Wake Up From The Dream

The challenge is to use our practice to cultivate awareness, to be honest enough and to train ourselves to be able to witness and watch the ever-changing flow of emotion, thoughts, projections, and experience that goes on in our minds. If we don't pay attention, then our minds make and rule everything. Then we're like slaves being jerked around by our mind. Many of us know the experience of doing things and then feeling bad about it saying, “Why did I do that?” In part, it's because mind, which really gets made up of greed, anger, and ignorance, that controls our true nature.

This “don't know” is a practice to bring us back to our true nature. It brings us back to our compassionate and open self which for most of us is a theory because we're lost in a dream. You always hear in zen centers, “Wake up!” Wake up out of the dream. Unless we recognize that mind makes everything, we stay lost in the dream. So we just go around and around and around and around, then something changes and we think, “Oh, it changed because I did this,” but we don't really know that. It's just we think that's what happened and then we scurry off following this path thinking, “Oh, that worked,” but then that stops working.

There's no technique that works. Just, “don't know.” Even “don't know” doesn't work. But “don't know” brings you back. If “works” means this sweet lovely life where everything goes great and I get everything that I want all the time, that is just more of the fantasy. “Don't know” brings you back to this moment. What am I just now? What is it that's happening in this moment? Not my dream, not my fantasy, not my anxiety, not my wishes, not my projections. But what is it?

By Zen Master Bon Soeng