Finding Your 'Big Mind'

We Are All Connected: Finding Your “Big Mind”

by Genpo Roshi | December 14th, 2008 | Comments (2)
topic: Personal Growth | tags: acceptance, Buddha Mind, control, God, spirituality, Zen

We are all born with the unborn Buddha Mind, what I call Big Mind/Big Heart, an inner awareness that we are connected with others and our environment — literally One Mind. But something happens as we grow up; we begin to separate ourselves from the rest of the world. We trade the Big Heart-Mind we are born with for another mind that centers around the small self. That self then becomes our number one preoccupation.

The small mind always looks at the world from the center called “me.” The arrow points “out there” so everything else appears to be on the outside. And when we look “out there,” we feel rather empty, unimportant and incomplete “in here.” Naturally, want arises; we want to feel better, more complete.

As long as we believe that something outside ourselves can make us feel whole, we will be driven to grasp at things. Dissatisfaction and anxiety will haunt us because we have traded Big Mind for a narrow, self-centered one. This unrest is what the Buddha called ignorance. We ignore our intrinsic wholeness.

The point of spiritual practice is to return to our original nature, which is Big Mind — the mind of clarity and wisdom, and Big Heart — the mind of compassion. … Even though we experience this incomprehensible Heart-Mind, our separate and frightened self wants to believe that something bigger than ourselves has everything in control; so we keep looking for God “out there.” The secret known by all the mystics is that God can be found only when we give up our efforts to control and understand our life.

When we look inside and let go, we can come from Big Mind and see that there is no need to control any of it. When we allow everything to just be, it all functions exactly the way we want because we give up wanting it to be any other way. The trick is to let go of wanting. When we give up our preconceptions of where the snow should fall and let it fall where it falls, then there is no question about what to do. Grab a shovel.
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