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The two Buddhist perspectives mentioned yesterday, while seemingly contradictory, each dissolve the frictions between ourselves and the world … our experience of the disagreeable, conflict, things bumping one into the other, life not going quite as we would wish …

First, if the sense of a separate self softens, or is fully dropped, what ‘separate things’ remain to crash against each other? What “you” remains for events to “not go your way”? The friction is gone.

Second, if you — and every other object in the universe — exists perfectly as perfectly-just-what-it-is, what is there to criticize or resist? Everything is as it is. The friction is gone.

Each of these perspective, although seemingly quite different, is tasted in the goalless, objectless experience of “just sitting” Zazen. When our mind ceases its hard divisions and categorizations, the first. When we relax from imposing our judgments on ourselves and on the world as to how each “should be”, the second.

“No friction”, or better (since we still must live in a world of things that bump and crash, even as we simultaneously drop all resistance) …

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