Slipping on Ice

 I have in general noticed the unfortunate truth that at least once a year, I will slip on ice--in spite of my best intentions. How to avoid this? An interesting conundrum is how, the more we concentrate on avoiding something, the more energy we are creating to "make it happen". It's sometimes the nature of life that our thoughts invite the very self-same situations of which we are afraid. Sometimes the best solution is to withdraw into the shell of one's being to avoid any kind of karmic retribution, but this is impossible. Even doing "nothing" will create some karmic retribution after all!

  One way that we can reflect on these situations is to think: is there anything in life that stays the same? Even in our darkest moments, we are experiencing temporary causes and conditions that are bound to change in the next moment. When I remind myself of this, my mind becomes a bit lighter. I know that my original mind is not at all bound to the conditions from the past. Another way of putting it is that we are not bound by the past, unless we continue to torture ourselves again and again with the thought of the past. And so if we practice going back to this fundamental state of being, then we can let go of the past.

   Master Sheng Yen's first adage is "wants are many, needs are few". I keep thinking to myself that if I learn to be happy doing little, thinking little, and being little--laying low, being nothing---then that being nothing will be my salvation. But in fact, life beckons us, and the world needs us for many things, and we should never refuse to be of service when the cause is a good one. Actually, when we do these things as "happy nobodies" then in fact, everything we do leaves no trace of the self. And everything becomes a kind of dance on the clouds.

  Most of our problems stem from the fact that we want to be liked and admired. I am convinced of this. I feel uneasy if I am with a group of people and they dislike me for whatever reason. Even if I didn't do anything in particular, I want to be liked. But if I didn't have such a strong desire to be liked, then there would be no real trouble. We don't actually need to be liked to survive: only be of service as best we can.

I know that the real purpose of life is to let go of this big ego self. To become nothing, just the same way as I was nothing when I first came out. Can I do it? Maybe that's the joke: there is no "I" in the end doing anything. So even the ego can have a big laugh in the end.