We and Nature...

Yes! Just as one Zen master said, "If you want enlightenment, go and wash dishes." Meaning, when you wash dishes, do not wash dishes with your hands while your mind is wandering all over.

With resentment.

That is not washing dishes. The sage, the wise man, has the basic working and living attitude of respectful trust towards nature and human nature, despite war, revolutions, starvation, rising crime and all manner of horrors. He is not concerned with the notion of an original sin, nor does he have the feeling that existence, samsara itself, is a disaster. His basic understanding has the premise that if you cannot trust nature and other people, you cannot trust yourself.

Without this underlying trust, the faith in the functioning of Totality, the whole system of nature, we are simply paralyzed. Ultimately, it is not really a matter of you on the one hand, and trusting nature on the other. It is really a matter of realizing that we and nature are one and the same process, not separate entities. You cannot omit one integer without upsetting the entire system.

In other words, the universe is an organic and relational process, not a mechanism. It is by no means analogous to a political or military hierarchy in which there is a supreme commander. It is multitudinous, a multi-dimensional net-work of jewels, each one containing the reflection of all others. That's how the universe has been described. Each jewel is a thing-event, and between one thing-event and another there is no obstruction. The mutual interpenetration and interdependence of everything in the universe. That's why the Chinese say, "Pick a blade of grass and you shake the universe."

The basic principle of this organic view of the universe is that the cosmos is implicit in every member of it and every point of it may be regarded as a center. The perfect under-standing is a floodlight on the whole universe in its functioning, exhibiting it as a harmony of intricate patterns. Whereas, the spotlight vision of the split-mind of the illusory individual entity sees only each pattern by itself, section by section and concludes that the universe is a mass of conflict. It is a limited spotlight vision which would give a sense of horror to the normal universal phenomenon of one species in the biological world, being the food of another. The broad perspective, thefloodlight which is the perfect understanding, would see things as they are.

Birth and death are nothing but integration and disintegration, the appearance and subsequent disappearance of the phenomenal objects in manifestation. True understanding, apperception, includes the understanding that there is no separation between understanding and action.

-anonymous