The mind is the slayer of the soul
Suite à la conversation avec Jesse, j'ai retrouvé le passage auquel je pensais. Je ne prétends pas du tout que cela s'applique à son cas, j'ai juste dit ce qui me passait par la tête. Mais si ça n'a rien à voir avec lui, ça aura à voir avec d'autres, car nous faisons tous l'erreur à un moment ou à un autre de croire que la personne qui nous enseigne sera intéressée par ce que nous croyons comprendre. Elle est d'autant moins intéressée qu'elle sait parfaitement où nous en sommes.
I'm not interested in your ideas or what you think or don't think. I'm not even very interested in my own ideas. So why should I be caught up in your thinking? If you have a problem or think you see something another way, fine—you can express it. We all can learn in this way. It adds to the total information. But your expression should not come out wearing a little smile of knowing or superiority. The only thing that counts is to open and expand and surrender and increase the flow within you.
The thing that crystallizes a person is a lack of flow. The flow of energy comes in and washes through you. It washes out the imperfections and impurities and prevents you from crystallizing. The thing that limits a person's growth is the mind. The mind sorts out and begins to attack the material that comes through. And because it can't absorb so much built-up tension, the mind eventually crystallizes. By increasing the volume and depth of the flow, you are purified. It is like a sewer that washes through and takes out all the imperfections. We don't know right from wrong anyway, so let it take care of itself. This extraordinary thing is made to take care of itself. The saying "The mind is the slayer of the soul" is true if we let it function as a thinking and operable thing. If surrendered, however, the mind can take in any amount of material and never get stuck because its parts don't break down. They expand and expand and expand.
What eventually kills people is that we go here and somebody says one thing, then we go there and anoth-er person says something different. This makes lines going across and up and down that begin to make a fabric, a fab-ric more like steel mesh than cloth. Everything gets caught in it and, before we know it, there is no flow. It doesn't matter what somebody says. It only matters whether we can digest it. If we can digest it, we can absorb and take its content. Spiritually, we are working for that.
We are not trying to become authorities on each other. We are here to grow and die and transcend ourselves over and over and over again. But the need in our own minds to always be right and to understand things is the ego. If we really know anything we should know that things will change and change and change. If we can sur-render inside ourselves the need to know, the need to have this kind of security that thinks it knows, then we have the one essential principle for spiritual work and ordinary life: the cycle of death and rebirth and death and rebirth.
Comme je l'avais lu dans je ne sais plus quel bouquin, il est très courant qu'un maître zen renvoie un disciple alors que l'entretien n'a pas encore débuté. Le gars entre, il fait ses prosternations, et boum, il se fait foutre à la porte. Il n'y a rien d'étonnant. Toutes les conneries qu'il s'apprête à raconter sont déjà écrites sur son front. Et quand ce sont des bonnes choses, le maître les connaît également avant qu'elles soient dites, même s'il peut demander confirmation. Mais les mots ne sont qu'une faible lueur de la vraie chose. En fait, le maître voit les progrès du disciple avant même qu'il arrivent...
"How do you feel, John?" It was unusual for him to ask.
"I feel okay, why?"
"Because you are about to have a breakthrough," he said.
"I don't feel very different," I said.
"It'll probably hit you in a minute. I'm going to step outside for some air." And he left.
I sat there afraid to do the wrong thing, uncertain if there was anything to be afraid of.
The silence deepened. The force working within me began to strengthen and swell. I felt unaccountably sad. Then, like sound heard first in the distance, a great wave began to break through me. I started to sob, more out of gratitude that something was actually happening than any sorrow. I felt carried out of myself. I could not say where I was. I could hear singing around me. It sounded like a chorus by Bach or Handel, yet not one I had ever heard.
After a few minutes, I uncertainly walked outside feeling purged and renewed. Rudi was standing under the awning of the nightclub in which he had at one time washed dishes. He looked at me and smiled, but said nothing.
"How did you know that it was going to happen?" I asked after a pause.
"Does it really matter?"
"No, I guess not,"
"But what does matter," he said, "is that if you had followed your own inclination you would have walked out here with me after we worked, and the whole experience might never have taken place. You don't have enough sensitivity to your inner condition to know what's good for you."
I stood there feeling stupid and grateful.
Gerta Ital raconte aussi un cas où son maître a vu plusieurs jours à l'avance qu'elle allait avoir une certaine réalisation. Il est intéressant de savoir qu'elle a eu le même maître que Harada Roshi. Du coup, tant que j'y suis :
Yamada Mumon Roshi : En zazen je deviens rien et toute chose devient rien