The Great Puzzle

Life & death are a great puzzle. Do not spend your life in vain.

- Bodhidharma, "No Buddha Nature Outside the Mind"

Get up, stretch, listen to bones crack, feel aches that weren't there yesterday. Calesthenics, drill, hit the punching bag. Shower, shave. Breakfast. Drive. Traffic. Morning news. War. Famine. Pestilence. Work. Work. Work. Boss is a jerk. Fast food lunch. Work work work. Traffic. Screaming kids. Left-overs for dinner. Death. Taxes. Sleep tonight & do it again.

Sucks, don't it?

This is the time you've been given.

With all of the things life throws our way, it all slips right past us.

Yet this is the time & place we have.

Bodhidharma's words are a reminder to us. Like the clack of the moktak snaps us from sitting meditation to return to the sleeping world, he would rouse us out of the distractions that we allow ourselves to be muddled by, and encourage to delve into the practice itself.

If you still do not know yourself clearly, you should be awakened to the essence of life-and-death by finding and meeting a Master who already has attained a great awakening.

Your opportunity to practice is here, right in the midst of all that life throws at us. You cannot afford to wait for when the distractions will pass, for a moment when the children don't need your attention, for after you've finished your taxes. The disruptions of life will cease when you're dead, but then it's too late. There is no perfect time, but there is Now. Through the practice, we have the opportunity to shed the things that have always held us back and discover our true selves. All of those things that life uses to tug at us will still be with us, but through transforming our understanding of ourselves, we transform our relationship with them.

Even though we might say there is originally not a thing to be attained, if you do not yet understand it, you must, with sincere effort & work, find and meet a Master to open your mind.

Now is the time to practice, with all the diligence we have.