Zen and the Art of Lost and Found

For Suffering is a State of Mind, Not a Condition of Existence.




I had the idea that there was supposed to be a rhyme or reason or rhythm to this thing called RR#3 the Milky Way. The place where I lived … not by choice mind you … just the place where I was dropped off for a period of time … and over time I came to suspect that I was supposed to do something with the experience of my existence.

But what?

A friend of mine lent me some audio tapes a number of years ago … it was Ram Dass at Helena Montana … talking to a crowd of dedicated groupies about his then new book “How Can I Help ” … I have since learned that it has gone out of print … which is really a pity …

My wife and I were driving from Regina to Calgary and we decided that we could actually listen to these tapes and hear them and discuss what we heard … We had 10 hours on our hands, and for anyone who has not driven across the Canadian prairies from Regina to Calgary … let me tell you it is stark … you can count the number of trees that you will see on the fingers on one hand … it is beautiful … and it can be monotonous …
 
So, we set ourselves into listening to the tapes (actually it was two tapes … about an hour and 50 minutes each). It was here on this trip that I heard A Truth … one that I had never ever considered as a possibility before in my life … I heard one of the great secrets of life be revealed.

What I heard was this: That life had a curriculum, and that I, like Ram Dass and many others had never ever considered the curriculum to be what it was. I had always considered it to be my curse. Something to be overcome, something to be improved upon … something to be repaired and something to be ashamed of …

The Curriculum is the Personality.

Then I heard a second great truth … this curriculum of life was not for the personality because the personality was the curriculum … It Was A Curriculum For The Soul …

When I coupled this new information … eventually being the keyword here … with the thought that my own best thinking was standing in my way … my predetermined understanding and strategy of using two polar opposites …special or non special … as being the defining forces of life … all of that thinking and predetermining polarization of life and all it contained … all the polar opposites had to be tossed out the window.

What became apparent very quickly was these two opposing forces were simply a creation of my mind … were devices for my own resistance to life’s curriculum … one that had been laid out for me … not designed by me …and as I was to discover that … not designed by me … was an important aspect in the composition of the curriculum … It was just laid out for me … to follow … If and When I Choose.

This insight … sort of … came down and filtered over me … like a very slow cool shower that touched me one drop of water at a time … in ultra ultra slow motion … I responded as quickly as I could to its touch, but it seemed to take forever for me to make anything that even closely or remotely resembled a move in response to this understanding or … its touch … I was going as fast as I could … but …
 
That just maybe I was my own worst enemy at times … that my mind working in conjunction with my Ego … that this combined process set into motion within me things and thoughts that were not necessarily in my own best interests … the mind and the ego … in fact … held me prisoner to (and by) my own thought processes.

Made A Discovery: I was both prisoner and keeper of the keys … my own keys. Now that was interesting …

I had found a starting point.

Not the one that I expected by the way … but a starting point nonetheless.

NDT:Extracted from Zen and the Art of Lost and Found ... Bright Star Press ... available on Amazon.com