all my attention during my practice sessions. But back then, it never occurred to me that a useful practice would be to incorporate the feel, the amount of attention paid, into as many of the movements of my body as I could all day long. Now I'm doing that.

Although I have done a lot of sitting in meditation noting failures in single pointed, two pointed, or even three pointed attention, and have benefited from doing it, I now think that spiritual traditions' almost exclusively touting the benefits of trying to be single pointed is often a mistake. I know of no treatment in spiritual literature of the full range of ways of paying attention. In my next I may write about that. One the other hand, that's probably too damn abstract and intellectual, much better if I start with something concrete and specific from my day!

Remember, suggest to friends they sample my articles on this website. Thanks.