SOLISTICE '24

Summer Solistice, 2024, includes the full moon - maximum sun, maximum moon!  These moments of solistice, both expansion and contraction, get our attention - especially December’s contracting sun, as in Christmas, Buddha’s birth, Hannukah and others.
 
There are many teachings, Buddhist and otherwise, surrounding such moments.   But, of course, it comes down to experience, yours and mine.  Contraction and expansion, the interplay of opposing activities, are happening all the time:  day and night, in-breath and out-breath, male and female, life and death  Consciousness itself is made possible by the contrast of one to another.   And, like day and night, together they compose one dynamic whole.   
 
But it seems human nature to get caught up in one side or the other of such dualities according to our preferences.  Change happens, inevitably, contraction and expansion happen, and we suffer. 
 
Mind is like a house with closets where we have hidden troubles we try to ignore in hopes that they will go away.  We all do this.  But, of course, they do not go away.  In subtle ways, they continue to influence our moods, our interactions, even our health.  In fact,  trying to avoid and suppress them only reinforces the disturbance!  The question arises, “How do I quiet my mind!”
 
Sometimes something wonderful happens, a startling sight or sound, an expansive moment of wonder and joy.  Afterwards we think, how can I get back to that moment.   But try as we might, we cannot get there.  Try to recreate the situation and it isn’t the same.  The question arises, “How to get there?”
  
In both cases, the irony is that “I” can’t get there.  “I” can’t quiet the mind.  On reflection, in those moments of joyful abandon, “I “ wasn’t there in the first place!  Apparently, something like letting go of “I”  is necessary.  But that is hard, scary even.  What does that letting go look like, what sort of “diligence” is required to get there?   
 
Because of such questions, practices, like Zen, like the spiritual quests of all cultures, become established.,  Zen is discipline to study the world of our experience, how our minds work, how consciousness works; the study of expansion and contraction, just what’s happening.  
 
Breath demonstrates that expansion and contraction naturally seek their homes, seek completion, where both rest.  Outbreath expands, releasing what was held inside, expanding until it can expand no more, when, for a moment, outbreath and inbreath rest together.   Then in-breath wakes up, drawing in air, contracting outside until it can contract no more. For a moment, it rests together with out-breath. Then expansion wakes again and seeks its home.
 
Between brief moments of rest, expansion and contraction separate.  One is active, the other quietly in the background.  Zen tradition explains that when expansion and contraction separate, space opens up between them.  It is in this space that the consciousness emerges that that discriminates between expansion and contraction.  And the one who discriminates is, of course, the self.
 
When expansion and contraction rest together, they are one unity. Then the space between them disappears, the consciousness that is self disappears. 
 
Breath is poetry for understanding how consciousness works, how the posture of a discriminating self arises, and also how moments rest and peace of mind are moments free of the preoccupations of self identity, free of object fixation and discursive thought. 
 
Breath is poetry for “Buddha nature,” embracing the big picture, both expansion and contraction, both their completion and their separation.   Or, as is said, awakeniing, to “unity, diversity and impermanence.” *
 
In the words of Nisargadatta:
“When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that is wisdom.  When I look outside and see that I am everything, that is love.  My life turns between these two.”  
 
* Joshu Sasaki’s interpretation of “dharmakaya, sambhokakaya, nirmanakaya