Three Minds of Thanksgiving

Three Minds of Thanksgiving11/26/14I wish everyone a joyful Thanksgiving, filled with practice opportunities. This is a great time todraw on your Zen training!Here are some reflections I shared at Inquiry on Tuesday, about the three minds ofThanksgiving.The mind of abundance: The realization of the richness of this life, and our way of living, thatoverflows even our capacity to comprehend it. We enjoy a level of comfort and gratification thatwould have been unimaginable even 100 years ago. We benefit from the abundance ourtechnologies, affluence, medical advances, food distribution, transportation, and educationprovide for us. We live in a free, if strange country, with many privileges denied to those inother places. We will gather on Thursday, most of us, to celebrate the incredible abundance weenjoy, and to offer thanks for it together. Certainly gratitude is an appropriate response to suchbounty, including the bounty of our friends and family. The sense of life overflowing is notdependent on our material circumstances: even a barefoot child or the poorest tribes in Africacan experience it. Here’s a quote from the marvelous book Order Out of Chaos, by IlyaPrigogine, the Nobel-prize winning physicist, and Isabelle Stengers:The real lesson to be learned from the principle of complementarity, a lesson that can perhapsbe transferred to other fields of knowledge, consists in emphasizing the wealth of reality, whichoverflows any single language, any single logical structure. Each language can express only partof reality. Music, for example, has not been exhausted by any of its realizations, by any style ofcomposition, from Bach to Schönberg.—Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle StengersWe cannot exhaust the overflowing reality in which we are immersed. It is truly staggering.Even when we try to narrow our scope: focusing only on honeybees, or orchids, or ZenBuddhism, for example, the richness of the reality field staggers us; it is trulyincomprehensible. This is the mind of abundance.The mind of lack: Even in the midst of overwhelming abundance, many people still long forsomething, filled with a sense of lack. In a survey that asked thousands of people how muchincome would be enough, would satisfy them, the results were striking: above the barestpoverty level, people at every socioeconomic level answered the same: about 20% more thanthey were making now. Incredible, isn’t it? Our sense of lack may be internal (there issomething lacking in me) or it may be external (there is something lacking in my world), or both(what is lacking in me is creating a lack in my world; what is lacking in the world is creating alack in me).And certainly even as we celebrate abundance, we are keenly aware of the genuine materialcircumstances of lack that many people must endure. So there is often some unease at thistime of year as well. What about people who struggle in poverty? Or we think, sure our table isoverflowing now, but what about retirement: will I have enough then? I’m lonely, I wish I hadsomeone—a lover, a close friend, even a dog— in my life. I need to make more money, I don’tknow how I will pay all these bills. I don’t have enough time to do all I need to do. I am missingsomething…something. Here’s the poetic expression of this mind of lack.---2I Want Something Without a NameErica EhrenbergI want something without a name - No!I’m not saying I don’t know what I crave!I want something without a name, light of foot, evenairborne, all feathers but feathersdetached in the air,of fine plumage. I want that whichit will not be possible to sayI have had. What envelopes and releases not chronologically, but envelopes and releasesall at the same time.One gesture, small as a man’s. Passing through a liquidand a solid state, and then an airbornestate, not chronologically, but all at the same time.A brightness in the eyes without the eyes. No eyes,no ears, no parts, all opening and closingat the same time. Both closed and open of noapparent distance form me. No distance. A holewith nothing around it. No surroundings. A diveto and fromnot even a poolnot even a plank.The mind of sufficiency: This mind is hard to describe. It is so simple. I guess you could callsuch a mind content.When I started graduate school, I was very frightened. I was a single parent, I was living ingraduate student housing, I was teaching and taking classes and working a couple of otherjobs, and I had no idea how I would manage. I thought, I wish I was rich. But then I got curious.What is it the rich have that I want? I wondered. I didn’t really want a huge house, or a boat. Iwas in school, so I didn’t really want to travel or go out for fancy meals. I realized what the richhad that I lacked was this: they didn’t have to worry about having enough money. Oh! Ithought, then what I really want is not to have to worry about money. And the truth is, we willhave money or not have money as I am going through school, but I could bracket off the worryabout it, and just manage the situation. As it turned out, our resources were sufficient and theworry was not necessary to being able to manage them. Sometimes they were more abundantand sometimes they were more scarce. But somehow there was enough.I think about the student in my class years ago, who struggled with writing, and came for helpin office hours. He was desperate to make an A, because his home village in Africa had sold allof their cattle—the entire livelihood of every man, woman, and child in the village—to send himto America to medical school. Or the student who was always a bit late to class, and whoconfessed that the bus often ran late from his work, where he was a bank manager. He lookedabout 19 years old. He told me that when he was 14, living in Vietnam, he thought he wasgoing on a vacation with his uncle, but instead, his uncle put him on a train and told him he was---3headed to the United States. He didn’t know anyone there, but somehow he would find a placeto stay. His charge: learn to speak English, get an education, get a good job, and make enoughmoney to bring his entire extended family to the U.S. This he had done. Now he was their solesupport.My students have taught me a great deal about the mind of sufficiency. And my practice hasgrounded this mind. As we sit in zazen, there is nothing missing, and nothing in excess. Justsitting, we can feel that quality of mind that can rest, not seeking something missing, notexhausted by too much of anything. Of course the mind of abundance and the mind of lackcome up, but we can watch them naturally settle into simple ease. This is enough. How simpleit is!About a Boy Stirring JamA wooden spoon for stirring jam,Dripping sweet tar, while in the panPlum magma’s bubbles blather.For someone who can’t grasp the wholeThere’s salvation in the remembered detail.What, back then, did I know about that?The real, hard as a diamond,Was to happen in the indefinableFuture, and everything seemedOnly a sign of what was to come. How naïve.Now I know inattention is an unforgivable sinAnd each particle of time has an ultimate dimension.Janusz Szubertranslated by Ewa Hryniewicz-YarbroughAs we enter the holidays, we will be exhorted to buy, buy, buy, and we will also be exhorted tothink about those who have little or nothing, with charity. We believe we know what we need,what we must have, and worse, we believe we know what others need or want (or shouldneed or want). From the mind of sufficiency, we open to a much more vast and satisfyingrelation with all beings, and with the whole world. It is the mind of mutuality, of relationality,through which genuine care can be expressed. Even in difficult or trying situations (which wemay find ourselves in over the holidays), we can open the profound inquiry in each moment:what is the liberating potential in this situation? What is it that expresses kindness or invitesconnection? In the mind of abundance we may be too mesmerized by our pleasure and comfortto engage this inquiry; in the mind of lack, we feel too impoverished to. So the mind ofsufficiency is a calm, steady, quiet mind, a mind that pays attention to just what is needed,what is enough. And this allows us to respond with what we can offer, generously and joyfully.It may be as simple as a hand on the arm and the ability to be with someone in silence. Ourpresence is our most abundant gift, and one we can freely and generously share.So if you have been invited to a Thanksgiving celebration hosted by the parents of the bestfriends of your son’s wife, as I have, and if it should happen that there is also a requirement towear a costume with a glitzy drugstore cowboy theme, something not readily available in yourwardrobe, remember that you do not need to spend hundreds of dollars on just the right---4fashion statement, and you also do not need to fret that you can only tie a lame bandanna on ashirt with a pair of jeans. And if, in addition, your son and wife are arriving at midnight ofThanksgiving eve, expecting somehow to magically manifest costumes from an environment inwhich every single store will be closed, the complexity multiplies by three. This is only anothersituation to meet with the mind of sufficiency. Which I hope I can do.