If write ‘above you’ll see my neighbours tree’…well would I lie to you?

That saying ‘seeing is believing’ is so often what we do … but the believing is deceiving… and it confounds the seeing!

Looking with wider eyes, is there just a tree?… – no sky, no clouds or sun?’
Okay… so maybe there is a tree and sky and sun and clouds in front of me…

Or maybe not…

Are there simply dots… showing variation of colour on the screen…
(mostly back or white)
which I take to show defined and separated shapes
quickly pattern-matched to words
with the easy familiarity of
of one steeped in human concepts…

Connecting these words creatively…
with echoes from the senses
from memory… and beliefs,
from ‘me’,
I weave an artificial-a-tree!

Although it seems that there
is, really, truly, something there…some self-existing ‘thing’
independent of the movements of my mind…
That’s a belief…a thought taken to be true, invested with certainty by the energy of another thought (or two, or three…or four or many more!)
Mum says to six month old tugging at what’s within it’s grasp from the back pack as we chat …that’s a tree! A silver-birch tree!!! it goes on and on from there…it’s a this…it’s a that…but whatever we call it that’s not what it is.

Then I could investigate further…this propensity to reify imaginings!
Does something similar happen when I’m out in the garden looking at ‘my neighbours tree’…
Do I separate dualistically, there’s me-subject and tree-object…do I interpolate a screen of interpretation between the tree and me?
Or do I see what’s there prior this activity…the radiance, light or energy of my mind showing as forms of emptiness…none which are ‘things’.

In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet he says ‘there’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’.
But although it’s less poetic isn’t it more true to say thinking makes it ‘seem’ so, for the thinker…?
And we can also look deeper… to the possibility of realising that there are no self-existing things onto which such an attribution of value could be stuck…Thinking, believing, that there are!.. won’t make it so…
and closes the door to a vital question… regarding the nature of this confident labeller, the ‘sticker’ !

Adding concepts to light forms is the recipe for making samsara… a world of pseudo entities where, as we fall into reifying interpreting and identifying with arising thoughts… utilising them as the basis for our fabrications, the light of the mind seems obscured…
And as we feel more dense solid and certain about our existence as individuated things we forget how much we have in common…most profoundly the equality of the empty ground or basis of our manifestation.
It’s always there but ‘unseen’ by our way of looking… until we desist…and relax out of our hungry egoic fascination with any movement of the mind…in meditations which facilitate this realisation.


Can I relax out of my solidifying busyness enough to allow the showing of the energy, ‘the tree’ , to impact me, to open to it, relax into… allow myself to be at one with the tree?
Then maybe I’ll see that the dry and dehydrating concepts which I, as ego-self, might usually unwittingly apply …making it seem more interesting to me… are not only superfluous … but a distraction.
It’s a bit like putting a big wedding dress over it… you look so pretty! I say, relating to the dress/ing that I just added…I’m appreciating my creativity not what’s actually there.

Maybe you like Wordsworth’s poetry…and can kind of imagine the daffodils…but if really you want to ‘get’ a daffodil you’ve really got to be there, present..relaxed…soft gaze, absorbing, sniff… and put your face in it! Then…what can you say about that? …it’s ineffable! and more of life would be as that if we weren’t so quick to deaden it with our ‘knowing’ words


So, if you like, you can imagine me in the garden enjoying the display…

At eight a.m….morning tea,
blackbird looks out from the neighbour’s tree…
By nine…
both gone!

…sawdust… logs… and chippings…!!!

Is there a gap in what I see… a hole left in the mind by the missing tree?…Happily not..it’s self-healing, always complete …

I appreciation of the tree I wrote:

For many years this full grown, vital tree
offered generous hospitality…
to birds and many beings

Nesting mating resting singing,
playing fighting shouting screeching
warming wings and preening feathers

shade and shelter from inclement weather,
the smaller from the big predator

In conversation with the soil; fungi bacteria and
all surrounding trees, and more,
the clouds… the sun and moon…
and stars

Drinking the rain and swapping gasses with the air
It swayed and danced and bent in gales,
and swished it’s branches in the breeze…

then suddenly…

first legs and arms, then head,
then trunk,

erased from view

chunk after chunk
like slow-mo etch-a-sketch…

Apparently…

my neighbour’s neighbour…
is troubled by needles!

Eh!!?… Oh!…
not the sharp and shiny ones
but the browny and piney ones
Riding the wind they sometimes fly from the tree
and, thoughtlessly,
some land…
in his gutters!

Laughing or crying…??? which to do ???
sadness and laughter both move through…

Illusions arise that we call ‘you’ and ‘me’
‘the bird’ ‘the chainsaw’ and ‘the tree’

but as they arise and we let them go free,
we can play in the play… with equanimity

Appearances – as experience shows –
Come as they come
and go as they go!

P.S For some reading this, it might be a first taste … You’ll find that the You-Tube Videos of the recent retreat James gave ‘The practice of Meditation’ explain this and much more with great clarity!
Releasing out our habitual orientations is not a task for the anxious ego…but, softening in the dharma rain and feel safer, closer to the truth..reliance on the ego-self construct diminishes and so we see more clearly