All across Canada people are participating in a day of remembrance, but what exactly is this remembering? What is memory? Where do memories come from, where are they when we are not remembering? Are they like files in some giant file drawer buried in the attic of the mind? Are they replicas of experience or are they collages of pieces of experience, assembled on the fly?
In our mindfulness practice, we are repeatedly attending to our lapses of attention and reminding ourselves to come back to the breath, the step or the recitation. True mindfulness is this remembering , literally re-minding ourselves, shifting away from habitual wandering thoughts and establishing a mind of open awareness.
If we consider Buddhist teaching, we are instructed that our aspiration is not one of figuring anything out. It is not an analysis, calculus or theorizing. We are not seeking anything new or unknown. We are remembering. The Buddhas teach that we are now and have always been the complete presentation of Awake Awareness, we are its display and its play. Our challenge as practitioners is to recognize that somehow we have forgotten this rather important piece of information. We are called to remember who and what we are. With that recollection we can reconnect with our purpose, our values and their appropriate expressions in our practice.
Yours in the Dharma,
from Akashaloka,
Innen, doshu
om namo amida butsu
View this week's Religion Experts Column:
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/ask-the-religion-experts/index.html
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