Sosan Explained How I Got Here
By Steve Beckow
Posted on May 23, 2023
Words like “mature” and “adult” have gotten a bad reputation in the last number of years.
I’m going to find another word. I choose the word “spacious.”
I bestow on it the meaning, “able to grant another space to be heard; able to place space between the actor/observer and the ego; open to and able to allow the divine qualities to fill that space.”
On what authority do I appropriate that word and give it this new meaning?
Anthropologist Leslie White looked at words as symbols upon which we freely and arbitrarily bestow meaning. (1) I’ve done what he described, freely and arbitrarily bestowing a meaning upon a word-symbol; namely, “spacious.”
So feeling more spacious recently than I ever have, following an experience of … uhh, maturity, I’m much more able to watch myself act. We saw recently that Sosan is able to slow his actions down to the extent that he sees himself create a preference. (2)
I never considered that. He and I both are on the path of awareness but his awareness is….
Well, let me relate a story to suggest how I hold him. I studied in Toronto under a student (Burt Konzak) of a Zen karate master named Hidehiko Ochiai. I once witnessed the master do a sword kata (exercise) in which the light shone off the blade as he moved.
But when he moved, the light did not shimmer.
Do you know what self-mastery it must take to do a sword kata and not have the light shimmer on your blade as you moved? My mouth was agape and I looked around to see if anyone else noticed. That was purity.
I can’t remember if I saw or was told that he would catch two arrows in the air simultaneously.
Whatever the case, the kind of mastery that Master Ochiai demonstrated and that I witnessed is similar in my mind to Sosan’s.
For me, Sosan is a master in growth to enlightenment.
***
To observe myself creating a preference never occurred to me. To really subject that to scrutiny?
What comes first? A craving. I clothe it in words. I enjoy it. I create a preference for it in future.
It’s the craving that brings on the desire for the specific, preferred item.
And not for what is not my preferred item. “This one; not that one.” Herewith have I created a division and set one part of my world against another.
Sosan would say that in so doing I’ve created division, split the world, and confused the mind.
We all of us are doing that every day. I like coffee. I don’t like tea. I like this kind of people. I don’t like that kind. I like Tom. I don’t like Tamara.
Multiply that by a few billion and run the script day and night. Welcome to Earth society 2023.
And then I wonder why I wake up on the Third Dimension, where true love is unknown and where people mostly occupy themselves with being right and seeing others as wrong or sharing their likes and dislikes? How did I get here?
Sosan explained how I got here.
I’m not interested in leaving here so I won’t necessarily follow him all the way Home. This is Home to me until told I can go!
Meanwhile, I’ll be surfing the great wave of love that all of us are riding home on. And, as I said earlier, Sosan’s is a great travel guide on the journey.
Footnotes
(1) In Leslie White, The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1949.
(2) See “Sosan’s Hsin Hsin Ming; or, The Book of Nothing,”
Steve Beckow
Steve Beckow
