We Are Always Halfway

LET US NOT make any illusions. Not about our own bodhisattvahood either. When my heart is free from images and limiting thoughts there will be a totem of self-conceit on my way the next moment. I have dressed up my piece of junk in a golden coat, to say the least. Not too bad, but without doubt a rock-drawing or a sign on a pillar along the way of my life. That is the way it often goes. Illusions can easily get hold of us again. Nothing the matter. ‘Persevere and not-know’ Soen SaNim would say.

Being free of illusions is nothing else but seeing through and releasing our images and limiting thoughts. That makes room for our true nature, the love that we essentially are, to arise without anything that holds it back. You would say that we have mastered this by now. With the true voice of my heart, the willingness not to be somebody, my incomparable source of insight, all within reach, and filled with wisdom and compassion… But no, the sea, the endless sea of time crashes on my coast and deposits ridges with shells, furniture that has fallen overboard, half-rotted plastic and dead jellyfish. Then it retreats again taking along everything with it again. Sometimes. Sometimes not.

The tide of my being does not guarantee that my coast will remain free of driftwood, refuse and twisted sheet metal. If I should think that this would be the case, I will create a new illusion. There is only one place of rest where the repetitive activity of this mental problem does not occur and that is in the attentive action of the moment. Then inside and outside, me and the other/the other thing is one and the intermediate field, emptiness, the self-propagating movement of life rule, and there is only love.

Thank goodness, this place of rest is always there, but we must look for it, or rather allow it. Again and again. Meditation helps us opening up to it. Sitting on your hands is absolutely no option. If we think that we have arrived, we are already hopelessly lost and will be entangled in disastrous dogmatic commitments, as happened to many Japanese Zen masters before and during the Second World War. We are always halfway. This adage does not allow a goal, a destination, indolence, a way.

Being halfway is not discouraging, but liberating. It is the resting place of constant alertness. And the certainty that there is always trying, persevering, without knowing. Always different. Always again. Halfway is the breeding ground of gratitude and unity. Even if we see through life as being a formdream – no, at that very moment, my task will still be to liberate all that.