Living Life As It Is: Chapter 2
There Is Nothing Static About Life
There is Nothing Static About Life
Do not use your practice to improve the situation of life.
Use the situation of your life to improve your practice.
~Ken McLeod from Reflections on Silver River
Person, Place, and Time
My teacher, the late Rev. Koyo Kubose, taught the most important Buddhist concepts in a simple way. That is why those of us who have had the good fortune to learn from him, his father, and the teachers that went before, are conditioned to look for the Dharma right where we are standing—not under the streetlight.
Writing this, it sounds like I got this whole right-understanding thing sussed. Nope. Catching a glimpse of right understanding conceptually is not the same as living it from deep in your bones. I do try to practice it by checking my mind, but I can guarantee I don’t see everything with right understanding all the time—or even some things with right understanding some of the time. Sometimes my mind is completely clouded by the illusion of self and only in hindsight do I realize how ignorance clouded my view. Hindsight realization is good, though, too. It helps us realize where we typically have trouble seeing things correctly.
Rev. Kubose taught the concept of person, place, and time as an everyday way of saying life is interdependent, impermanent, and constantly changing. We are constantly interacting with life through different people, including ourselves as we change, different places, and at different times. But we rarely see life that way, even if we know that’s the way it is. We want—and most times expect—things to continue to be the way they are now. And this is what keeps us grasping for what isn’t, even though we’re standing smack dab in the middle of what is.