Mental meandering

Posted on 1:21 PM by jr cline | 1 comments

I watched Elf last night.  I cried happy tears.    
Somewhere along the way it said the meaning of Christmas was belief or something along those lines.  That reminded me of a blog I read (I can't remember which one).  The blog posed a question about the meaning of Christmas and I said it was about people and relationships.
But after watching Elf, I think it is about belief.


Belief in many things: people, relationships, love, magic, Santa, the Easter Bunny, fun, dancing, the unimaginable, mischief, prayer, the empty space...and...and...and....

Of course all the things I listed I see as positive.  And if there is a positive there must be a negative. For every inside there is an outside.

Or is there?

Separation isn't real, it is a belief system?

  

I try to follow the middle way.  For me this means being free of the one-sidedness of perspective that takes the extremes of any polarity as objective reality.
The belief that separation is illusory must be coupled with the complete embrace of duality in all of its forms.


"'Everything exists': That is one extreme.
'Everything doesn't exist': That is a second extreme.
Avoid these two extremes," ~ Samyutta Nikaya's Kaccāyanagotta Sutta

 
Huineng said, "Suppose there is a person who asks, ‘What is taken for and called darkness?’ Reply and say, ‘Light is the proximate cause and darkness is the contributory cause. When light is ended, then there is darkness. By the means of light, darkness manifests; by the means of darkness, light manifests. [Their] coming and going are mutually proximate causes and become the meaning of the Middle Way.’"

hmmmm...I don't know about all that.
Of course, I don't know in general.

Is there even an "I" to know?  That is a topic for another day.

Have a marvelous weekend.
 

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

I cannot even understand what it is your philosophizing about here, that's how mush my brain it. I wish I could think in these ways, but my brain won't go there. The photos are great. I'm just confused about it all except the first part about Christmas...have a good one, in any case. :-)

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