One

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,

My dreams are worrisome. I keep dreaming of Zen services, chanting sutras, inviting bells to ring, gracefully offering incense, and I wake. It has been several months now since I left the Zen Center. I feel as though something is slipping away. Perhaps this separation is an opening of my hand of thought. Perhaps I am fading away. Perhaps my dreams are a closing of that hand, grasping for what was. Better to let it go.

At Temple last night I felt alone, very alone. My Little Honey and I had been suffering one of our moments of disagreement, I had had a runny nose, I took an antihistamine with my evening meds, and within an hour felt the heaviness of sleep pressing against me. My friends asked if I was OK. My Little Honey asked if I was OK. I was OK. I was just alone in my own little head.

I practiced zazen during part of the service. It is always a good thing for me to be still and place my attention on the present moment. It points the way, as it were.

There it was, a sort of emptiness. Nothing fixed, everything in motion. Coming and going, coming and going. Standing, sitting, chanting, praying.

In the Sefer Yetzirah (the Kabbalist' Book of Creation), is says that God created the universe through His words He made emptiness because before the first word, He was One and everything was filled with Him. Likewise, we create with our speech. This creation is the heart and beginning of duality, as before creation there is just One and one without two or three is meaningless. With the speaking of One there is the other. We really need the other.

In Zen we call this Big Mind and Small Mind, the Absolute and the Relative: two interdependent truths. To reside in Big Mind alone is to reside in Nothingness, no form whatever. This is a blissful sickness, like being stuck in peace. Sooner or later we need change.

So it was in the beginning, the Absolute needed the Relative in order to be the Absolute. Its important to see that both are one in the same. One resides within the other. So, while we have the potential for oneness, so too we have the potential for duality. In the One is all, in the all is One.

As for me, I don't know who I am anymore: Jew, Zen priest, husband, father, disabled vet, therapist, friend, none of the above: and with that am completely liberated. A good thing.

Be well.