My virtue is the slumber of my vice and my vice is but virtue misperceived; only forgetfulness makes them two. Forgetfulness is the source of the Ten Thousand Things, of night and day, life and death, self and other. In forgetfulness, I seek shelter from the unbearable lightness of being. By forgetting, I become “this” and “not that”.
What we translate as “mindfulness” is the Buddha’s great teaching on smṛti (स्मृति), literally meaning “remembering”. To remember is to see the game of hide and seek I call my ”self”. It is to trace the slopes of my highest peaks down until I see them become seabed. It is to follow my supplest branches back into the earth they feed on; to see my gains and my losses as the in- and out-breath of the same delusion.
To remember is to make one what was never two. It is to surrender to the truth, which is freedom, which is love.
Beyond good and evil, beyond joy and sorrow, beyond the veils of language and thought… There lies the end of all conflict, all debate, and all seeking.
May we remember,
Simeon
“To study the Buddha’s way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.”
— Dōgen Zenji, Genjo-koan
In this deep-dive piece, we journey into the Buddha’s central teaching of Dependent Origination. See how our sense of self and the world is constructed through lapses in our understanding of the nature of reality
Suggested Reading
The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter by Rupert Spira
“I’ve gained deeper understanding listening to Rupert Spira than I have from any other exponent of modern spirituality. Reality is sending us a message we desperately need to hear, and at this moment no messenger surpasses Spira and the transformative words in his essays.”
—Deepak Chopra
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Sweet, thanks for sharing. Nice to remember to lift the veil of delusion of separation :)