Engage with life, but don’t cling

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Spiritual teacher, Ram Dass, said, “Our journey is about being more deeply involved in life and yet less attached to it.”

This is a very important teaching of Ram Dass. It sounds like a paradox. How can one be more engaged with life and yet less attached to it? Isn’t it a contradiction? To understand this is to understand the Middle Way that Buddha taught. It is also to truly understand the Zen art of non-attachment. Non-attachment is not the same as to reject or abandon the world or to stay away from people and relationships. There are two extremes: One is to become a reclusive monk and leave the secular world. The other extreme is to become a materialist and/or a hedonist. Neither is being “deeply involved in life.”

The practice of the Middle Way is to be involved in the world in a non-attached manner. Real renunciation is to accept that all things change. There is no permanence. Realizing this, we neither cling nor grasp. Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki, said, “Renunciation is not giving up the things of this world, but accepting that they go away.” Similarly, true silence is not about escaping to a world where there is no sound or noise. Rather, it is to be at peace with the world of sounds and embrace what is. My most favorite Mahayanist Sutra is the Vimalakirti Sutra, in which the protagonist is…