This One. Immediate. Moment. The Rest is Nothing.

Every Sunday morning I attend a silent meditation group at our local Buddhist center which has a big sunny meditation room…and a large, beautiful statue of the Buddha. We sit for 30 minutes in….well, silence. This particular morning two female friends joined me and afterwards we had breakfast talking about marriage, parenting, personal growth, dreams, and a sundry of other topics.

As we were talking, I saw my ex walk in behind them. I instantly wanted to either hide or flee. Neither were good options so I sat there with the sweat beginning to bead on my forehead hoping she would stay THERE and not walk over HERE where I would have to acknowledge her. She did not, thankfully.

Walking back out into the sunshine having avoided the head-on collision with she-who-will-remain-nameless got me thinking.

In his book, Dropping Ashes on the Buddha, Zen Master Seung Sahn relays a “problem” about a man that walks into the temple smoking a cigarette, steps up to the statue of the Buddha, blows smoke in its face, and drops ashes on its lap.

For most of us, this would be an act of intense disrespect. Can you imagine doing this to a statue of Jesus in a church? For some, the same could be said for kneeling during the National Anthem or burning the flag. Society teaches us that showing disrespect for the symbol is equivalent to showing disrespect to person, deity, whatever.

Not so fast.

Not only are they not equivalent, but (brace yourself) neither the symbol nor the thing it represents is worthy of devotion. Both are illusions. Both the statue of the Buddha AND the Buddha are representations — empty and impermanent. Jesus, Buddha, our Flag….all of it. Empty.

Blasphemy!

Here’s where I’m going: How often do we let our feelings, perceptions, and impulses fool us thinking we know what is right and what is wrong…good and evil…true and untrue? Our entire lives are organized around compartmentalizing people, events, and opinions into dualistic categories — categories that give structure to our lives and enable our ego’s self-preservation.

We follow religions and proclaim loyalties to countries. We erect statues, buildings, and Facebook profiles. All of it to construct a sense of who we are (and are not) and what we believe in. These constructs seem real, but they are mind-created and illusions. They get us through the day and night. They get us through our long lives. They shape our attitudes and elicit feelings, but they are not real.

Am I saying that God isn’t real? Let me put it this way: can you define God? I can’t. My inability to define him doesn’t make him unreal. It only makes him beyond mind and beyond words.

So, like the man in the temple dropping ashes on the Buddha, we have to let go of these preconceived notions. A thing is what it is, nothing more, nothing less. It is both infinite and nothing. It is beyond words and beyond thinking.

Would you drop ashes on the Buddha? Or the Bible? Would you laugh at the casket of your loved one? Would you burn the flag? Do you have so much respect for life that nothing that the mind creates is as important as this one immediate moment?