Hello, Everyone,

Your Brain is not the Only Part of Your Mind with Ripples

That everything is included within your mind is the essence of mind. To experience this is to have religious feeling. Even though waves arise, the essence of your mind is pure; it is just like clear water with a few waves. Actually water always has waves. Waves are the practice of the water. To speak of waves apart from water or water apart from waves is a delusion. Water and waves are one. Big mind and small mind are one. When you understand your mind in this way, you have some security in your feeling. As your mind does not expect anything from outside, it is always filled. A mind with waves in it is not a disturbed mind, but actually an amplified one. Whatever you experience is an expression of big mind.

The activity of big mind is to amplify itself through various experiences. In one sense our experiences coming one by one are always fresh and new, but in another sense they are nothing but a continuous or repeated unfolding of the one big mind.

-Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Min

I found it very gratifying to find out (yet again, I keep forgetting!) that "waves ARE the practice of the water." It basically means for me that when I sit or don't sit, whatever is going on in my heart or head is O.K. I don't need to listen to it if it's reruns from the past or speculation about the future. Just as my heart beats without me controlling it, thoughts can come and go and they do go, good and bad, if I don't try to control them. It is only when I dwell on things that they become a super big issue and my life becomes difficult. So, right this moment, everything is good!

Many blessings,
Lora