Quote:One time I finished my best-ever pommel horse routine and walked over happily to take the tape off my wrists. Soc beckoned me and said, “The routine looked satisfactory, but you did a very sloppy job taking the tape off. Remember, every-moment satori.”
After high bar, he said, “Dan, you must still learn to meditate your actions.”
“What do you mean, meditate an action?”
“Meditating an action is different from doing it. To do, there must be a doer, a self-conscious someone performing. But when you meditate an action, you’ve already released all thoughts, even the thought, ‘I’. There’s no ‘you’ left to do it. In forgetting yourself, you become what you do, so your action is free, spontaneous, without ambition, inhibition, or fear.”I've posted that passage, from Dan Millman's Way of the Peaceful Warrior, before, and I'll probably do it again at some point. It says so incredibly much! It sums up the biggest part of Taoism perfectly!
I don't meditate at all. I briefly tried about a year and a half ago, because there's a Buddhist temple about a half-hour away where they'll teach you for free. (What a great place and great people!! I sure wish I was a Buddhist! ) I don't feel the drive for it. Every moment can be a moment of meditation, a moment of achieving perfection/satori/wu-wei. The times when I most desperately think "I need 'me' time" are the ones when I forget that; when I think, "I wish I was done with this already, so I could go practice wu-wei." But if I lived wu-wei in the first place, I would not need to be done with anything anyway.
Now I know it's not as easy as all that. Certainly not for me. I can't always just turn my mood from frustration to satori. But sometimes I can. And the more I think these things, the less intense my frustration is when it does come along. (And I currently have a 5 month old who, like her older siblings, screams for hours every day, and takes two 15-minute naps per day - if we're lucky. Frustration is there for the taking!) Remembering the lessons of the Tao Te Ching keep me rooted. In Le Guin's Dragonfly, we find this conversation:Quote:“What brought you here, Azver?” the Namer asked. “I’ve often thought of asking you. A long, long way to come. And you have no wizards in the Kargish lands.”
“No. But we have the things wizardry is made of. Water, stones, trees, words…”Amidst the excitement and action, the wonders of wizardry, we're told that we are steeped in magic all the time. Remembering such passages is my wizardry, and my meditation.
danlo, I see another post of yours below this text box. I'll have to read it tomorrow. ____________ Highdrake's mastery of spells and sorcery was not much greater than his pupil's, but he had clear in his mind the idea of something very much greater, the wholeness of knowledge. And that made him a mage.<i></i>
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