EXPERIENCE, PERFUME, SEED

According to Buddhist psychology, there are three stages to the development of a narrative: experience, perfume, and seed. We have the experience, which creates a perfume, an emotional memory. That memory coagulates to form a seed that projects into the future. Our narrative is created and perpetuated by a waterfall of experience, perfume, and seed; experience, perfume, and seed; experience, perfume, and seed. As long as we cling to a narrative, our future is affected by the residue of the past.

Friends are those for whom we carry positive seeds. Our last experience with them left a wonderful perfume that coagulated into a positive seed, so we want to be with them. This tendency keeps our narrative going. For as long as our narrative runs, we experience the present through the past.

But with practice, we begin to notice when we are watering seeds from the past that will condition and limit our future.
–Tim Burkett

WHAT’S UNDERNEATH

A student got discouraged because the higher states he experienced always passed. “What’s the use?” he asked.

Suzuki Roshi laughed and said, “That’s right, no use. All these states come and go, but if you continue your practice, you find there’s something underneath.”  

We are free, every one of us. We are born free, and the bondage, restrictions, and limits that we find in our life are self-created. The edges we perceive have been placed there by the way we use our minds. There are fundamentally no edges, no boundaries. But this practice has nothing to do with believing. We don’t have Zen believers. It also has nothing to do with understanding. Understanding implies a separation between the knower and the thing that the knower knows. It has to do with direct and intimate experience itself. Your experience. Not Shakyamuni Buddha’s, not mine—yours. Only you can make yourself free. No one can do it for you. The only one with the power to do it is you yourself. “Only a Buddha can realize Buddha”—and it is nowhere to be found other than on top of the seat that you’re sitting on. –John Dido Loori