Zen Buddhism is known for focusing on the natural world rather than abstract concepts. Chopping wood and carrying water are favored over devotion to God and similar thoughts divorced from everyday reality.
Just this. A simple yet profound Zen saying.
Just this breath in meditation. Just this step in walking the dog. Just this seeing of the full moon. Just this sensation of a hot bath. There’s nothing lacking in just this, nothing to strive for, nothing to hope for, nothing to pray for.
The present moment is complete. Undeniable. Impossible to argue with. Beyond doubt.
Religious notions of faith in some unseen divinity are laughable when just this is taken to heart. Wherever you are, no matter what you’re doing, just this is ever-present, a friend who never lets you down, a constant companion we can always depend on.
CNN has a frequent refrain: “Breaking news. Happening now.”
That’s precisely what just this is. Our personal breaking news about what is happening now in our life.
The past is no more. The future is yet to be. Our memories reconstruct the past; they aren’t an accurate reflection of what actually happened. Our imaginings of the future are even less accurate; they are nothing more than guesses about what will transpire when the current just this morphs into the next moment’s just this.
Zen reminds us that a good mental posture should mirror a good physical posture.
Upright. Centered. Not leaning forward. Not leaning backward. Able to move in whatever direction just this takes us. Just this can be repeated either during meditation or in the midst of our daily life.
But the best way to say just this is silently. By absorption in the present moment. By flowing with the ever-changing current of existence. By embracing the only reality we will ever know — here and now.
Discover more from Church of the Churchless
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
‘Just this’, ‘What is’, ‘Suchness’ – all terms used to point out that all we can ever really know is this moment, whether it is a sound, an image, a thought, a feeling, an emotion – all only ever arising in this moment. All this being intimately connected to the illusion of the self in that whatever is thought, believed, conjectured etc, that arises in the moment, is immediately usurped by the ‘me’, the ‘self’ which, after the event, lays claim to anything that appears in consciousness as being ‘me’.
We habitually reject this present moment reality by looking for a better moment, usually one that appears to offer some sort of confirmation that my ‘self’ is the real me and that if we follow whatever spiritual practice is currently on offer, we (my ‘self’) will be greatly enhanced, granted liberation, and/or life everlasting – etc.
By virtue of our either our fears and insecurities and lack of self-understanding, and also through our overblown sense of feeling to be special, we seem to have become slaves to the divisive self-structures we have created.
In conversation with a reader, Robert Saltzman makes it clear that: –
“Humans have no self in the sense of a durable entity that thinks, feels, and owns experience. What we call “self” is a process—an event of claiming. Experience arises: a sensation, a memory, a thought. Almost instantly, language and habit wrap it in possessive form—my pain, my past, my thought. That possessive turn generates the sense of a possessor. But when you look closely, there is only the arising and the claiming, not a separate “someone” behind it. So: there is selfing, but no self. A performance, not a performer. The “I” is the recursive echo of its own claim.
The Buddha’s doctrine of anattā—no enduring self—tracks closely with what I am describing. He saw that clinging to “I” and “mine” is the engine of suffering, and that what we call a self is just the interplay of aggregates: body, feeling, perception, formations, consciousness.”
I’m into fitness
Just this while you are still there could just be “Just me.. Just my hot bath.. Just my cup of tea.”
Just this could be just denial.
But if that’s comfortable then just that.
I suspect we are much more selective. When I don’t like your idea I say “It’s really just this.. What I see, what I think…. Not you and what you think.” But just this is actually just all that.
What I see and what I don’t see. And what I don’t see might just be you. So yes, just you is also just that. Not just me.
“Wherever you are, no matter what you’re doing, just this is ever-present, a friend who never lets you down, a constant companion we can always depend on.”
Loved how you put this. This bespeaks a direct, first-hand familiarity with the comfort that turning within can afford us, and that is indeed a friend that is available to us always, at all times. I empathize with this.
(edit: Heh, in saying “turning within”, I guess I was speaking more of my own experience. In my experience, the dwelling in the present, when it does happen, happens usually during meditation — although sometimes, occasionally, at other times too, but less so. Agreed, there’s no reason really why this should necessarily happen when you’re meditating per se.)