Lesson 110: I am as God created me.
Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield writes in his book, A Path with Heart, about his teacher Achaan Chah who taught that all students must choose one way to practice to reach enlightenment. Chah called his practice “taking the one seat.”
Chah explains: “Just go into the room and put one chair in the center. Take the seat in the center of the room, open the doors and the windows, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat. You will see it all arise and pass, and out of this, wisdom and understanding will come.”
Today’s lesson provides that kind of “one seat” experience. If we can get it through our thick skull, and equally thick ego, that we are as God created us, then we are taking the “one seat,” we are situating ourselves in the only form of Reality that exists – our creation as innocent children of God who remain with God even as we seek to create illusory worlds of separation and division.
When we look around the world we have created, we find it difficult to believe we are as God created us, and nothing we create outside of ourselves will change that. The ego likes us to believe that we have created ourselves – that we are the master of both the past and the future. When we realize we are as God created us, we can be in the one moment the ego wants us to avoid at all costs: the present moment.
Taking the “one seat” and remembering we are as God created us allows us to simply become a witness to “scenes and actors … temptations and stories” that come our way in any given moment. If we are firm in our identity as God’s innocent creations, we don’t have to be at the mercy of those events and thoughts. Instead, we allow it to “arise and pass” without moving us from our “one seat.”
The ego balks so loudly at this idea. “You can’t just sit there, you have to DO something,” it cries, “otherwise, you’re just engaging in privileged navel gazing.”
Ah, yes, the ego always insists on action – but its favorite for us to engage in is “reaction,” where we mindlessly react to situations without first centering ourselves. This is how we get into so much trouble. We believe the illusion so fully, we dive in with both feet, determined to set right what we see as wrong and save the world through our own egoic power.
And we make a bigger mess.
By taking the “one seat” and remembering we are as God has made us empowers us to act differently in the world – to act from a place of spiritual strength instead of ego weakness. When we can remain calm in the “one seat” during a crisis, we will be more effective in how we interact with the world around us. We will make the moment that passes before us better instead of more complicated or worse.
It’s not navel gazing to take the “one seat” and remember we are as God created us. It is our duty, our imperative to do so because we can only be effective when we act from our calm, Divine center.
Kornfield knows that this is not a comfortable place to inhabit for anyone, but it’s necessary if we are to save the world.
He writes:
“We may fear that our heart is not capable of weathering the storms of anger or grief or terror that have been stored up for so long. We may have a fear of accepting all of life, what Zorba the Greek called the ‘Whole Catastrophe.’ But to take the one seat is to discover that we are unshakable. We discover that we can face life fully, with all its suffering and joy, that our heart is great enough to encompass it all.”
Photo by Eduard Militaru on Unsplash