We will crave privacy, a space of our own around which we can create a ring of fire or a moat.

Ming Zhen Shakya

Thank you, Em for this reminder to focus on our spiritual practice and Newton’s understanding of actions!

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

These days and days, we hear more and more the song of the great barons of science rather than listening and singing our song of our own grass roof hermitage. This is when I say, “God help us, God help us all.”

Indeed! Perhaps it requires a scream!

As in all things, science has gone wild with power in thinking and believing like that old TV show “Father knows best!” But say, that was a TV show – a created fiction based on? I do not know. Male domination? A cultural rule. A good time? Putting everyone in their place – whatever that may be?

What jumps to mind is the incredulous goings on behind closed research doors. Here is just one headline – one link.

THE REBEL PATIENT™

Help End the Horror of LIVE Birth, Late-Term Human Newborns Procured for Organ Harvesting at Pittsburgh University

SO…the best we can do is as you wrote Em…

We will crave privacy, a space of our own around which we can create a ring of fire or a moat.

Here’s the “how” of fulfilling this craving for privacy. Follow carefully. Study it and sing the song of The Grass Roof Hermitage.

Don’t hang out where those saturated in ignorance live and love.

Remember, this song is about building something where there is “nothing of value.” It is a reminder of the reality of impermanence.

Live calmly wherever you are. 

This requires constancy of letting go and remembering all this is a passing show.

All that is, is here!

It isn’t anywhere else.

When you let go of the ego, you gain the ability to illuminate forms and the nature of forms. Brighteyes!

No matter what you have or where you are, let go of the ego and see for yourself.

Firm steadiness is unsurpassable. 

Get it. Nothing goes beyond  ‘nothing in it for me.’

Cover your head.  It is not a matter of conceiving anything.

Don’t go after intellectual understanding.

You are already free.

When you live where there is nothing of value you no longer work to get free.

Stop all enticements.

Study your self. Study the old teachings again and again.

Relax completely right where you are.

Get free of mental and physical obstructions.

You are the undying being when in the place of nothing of value.

Drop the cash value model of all things.

Be there, here and now.

Fashi Lao Yue

 

 

 

 

Learn to Spin The Wheel 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is hard for us in the 21^st century to image building a grass hut up in a far-off mountain range. A place we would call home! It is unthinkable. We love all our conveniences – running water, heat when it is cold, air conditioning when it is hot and every imaginable device from stoves to air cookers to electric light. We want an endless array of amenities and deem them essential.

But less we forget – we are spiritual seekers, much like Shitou Xiqian an 8^th century Zen Master. We are seeking realization. Maybe we are not ready to give up indoor plumbing, yet. But we who seek liberation from suffering surrender our passions and demands. At the very least, we practice with the hardships of this modern era in the same light as Shitou. The light of no value. That is the light that builds the grass hut.

“Nothing of value” is a universal knowledge of spiritual surrender. It is often said and perhaps over-used as “letting go.” We let go of any iota of self-attainment, self-achievement, or self-praise and gain. Another way to understand this universal knowledge is to see and know it as “emptied out.” It is what the Great Awakened Masters did. They were dispassionate and lived a renunciate life.

Shitou is an exemplar of dispassion and renunciation. He had built a temple. Disciples came. And, yet… legend says he built a grass hut right next door to his temple… then. moved into it, alone. Moved into a grass hut he built where there was nothing of value.

The GRASS ROOF HERMITAGE is both a place in the external world and a description of Shitou’s internal destination. It is a solitary place where he eats, relaxes, and enjoys a nap where there is nothing to measure or tote up or evaluate and appraise.

When the hut was completed, fresh weeds appeared.

Now it’s been lived in covered by weeds.

Once the hut is finished, fresh weeds appear. Once he lives in it, he sees that it is covered by weeds. We know that Shitou accepts the immediate change in the hut without complaint and with acceptance. As the Song goes on to explain.

The person in the hut lives here, calmly, not stuck inside, outside, or in-between.

NO regrets. NO worries about his new digs getting worn down by time and use. NO worries about the property value. Or the neighbors. Or how comfortable it will be or how long it will last. Or resale profits. Shitou is aware of the nature of the world as being of no value and impermanent.

He is not caught up in where he will live and how much it is worth. He does not get attached. He is not a worldly man. He does not love the things and places of the world.

Places worldly people live, he doesn’t live.

Realms worldly people love, she doesn’t love.

Neither the external desires for things nor internal desires of feelings plague him. Shitou knows all he needs to know about the world. He knows that the hut is small, and he knows all the vagaries of the mind including passions and attachments are in this hut. There is nothing special about the hut – in the sense it prevents all the suffering of desires, feelings, perceptions, impulses, and a self-centered consciousness. NO. Building the hut does not stop the world because Shitou he does not go there. Nor does he go towards the mental realms of his mind forms.

 In ten feet square an old man illumines forms and their nature.

Whatever is in the world is in the small hut because Shitou is in the small hut. The light of Shitou is the same light we have. The difference is he used the light to illumine forms and their nature in a ten feet square grass hut. We are to sing the same song and illumine forms, so we know their nature.

PART THREE TO FOLLOW.

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