Awareness is our true self; it’s what we are. So we don’t have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness, with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments. We’re either in awareness, which is our natural state, or we’re doing something else. The mark of mature students is that most of the time, they don’t do something else. They’re just here, living their life. Nothing special.

103When we try to be something that we are not, we become the slave of a rigid, fixed mind, following a rule about how things have to be. The violence and the anger in us remain unnoticed, because we are caught in our pictures of how we should be.

When I watch my mind and stay with my body, out of that comes some course of action.

When we refuse to work with our disappointment, we break the Precepts: rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it's the moment of being that disappointment which is fruitful; and, if we are not willing to do that, at least we should notice that we are not willing. The moment of disappointment in life is an incomparable gift that we receive many times a day if we're alert. This gift is always present in anyone's life, that moment when 'It's not the way I want it!

If from morning to night we just took care of one thing after another, thoroughly and completely and without accompanying thoughts, such as “I’m a good person for doing this” or “Isn’t it wonderful, that I can take care of everything?,” then that would be sufficient.

When we seek from Zen (or from any spiritual path) the fulfillment of our fantasies, we separate from the earth and sky, from our loved ones, from our aching backs and hearts, from the very soles of our feet. Such fantasies insulate us for a time; yet in ten thousand ways reality intrudes, and our lives become anxious scurrying, quiet desperation, confusing melodrama.

Body tension will always be present if our good feeing is just ordinary, self-centered happiness. Joy has no tension in it, because joy accepts whatever is as it is.

Who knows how we should be? We simply do our best, over and over and over.

Who knows how you should be? We simply do our best, over and over and over.