I hope the new year is finding you all well and growing in your practice! Things haven’t been too exciting here, but we have finished a couple of new videos. The first is a excerpt from a Dharma in 1992. The video quality isn’t particularly good, but the contents are definitely worth it.
This talk covers one of the most foundational steps of spiritual practice: how to view what we’re experiencing and encountering, and what to do with it. I specifically meant “foundational” not “fundamental,” because this is the foundation of spiritual practice. It’s like getting the first button lined up properly. Get that mixed up, and everything else after it is a bit off.
“What I’m experiencing, good or bad, is manifesting from my true self.” This seems like it could be quite unfair, and in a sense it can be, because sometimes stuff happens to us for (apparently) no other reason than we were in the way. But. The thing is, because this is a manifestation of *our* foundation, our foundation also has the ability to change it into something else.
This is key. This is hope.
If what we were experiencing was truly coming from somewhere else, from something disconnected to us, then we would have almost no control over it or ability to determine where things go from here. We would be reduced to beggars, appealing to some other source to please be kind to us. Instead, by returning what we’ve experienced to our foundation (as we go forward responding to it as best we can,) it will begin to change. Sometimes that change happens so slowly we can’t see it, and sometimes it happens in an instant. But, because this is arising from our foundation, through this connection with the whole, we have the ability to affect how things go from here.
In general, it’s best to try to return and change things before they manifest into the material realm, if possible. Once something has appeared with physical form, any change has to take that into account as well, and there often seems to be only a limited range of physical change possible in the short term. Perhaps I should do a post on the limitations of change, and why it isn’t always as instantaneous as we’d like?
The second video we have is the English text to Daehaeng Kun Sunim’s translation of the Heart Sutra, as chanted in Korean by Bo Won Sunim. He does a great job, and the contents are quite profound.
Wake Up and Laugh! 
Happy Lunar New Year!
Thank you for these videos. I watch for a new release and learn something each time (and rewatch when I feel I’m not getting anywhere).
Master Daehaeng Kun Sunim is the teacher whose words I’ve heard/read where her presence (even on video) and what she’s taught opened the way into other teachers and literature I didn’t really understand before. Without the translation team and her books I would never had had that opportunity.
You mentioned, “…post on the limitations of change, and why it isn’t always as instantaneous as we’d like?”. Yes, please!
Appreciate what you do, Chong Go! (What’s the correct form of address? Should I always add Sunim?)