Haunted

When I came upon this tree awhile back, I couldn’t help but stop and take a few pictures of it. With its bare limbs raised in the air, and almost everything around it dead as well, it’s the perfect image of our repetitive, habit driven minds.

Chinese Zen Master Sengcan, in his great dharma poem Xinxinming, wrote this: “When you try to stop activity, your very efforts fill you with activity.”

So, we have a quandary, don’t you think? There’s the mind dipping back into the past over and over again, bringing forth the same old muck, same old ways of acting and believing. And then there’s this line, reminding us that suppression only brings more activity – and I’d say haunted activity at that.

Take a haunted house. How the spirit of someone that lived there, or spent time there in the past, now clings to the walls and floorboards, unable to let go of whatever it was that had happened there. Having no peace itself, the ghost fills the entire house, and everyone in it with dis-ease. It’s a miserable existence, being trapped between incarnations, and also caught between the desire for liberation and the itchiness of recreating old misery.

In a way, all of us are like this at least some of the time. Some old event or dysfunctional way of acting or thinking arises and, instead of breathing into it and letting it be as it is, we pour ourselves into it, until we become like a forest filled with dead trees.

Do you ever feel like you are haunted?

Photo Credit

Haunted Tree by Nathan Thompson

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