An Appropriate Response

An Appropriate Response: Emerging and Evolving

A Zen Koan says:

A monk asked Yun Men, “What are the teachings of a whole lifetime?” Yun Men said, “An appropriate response.”

An appropriate response to our life, our relationships, our communities and culture, and to the world. And if we hope to have an appropriate response, it must include embracing the complexity of life and the world, in addition to awakening to timeless presence, which reveals more room to work with that complexity.

Awakening means embracing and penetrating the mystery of this life as we and it change, to make sense of it all as best we can for the purpose of a most appropriate response moment to moment.

Awakening embraces the ever-changing, evolving kaleidoscope of reality. What is happening in this life matters. The experiences of life are not simply for going beyond, serving solely as exercises for meditation.

We and everyone in this world experience joy and pain, and we need to engage life to better understand how to support joy and to lessen pain, not just through the realization of presence, but also by necessarily embracing and engaging the very forms of life we inhabit and share with each other.

Presence gives us more room to respond, but it doesn’t say how we should respond or what we should do. We must live life in real time to continually discover the how and what, which is continually changing and evolving.

We seek to understand our current life experiences, to understand the problems and crises of the world, to understand what lessens suffering and cultivates love, joy, safety, dignity, and well-being.

We seek to understand how we see and experience the world in real time, to examine the very lenses with which we make sense of the world, and to strengthen, expand, deepen, and evolve our ability to understand the emerging complexity of the world and our life, so that we are more consciously evolving and responding with life, and less against it.

We seek to influence the present and how things are unfolding with as much wisdom and compassion as we can.