The One Revealed III

Scott Bradley

Each thing reveals the One, / the One manifests as all things. / To live in this Realization / is not to worry about perfection or non-perfection. / To put your trust in the Heart-Mind / is to live without separation, / and in this non-duality you are one with your Life-Source.
— Xin-Xin Ming (Seng-Ts'an?; Richard B. Clarke, translator)

Putting our trust in the heart-mind is the same as "realization". This is saying a lot. What is it saying? I think it might mean something very different to Seng-Ts'an and his translator than it does to me, this difference being that which obtains between Buddhism and philosophical Daoism (as I understand them). Nevertheless, understood from a Daoist perspective, it still points to the pinnacle experience to which it aspires.

The heart-mind, for Zen, is identical with Universal Mind. This may be the case, but I cannot go there; or at least, I cannot begin there. I can only begin with this heart-mind that "I" am; this experience of "me" is the gate to my re-integration with source, not as something known, but as a not-knowing that need not know. This is the meaning of "trust". There is no reason to identify this mind with a distinct and unique universalization of itself beyond the universal integration of all things. One might just as easily speak of the Universal Not-Mind. Consciousness is indeed a wonderful experience, but it would still be anthropocentric folly to pronounce it special. Nevertheless, it is this experience which is both paradoxically the cause of our alienation from source and our opportunity to re-integrate with 'it'.

Trust is possible only because of individuated conscious experience; a rock has neither the possibility nor the necessity. Blessed rocks. Blessed humanity, which can actually consciously experience re-integration.

Trust is affirmation so profound that it is synonymous with surrender. Surrender is a letting go into things as they are, the inevitable and the unavoidable, that resonates back into the conscious mind as thankfulness. Trust is an opening of the heart-mind in thankfulness. As such, it has no object; it requires no tenets of belief; "source" is beyond imagining and re-integration with 'it' takes place in the realm of Mystery, empty of content.

Zhuangzi describes this as relying on nothing. To the extent that one believes in something, there is something relied upon; and where something is relied upon, there remains something unsurrendered. If something has to be "true", then conditions obtain, and where conditions obtain, something is relied upon; where something is relied upon there is a gap between that something and oneself.

"To put your trust in the heart-mind" is to surrender into the experience of you as sufficient unto itself as an expression of source. Trust need not be conjured up; it is already the deepest expression of one's existence. Life is trust. To live is to trust. To trust is to live most fully.

You can check out Scott's other miscellaneous writings here.