Zen Roshi, Lola McDowell Lee, explains how when you first meditate, thoughts of your day may fill your mind. But eventually, you will experience a silence. God isn’t going to talk to you in words. He has no mouth. Junaid, a Sufi Master, seemed an ordinary laborer. And one of his young apprentices often wanted to display his great knowledge of things. Junaid says, “I am not so young as to know so much.” When you know that you do not know, that is when you are most receptive to wisdom. Mencius said that people are basically compassionate. The way of searching it to look for the mind and heart that you’ve let go of. But many naturally find this paradoxical: how can a mind whose function is to think—not think. One day Chuang Tzu took a nap under a tree. And his fellow travelers noticed how uneasy he was in his sleep. When they woke him he said he had dreamt he was a butterfly. They laughed, but he remained deeply troubled. “If I can dream I am a butterfly, then why should I not think that perhaps it is the butterfly that now sleeps and dreams she is Chuang Tzu. This, Lola says, is a tremendous koan. Sometimes you unwittingly experience No Mind. When there is not thought in your mind, where is your mind? Mind with thought in it is stopped. Mind with no thought is ever flowing. Meister Eckhart says if you forget and ignore self-consciousness, it is in the stillness, and silence that the word of God is heard. Once must achieve un-self consciousness by means of transformed knowledge. That is called ignorance. But it is not from lack of knowledge that the ignorance is found. It is from knowledge that it comes. It is by what happens to us, not by what we do, that we are transformed. The tale of the rich man who called all the laborers to work at his farm. Some came in the morning and worked all day, some in the afternoon, some at night… but he paid them all the same. They complained. When there is no mind, there is no sinner or saint. Grace comes to all as a gift. Desires are forms. When enlightenment comes, these desires, which are energies, don’t disappear… they become formless. Sep 9, 1984
