The Vancouver Island Zen Sangha is delighted to announce that Coming Home – Taking Refuge Within, the long-awaited new book of Rev. Master Meiten McGuire’s writings and reflections, is now available. The following piece is a previously unpublished chapter from the new volume. More information about the book follows the article.

I’m seeing more and more clearly the ceaseless activity of attention. Most of the time it is caught up in the play of the skandhas, the never-ending flow of activity in thoughts, feelings, fantasies, broodings, play-backs of the remembered past. It’s all over the place, or we are all over the place as we are dragged around by all of this.  It is what was meant by a Buddhist monk when he would admonish himself each morning to, “Wake up, don’t be fooled!”  He wasn’t referring to being fooled by others, but to this very dominating tendency to get caught up in the skandhic activity.

I can see that the trouble I’m having with physical balance, and hence walking, is a gift urging me to be in the present, otherwise I am off balance and could fall. This makes me very uneasy, so you would think it would be simple to just stay grounded in the activity of standing and moving, but no, it isn’t that easy. When we are “grounded in the present,” we are really “functioning with awareness”—it is the same thing put in different ways. Within this precious awareness the Voice of God, the Eternal, the Lord of the House may be heard. It is always here, right now, every moment. The trick is to stay tuned to It instead of all the activity within our little minds. The latter is included within the Whole, but it is only a part of It, and the mental noise can drown out the “still, small Voice” of the Eternal just as our pointed finger can block out the sun. Then we take this little tiny bit, this ‘me,’ as the center of everything—and suffer, accordingly. The Buddha said that when we grasp at anything, Mara stands beside us. Mara is how Buddhists refer to the doubts, desires, and muddle that confound us when we mistake the part for the Whole and then place demands [grasping] on how that Whole should be.

The antidote for this is simply to pull ourselves back to an awareness of this moment. This is a place of quietness for it is just being one with that which is. “Seeing the Way things are” sometimes is a synonym for being enlightened. Momentarily we let the veils of our desire, hatred, and confusion drop away—or rather they just do drop away when we have grounded ourselves in the present. This is the place of peace and security. There’s nothing to fall from, it’s solid, it’s real. The very serenity and simplicity and evenness make it hard to notice.

When I get caught up in the stream of thoughts and feelings and then wake up, so to speak, and return to just being here, I am bemused that something so precious is so difficult to do. Well, that is the rub of it of course—one can’t attain it in the sense of holding on to it, for then we are once again in the land of samsara, the suffering that comes with grasping at anything. By letting go, we have what we were afraid we’d lose that led to the clinging, the attachment. And it takes a lot of trusting, a lot of faith, to just let go.

Fear of the Unknown, of what comes next, prevents our living in the Flow of Life. In that Flow come both pleasure and pain, success and failure, all the opposites that prompt our swinging, wanting the one and scurrying away, if we could, from the other. This is why all-acceptance is so very important to cultivate. Reverend Master called all-acceptance the Perfection of Zen, of our training. We can veer off from staying in the Simple Present, which is the Place of all-acceptance, because being in this spiritual Place not only exposes our suffering, but also threatens to expose the causes of the suffering. And that can be very unpleasant to endure. So we opt for the ‘devil we know’ instead of the ‘devil we don’t know,’ and do things that create more suffering so that we can avoid facing the causes of suffering within ourselves.

Our own humanity, our own limitations, the consequences of our own actions, help us wake up from this nightmare again and again. When we are thrown back on our need for help from Something greater than ourselves, and when we are able to cry out for that help, we cut through the negative cycle. And in fact, we can’t do it all ourselves, we need to rely on the Eternal to help us. This help is always available to us, but so often it is only when we come to that exquisite place of uncertainty that we really get in touch with It. When we feel all self-sufficient and on top of things, then we think we are in charge of our life, and it does not even occur to us that we need the help and guidance of the Eternal. Of course, deep-down we know this isn’t so. Any moment life could be snatched from us, or some catastrophe or another could fall right on top of us totally unexpectedly. I am finding that there is nothing so salutary as the humility of knowing there is nothing that I can count on and that God is running the show. I am assured that it is all working out, that everything is being taken care of. Over and over again, I am getting proof of this in my daily life.

All-acceptance can be grounded in seeing the value of what befalls us, rather than trying to hold things to another course. It isn’t a Pollyanna view that ignores life’s difficulties, but it is firmly rooted in that faith that whatever happens is for the best. Now how we understand what really is best has to be from the point of view of our spiritual development—I think that is the only way to get out of the realm of the opposites. The recognition that we can’t see the whole picture can help here. It is said in Buddhism that Buddhism will last as long as bowing lasts. And bowing is an important part of our practice in a monastery, the getting down on our knees and bending head to the floor kind of bowing. The physical act hopefully puts us in touch with the more important heart-act, giving our heart over to That which is greater. We do a lot of bowing each day in the monastery, conveying that this kind of acceptance can’t only be done once. It is a constant re-dedication of our lives to what is fundamentally important and helps put into balance our daily concerns, if we let it. It is a very wonderful way to live, a way to cultivate the faith to stay grounded in the present and listen to the Voice that can guide us.

Coming Home – Taking Refuge Within is a 540-page paperback.  It includes Rev. Master Meiten’s previous three books, which are now out of print: Reflections on the Path; Reminders on the Way and Returning to Stillness. 25 new chapters of previously unpublished writings – essentially a fourth book – complete the volume.

The print version can be bought via Amazon, where an eBook version is also available, at minimal cost. The eBook is also free to download from the Vancouver Island Zen Sangha’s website: (http://www.vizs.org/writings.php).