Calm, Loving, With Clear Insight

I woke up this morning wanting to write.  I realize that part of writing this blog is developing my identity as a Buddhist – which means to develop my identity in general, really.  So the desire to write is really the desire to develop. 

I have a way of summarizing my spiritual identity.  It used to be, “Seek to be calm and loving,” but it’s evolved to “calm and loving, with clear insight.”  I’m curious to know if other people have ways of encapsulating their paths like this? 

Calm, loving, with clear insight: really, each term encapsulates the others.  In zazen, I become calm: but why is being calm important?  For me, love arises when I am calm, and so I sit zazen to be loving.  When I am calm, or when I am loving, I also see and love what really is – so being calm is important because it facilitates clear insight.  When I have clear insight I love what presents itself.  So there is a strong link between detachment and love – when I don’t desire something to be a certain way, but rather see it for what it is, that opens up the space for love.  This is why that scary word detachment makes sense to me, and why I would seek to cultivate detachment. 

In zazen, when I am involved in the act of noticing, I am often noticing something about one of these three: my attention very naturally moves to noticing outside phenomena and my internal reactions that lead to varieties of calm/not calm, loving/not so loving, and clarity/delusion.  I didn’t realize my zazen was at all ‘focused’ like this until writing.  Perhaps these three features constitute major portions of my internal movement, hence, they would simply constitute what was there to notice.   

Love is something I would hope to talk more about in the sangha.  Do other people also feel love arising from zazen?  Do others also draw these personal connections, from their direct experience, between being calm, loving, and having clear insight?  What does it look like to develop ourselves as loving beings?   To develop love within the sangha?  I suppose that is my real dream, to work together in such a way that we come to love each other. 

As someone whose Buddhism is unconcerned with nirvana, reincarnations, or notions of afterlife and soul, it may seem that bodhisattvahood would hold no meaning for me.  However, I hold it as the ultimate symbol of detached love, of loving with clear insight.  The bodhisattva is the image I hold in my mind when I bring my focus to the matter of loving all being.  Saving all beings drops by the wayside for me.  But loving all beings – and all being – is within our power.  What could be more wonderful than spending a life discovering how to do this, within oneself, but especially with a community?