Nothing added. Or, is this the end of the blog, pardner?
I’ve been reminded of some Buddhist legends recently. One of them is about the awakening of the Buddha, where the story goes that the Buddha was meditating through the night and in the morning looked up to see the morning star and recognized great awakening.
At some point I was sitting and thinking about suchness as “nothing added” and a bird chirped. This chirp was so direct, complete and pure. It occurred to me that the bird added nothing. It chirped. At the same time, I remembered the Buddha’s morning star and I recognized the quality of the chirp of the bird.
What does that have to do with the writings of Mr. Scheinfeld? Maybe little, or maybe everything. Taking the latter tact: Busting loose and the infinite abundance are expressions of “adding nothing”. For example, like anything else, money just is. Yet another suchness. As soon as it becomes the subject of desire or repulsion, maybe something important, stressful, to be hoarded – whatever – something is added. At least on an emotional level, the process is a way to reduce some of that which has been added. Interestingly, these additions are limitations; they are “falsehoods” which overlay or obscure suchness, which is also to obscure the great, (see earlier post), infinite abundance.
What to do? Mr. Scheinfeld’s recommendation is to practice using the tools of the process, appreciation and adjusted terms (also meditation, but there is not so much explication around this in his book). The outcome of this is a form of experience that is more rewarding (joy, peace, appreciative, unlimited, ecstatic …) than the initial, “severely limited” perspective from which we started playing in the human game. His encouragement is to play the game from the perspective of the suchness of the game exactly each of us is playing. The reward is experience unfettered by unnecessary additions (like all manner of activations around money or health or relationships or ….), that ultimately hamper full, creative play – and the experience of freedom and infinite abundance which that implies.
From a point of view of a Buddhist notion of seeing things-as-they-are Mr. Scheinfeld’s take makes much sense to me. At the same time, writing much more about it does not. I got it and practice counts.
So that’s it, (maybe :-)?
