Staying in the physical dimension

Day 310 / 365

In the book “Nothing Holy About It”, the author Tim Burkett talked about an incident with his Zen master that resonated a lot with me. He saw his master coming towards him with a grocery bag full of vegetables. He seemed very excited about the vegetables, saying how nice they are. Tim looked at the bag and felt happy looking at the colorful vegetables and how happy they made his master.

Then the master told him that the vegetables were two days old and he got them for free from a shop that was about to throw them away. Suddenly the whole happy story about the vegetables that was in Tim’s mind vanished. They now looked rotten to him, he felt uneasy thinking about his master eating them. “What if he asked me to eat them too?” he thought.

What happened here is the difference between the physical dimension and the mental dimension. The physical dimension is what’s real, what is all around us to observe. The mental dimension is the stories we make up in our minds. It is filled with judgment criticism and ideals. The physical realities are out there for us to enjoy, but sadly we spent most of the time worrying about our own made-up stories.

You come back home and you see that your room is a mess. You blame the past you for making that mess. You worry about how you are going to continue living in such a messy room. You stress about how this mess is given you anxiety, which leads to even more anxiety. All these stories, while the reality is just that your room is messy, and you should start cleaning it.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — Exponential Growth