1st part of YT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTO_WQZ-2q0 which is part of a larger lecture on consciousness.
Hakuin, the 17th century master writes in one of his poems, he uses the phrase,
Taking hold of the no-thought in the midst of thoughts
so that means, having a mind that is in a way like a mirror.
Zhuangzhu, the Chinese Daoist, said the perfect man employs his mind as a mirror:
It grasps nothing, it refuses nothing, it receives but does not keep.
and so the poem says,
The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection, Water has no mind to retain their image.
so this is a mind then that has no attachments.
Now, attachment is a word that has associations in English which do not quite give the Buddhist meaning of the word. But the slang term that we now use, a hang-up, [fixation, block] is the right translation for [the Buddhist notion of] attachment. When you say a person's all hung up, or he has a particular hang up, that is the Buddhist meaning of attachment. It means a mental fixation. Or an emotional fixation. On some particular pattern in life.
So, to get rid of hang-ups, one must first, uh, get rid of thinking. After you've got rid of it completely, and have thereby revived the background, the mirror, as it were, the mirror mind, then you can go back to thinking, and you can think against the background perfectly comfortably and not get hung up on thinking.
And so in this way, uh, you'll get an extraordinary feeling, of life going on as a single process all the time which doesn't stick. You and it are all one, and it's got all kinds of differentiations in it, so that it doesn't become some sort of a formless blur, but it is sort of..
it flows, like water: as water has all the patterns in it, network of sunlight, the ripples, and so on, so in the same way, the world has all this, but it constantly flows. Because of no hang-ups.
So then the royal road to this state is giving up the sense of urgency, that you ought to do something, [that] something is required of you. And understand for example, that looking at a rubber band on your fingers can be quite as important as anything else you can do. In other words, being here at this moment, and listening to the sound of my voice, without paying the slightest attention to what it means, can be as important as anything there is in the universe. Why not? Is the tree outside important? It's beautiful. Is it worth looking at? Why, certainly. But, it's not achieving any great mission in life. It's just being a tree.
As Emerson said in his essay, I think on compensation,
These roses under my window, are not concerned whether they are better than last year's roses. Or whether next year's roses will be better than they. There is simply the rose; it lives for today.
And that's the point.
When you learn the art of meditation in this way, you will see other people rushing around wildly like chickens with their heads cut off. And they think they're going somewhere. And they're completely deluded. They're there. And they don't know it, that's why they're rushing around so wildly. But you by this means can begin to learn that you're there, now. And that the extraordinary thing as you see the world in this way, especially as you see people in this way, and from this point of view, you realize the people are natural, valid processes. Just like trees & birds & clouds.
Now, do you ever criticize a cloud for being badly shaped?
Did you ever see patterns in foam make an aesthetic mistake?
Well, no, one just doesn't. There once was an 18th century classicist, one of those people who enjoyed formal gardens and Greek palaces, who criticize the stars for not being symmetrically arranged.
But that would never occur to us today. We don't want to see our stars in rigid [wretched?] geometrical patterns, we love to see the scatter of things. And the uh curious groupings through the sky. In a marvelous, irregular, order, a marvelous orderless order you might call it. Yeah, the funny thing about clouds, and stars, and mountains, and all natural outlines, is that they're beautiful, and we know that they have a quality that distinguishes them from being messes. You know a mess when you see it. But these things don't apparently make messes.
So, in a way, human beings don't either. And when you see human life as something that is just the same kind of thing as the shape of a tree, or a cloud, or like that, you stop judging it. And you have to know that about yourself. This is the beginning of everything. This is the beginning of every kind of wisdom: to see that you really don't have to go anywhere. You don't have to get any better than you are, because with all your defects, your selfishness, your neuroses, your sicknesses and everything..
(Well, fish have neuroses and sicknesses and so on and so do plants, you've often seen plants that've got bumps on them or some queer little diseases. And they all have those sort of troubles. That's life.)
But, when you realize that you are an authentic projection of the universe, just as you are at this moment, then there's no where to go, no need to do anything. And out of that peace, comes energy. Real energy instead of phony energy, which is trying to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps, the usual kind of human energy, which gets progressively nowhere with more and more busyness.