Flipping A Coin With No Heads Or Tails

I am sitting in a cafe overlooking Tooting Broadway Underground station. It's a beautiful day. The sky is a dependable blue, and in the urban-scape, the only vegetation rises from planters splitting the traffic in the central reservation, the flora in no hurry to bloom. The florists' stall outside the station is a montage of colour against the drab concrete of the building. Below the orderly sky, the Saturday morning's hustle and bustle unfold.

The endless stream of people manifests into a rainbow of skin, language, gender, sizes, cultures, and views; a homeless lady sits outside the cafe door, her eyes gazing up from beneath her headscarf as she holds out her begging bowl. A passing woman clings to her Gucci handbag, eyes hidden by designer sunglasses. Two men with neat blonde haircuts in black T-shirts and jeans argue and gesticulate over their espressos. The driver of a black cab yells "asshole!" at a passing cyclist. I sip my green tea, the bitterness of the over-brewed leaf catching the roof of my mouth. It is easy to watch the world pass, setting apart everyone, judging every colour, culture, belief, the greedy, the angry, the innocent, and the guilty. I watch as my mind picks away at the scene and discriminates recklessly with no awareness; it clings to me, who I am, what I know, and what I believe, my truth yet not reality.

When I began Zen training, I had no realisation that how I was looking at the world might be arse about-face. I just wanted to feel better, to relieve some of the pain that my life had imposed on me. Yet something deep down was poking at me, telling me the world wasn't right, my world wasn't right, and there must be a less painful way. Zazen brought some space into a life that was full to the brim, an existence of hanging on by holding one's breath and hoping for something better. The poking became more potent, and it got me out of my bed on cold dark mornings to practice. And then my world flipped, just like a coin that has consistently landed heads up suddenly landing on tails. My beliefs, concepts, assumptions, opinions, ideas, judgements, views, and expectations dissolve into nothing.

The coin hasn't stopped landing on heads, but as it does, there is a clarity that it is nothing more than a coin at which point neither heads nor tails exist. Zen practice allows me to break the barrier of my individualism through the wisdom of nondiscrimination, freeing me from all notions, including life and death. The non-stop training holds me at the edge of freedom; it's fragile, yet with each breath comes the experience of a much needed beautiful new world.

An ancient Zen Master puts it most eloquently;

Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains, and rivers are rivers; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains, and rivers are no longer rivers; after practice, mountains are once again mountains and rivers once again rivers.

This is why we train.