Road to the Divine

Meditation for Friday, July 29: Follow your senses

Running can be humbling, and it was for me today. I ran farther than I ever have before, but in the last mile, I developed a side stitch that almost made me end the run. Fortunately, I found the other side of the pain and made it through. When I finished, I smiled.

Novice zen monks entering a monastery are tasked with menial jobs, usually washing the floors. In some monasteries, it is back-breaking work requiring bending over and running back and forth pressing a wet sponge to the ground. The station is lowly, the pain piercing, and the monks have to learn how to understand it as something temporary. The Buddha taught that everything is impermanent, including pain.

In his diary, The Drowned Book (trans. by Coleman Barks), 13th-century Sufi mystic Bauhauddin, the father of Rumi, stresses the importance of being aware of your senses. Like the Buddha, Bauhauddin believed in the impermanence of pain. Being a mystic, he also saw the senses as the ultimate road to the divine.

From The Drowned Book, Book 1, verse 10:

I see the essence of being alive as water flowing from the invisible to here, and then back to there. My senses know they came from nowhere and will go back to nowhere. I recognize the one step from existence to non and from nonexistence to here. When I deeply know my senses, I feel in them the way to God and the purpose of living.