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February 2023
Dear Friends,
Let’s be completely straight-forward here. Desire mind is a thing. Intimately close to that thing is what we think about it. Should I, or shouldn’t I? And before we know it (a microsecond later?), 10,000 other thoughts appear to rationalize, excuse, defend, attack, misdirect and otherwise confuse the simple event of wanting something. And I haven’t even begun to discuss the enormous influence of our feelings. All of this can be quite paralyzing.
We have a delicious kong-an in our collection wherein one of our ancestral teachers, a seller of “mind-refreshers” (the Tang Dynasty Chinese version of Twinkies), challenges a hungry, scholarly customer, “The Diamond Sutra says ‘Past mind cannot be attained—it is already gone; also present mind cannot be attained—as soon as we realize it, it has disappeared into the past; finally, future mind cannot be attained—it is not yet present.’ So I ask you, what kind of mind will you use to eat these mind refreshers?”
Hmmm, what kind of mind? Which one is it? Where’s the catch...? Of course our scholarly customer could not answer and he just stood there, unable to respond, his mind going in circles like a hamster on a hamster wheel.
The fascinating thing about this phenomenon is that while the paralysis is taking place, the mind is running about like mad, picking up one thing, then catching sight of another, dropping the first, racing off somewhere else, dropping everything in order to grab at something just out of sight that looks like the exact right thing, which, as it turns out, was probably the exact worst thing. And so it goes, on and on. Meanwhile time is passing. Simple reality has escaped us, entirely. There are others in line, waiting now with some impatience, their stomachs rumbling with hunger.
Yours, at the checkout line,
Jeong Ji
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