Well, there's a lot going on here.
Thanks for your links, B4real, especially the last one!
vlcoats wrote: ↑
I have one other question about you horses… if you always take both of your horses on your ride, do you always ride one and lead the other, or do you switch off?
Here I have a problem with "switch off". You are obviously not asking whether I kill my horses, but I don't know what you
do mean.
From the context, it might be whether at times I ride, and at other times I walk with them. In which case the answer is, Yes, I do walk with them, but I can't run with them, nor walk long distances, and so I ride much more than I walk.
vlcoats wrote: ↑
As for the Zen thing [...]
Vickie, of the two rules (not to damage the body
— not to damage the mind), let me underline the second one: Don't make your brain hurt more than reasonably unreasonable.
Your intuitions are perfectly correct, and you are not quibbling. You are asking justified and decent questions, and I'll try to give justified and decent answers. Maybe not exactly item per item, but then I think it's rather the whole picture that needs clarifying.
The confusion is being brought about by the rational attempt of the Ox-herding pictures.
So, first of all: They are not some roadmap to enlightenment, just as John Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress is not some roadmap to God.
If you give them a second reading, this time with the ego being the ox (instead of the enlightenment), maybe that will take off the edge already.
vlcoats wrote: ↑
I feel that accepting that we are graced by being here is enough. I had to look up what being sentient or non-sentient means. Of course we all are related. Who cares how or why? It is as simple as the web of life, right?
Right.
In theory.
And zen is
practice.
The problem with simple things is, that they are difficult. Latin, for example, is a very simple language; and DOS is a very simple computer system
— and yet everybody prefers the highly complicated English language, and highly complicated graphic user interfaces.
Because they are easy to use.
There are many people who have difficulties coping with simple things.
Yes, "accepting that we are graced by being here is enough"
— and perfectly so!
But only very few people are able to really accept that.
24 hours per day. In the grinding wheels of wear and tear, and when overwhelming problems, and fear, eat up our soul.
When we would like to remember that grace, but anyway would be unable to bring it to life.
When we actually need it...
B4real's neighbour, for example, had a cuckold's good luck that, in spite of his uncontrolled screaming and pouring anger all over the place, the horse's instinct of "not to harm the Little Ones" was stronger than the "breaking in" it had undergone. (Totally un-funny replacement term for "teaching", isn't it!)
Attached to the fence, any horse's normal reaction to this artificial panic would pretty likely be that, instead of normal running away made impossible, it would fight against the rope, and the kiddies would fall off and get under the hooves.
That kind of human ego-stuff must be brought under control by anybody who wants to become a horseperson. If Sigmund Freud doesn't agree with me, let him have no horses.
The correct reaction of that man would have been to "go firmly to the window, drink it in"
— to the window in the frame of events, where he could approach the horse with soothing authority, swallowing the above-mentioned ego-stuff and transcending it:
Exquisite music, wise young horse in glory, / as powerful as all the great must be!
And lifting the kids off the horse's back, then explaining that they should only do such things with him, not without him, and then helping them back onto it again, horse freed from the fence.
But there's an unbridgeable gap between those two attitudes, theory and reality. The search for the ox is the attempt nevertheless to bridge this gap. Nobody knows where such trying comes from. There's no merit in it; those who leave things as they are, aren't any worse people for it.
Only: that fellow's incompetence jeopardised the lives of two small children...
At times, some of us must tell ourselves with some energy to stop the junk we're doing. But the overall strategy should obviously be to round up our ego-stuff in circles, rather than go dead opposite against it. That requires a lot of practice, before we'll be "well trained".
Kodo Sawaki says: "Give your cow a vast field, and it will be well herded."
●
Enlightenment is not a thing that one might nail down theoretically. It only exists in the individual cases of the very persons who are concerned.
Leonard Cohen's case is pretty clearly described in the biography
I'm Your Man by Sylvie Simmons, from page 394 to the end of chapter 20 (in the 2013 Vintage edition
— the passage begins with "Autumn 1998").
His own descriptions are, besides the whole song "You Got Me Singing", in that passage of Sylvie Simmons' biography:
"I said to myself this must be what it's like to be relatively sane."
and in
Come Healing:
O see the darkness yielding
That tore the light apart
Come healing of the reason
Come healing of the heart
and in
You Want It Darker:
I didn't know I had permission
To murder and to maim
(Who on earth could forbid the enlightened to do whatever they fancy?
Quoting Nancy Bacal from that passage in
I'm Your Man: "[...] suddenly he could come and go as he pleased, do whatever he wanted. It took him a moment or two to figure that out, but when he did, it was a delight to see him so happy and so joyous."
Permission by life itself. Murder and maim?
— Nobody is responsible but we ourselves, individually. What does our conscience say in each particular situation?)
Afterwards, no more fits of clinical depression, no more spiritual crises.
He arrived,
practically, in everyday life, "even though it all went wrong", at this "accepting that we are graced by being here is enough".
●
The
Ballad of the Absent Mare ends in the "Empty Circle". That is the hinayana version of enlightenment ("Small Vehicle", personal salvation). The two remaining Ox-herding pictures are the mahayana version ("Great Vehicle", end of suffering for all sentient beings).
The reason for the
Ballad's ending is, that "my darling" says to "Leonard": "just let it go by..."
Now whether this "darling" is God's grace, or a woman, or (more likely) both; and what they will be doing when the song is over, that's not part of the
Ballad anymore
— however, it is strongly suggested by omission.
It is by troubadours, after all, that ballads are sung, by men for whom "High Romance" never really was exclusively "High".
"
Say a prayer for the cowboy, Gentle Lady, and lend a kind ear to my courting song..."
And in case her husband is absent, yes, sometimes, with luck, the answer might be a bit longer than: "Leonard, just let it go by / That old silhouette on the great western sky"...
●
Ballad of the Absent Mare is a romantic man and woman thing.
