Delusion and Awakening | Paul Gyodo Agostinelli Sensei

What is delusion? Zen Master Dogen said "To carry youself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is enlightenment." Do you experience yourself as experiencing things? Or is life just happening? Our view of ourself as a separate self and our ideas often get in the way of seeing this, creating a contraction in the body-mind that is self-reinforcing. This is why not-knowing is such a big part of our practice. In zazen, if we're truly practicing, we can explore this edge. Can we let go of our contracted, deluded view and allow experience to experience itself? Can we wake up to reality?

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I suppose that was how I came by my own state of mindfulness. I was faced with a situation (albeit a bizarre one) that I could not escape that was so harrowing that if I didn't learn to manage the sheer existential dread it would have broken me. And although I lost that state of mindfulness as the existential dread faded and I fell into a sort of denial, I found that the mindful state I was in made me a better person so I came back to it.