Deep in the Roots

The mind is ordinarily chock full with all kinds of intellectual nonsense and passional rubbish. They are of course useful in their own was in our daily life. There is no denying that. But it is chiefly because of these accumulations that we are made miserable and groan under the feeling of bondage. Each time we want to make a movement they fetter us, they choke us, and cast a heavy veil over our spiritual horizon. We feel as if we are constantly living under restraint. We long for naturalness and freedom, yet we do not seem to attain them.

Being so long accustomed to the oppression, the mental inertia become hard to remove. In fact it has gone down deep into the roots of our own being, and the whole structure of personality is to be overturned. The process of reconstruction is stained with tears and blood.

D.T. Suzuki in his introduction to Essays in Zen Buddhism is describing what we all believe is vital to a successful physical life. Without intellectual nonsense and passionate rubbish our reality would be a flat line of complacency that has a beginning and an end and both appear at the same point. This necessary group of thoughts and experiences is the catalyst for expansion, but that expansion is manifested in time segments which flow into our probable reality from a pool of consciousness.

We inherently possess pools or separate pockets of experiences where information from the inner self is collected and stored. This information is processed before flowing into our official pool of consciousness where thoughts become experiences. We innately have a selectively significant attribute that creates a reality using innate and learned beliefs to sense our own being, but that being is choked by our self-induced limitations. There are ways to dip into our side pools of consciousness and by pass the selective process and experience other realities physically.

Suzuki calls this pool dipping Zen or seeing into one’s own self nature, but the name is not important unless religious beliefs dominate this process of internal dipping. The pools contain past as well as future probabilities so we can pick up strands of our own consciousness and incorporate them into our physical reality. Explaining this process to the ego consciousness makes this process easier. Expansion does not need tears and blood to physically manifest unless we choose that path.

Deep in the roots of our own being is the natural freedom of expansion and we decide how and when we will experience those roots physically. Just like a tree that chooses to break in half and still grow we choose to break in half in order to grow.