A clear mind lasts forever

You hurt me years ago;
My wounds bled for years.
Now you are back,

But I am not the same.

(from 365 Tao by Deng Ming-Dao)

When we meet enemies from our past—some friend, family member, parents, a person on the street, acquaintance who has wounded us—and the mind’s tongue doesn’t suddenly lick a remembered sore, we know we have healed. We have changed and are no longer vulnerable the same way anymore.

Listen to your friends and family in daily conversation. How much of it is the licking of open and still hurting wounds. When we talk up our grievances, we are just asking other minds to lick them for us, like a child asking its mother to kiss the boo boo and make it go away. Some people are consumed with grievance.

I met a man yesterday, and when I asked how his business was he went into a long rant about how Obama had ruined his life. I wished him well and walked away, leaving him in pain. I didn’t want to lick his wound, for I knew licking it would not make it go away.

Much of our public and family discourse is the convention of exchanging licks: I’ll lick your wound if you lick mine. So we listen to the grievances of others, patiently waiting until we can share ours. If we don’t have some recent personal attack to grieve about, we can grieve about the weather, the repairs we have to make on our stuff…something is wrong somewhere. We have made a religion a communion of sharing grievances, and we don’t want to be left out. “What, you don’t have a grievance! What’s wrong with you?”

We should ask ourselves if it is possible to live without having grievances? To live without being covered with open wounds, festering sores in the mind? We can almost remember a time before the advent of the ego when as an innocent child we had no grievance with the world. Is that child dead? Is that innocence lost? Ask yourself this: if innocence is just a clear mind, a mind that is not hampered by an conceptual operating system we can call the Ego, is that original face lost forever or just hidden from view. Is it in the future, something to be attained—or is it always now? A clear mind is a joyous mind. A clear mind is a wondrous mind. A clear mind holds no grievances against the world. A clear mind is like an eye without cataracts.

A clear mind is the Christ child born in our heart…once when we popped out of the womb in our first birth…and still…waiting to be popped out of the grieving mind for a second birth. What is our grievance but the womb of wonder, the manger of God and our  opportunity for healing.

A grievance is only a grievance when we lick it’s pain and when we share it. To the clear mind, the grievance has no more reality than a cloud does to the blue sky. To the silent mind, a grievance has no more power than the barking of a distant dog. To the peaceful mind, a grievance is just another opportunity to release oneself from the tyranny of the past.