True Harmony

 Walking home today from dinner (and the previous Buddha class), I had the following reflections:

a) I want to be able to spell out the Twelve Links of Conditioned Arising and articulate their meanings individually, so that I and others can understand it more clearly.

b) Harmony: what is it? What does it mean to harmonize?

And, in regards to b) I wanted to say that people typically think of harmony as being the willful imposition of some kind of order onto other beings. We think "harmony" and subconsciously we then associate it with trying to oversee order. But I start to believe that this assumes that there are separate beings that are being orchestrated. The view of harmony thus contains a seed of disharmony: I want these otherwise independent, self-existing entities to go a certain direction that might be against their own being.

The true nature of being is continued arising and perishing. Things don't exist in isolation; they are shifting movements, like the shadows. So everything is already intrinsically harmonious. Nothing stays for longer than it needs to stay, and even if we think otherwise, it is because a new conditioned thought has arisen in that moment. And this is really already deeply harmonious.

When I imagine that I need to make the world harmonious, I am imposing an artificial will: trying to arrange experience as though there were a being capable of orchestrating things. But if I recognize that things happen as they do because the complex causal factors made them appear, I am no longer at odds with the universe. I see things arise and perish immediately, and the only way I would be disharmonious with it is if I imagine a separate self that is not "one" with it at all. Or, conversely, I imagine separate selves that exist independently of each other.

Well, next topic will hopefully return to item a)!!