Are you addicted to why? Shambhavi talks about the uselessness of asking why. If you want to find actual peace and contentment, better to ask how? and what? A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi
Podcast First Words
I want to talk about living without asking why. I just remembered a story that my divination teacher taught me. This is something that really happened. I learned divination from Lu Ming, a Daoist teacher. He grew up in New England, and at one time he was a student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Ming actually isn’t alive anymore. He died a few years ago.
When Ming was a younger man, there was some kind of Buddhist spiritual center in New England. The lama who was running this center—and I can’t remember the whole story, which I wish I could—but something made this lama think that maybe it wasn’t a good idea for them to stay in the center. He thought they should move. And so he asked Ming to do a divination about it.
Ming was out in the woods, and six ravens—he said they were really huge birds—landed right in front of him and started cawing in different patterns. Ming said he actually fainted. He was very frail, probably about 110 pounds. He was never that hale and hearty. So he saw these big birds, and when he saw them he fainted out of fright. Then when he came to, they were cawing in different rhythms. And according to Ming, they were cawing in the numbers that corresponded to different lines of a six-line hexagram in the I Ching, which most of you have probably heard of. He went back, and he reported that these ravens had given him a divination and that the divination was disastrous for this group to stay in the center in New England. The very next day they packed up and left.
So this is about living in the livingness of communication. This is where you’re able to recognize wisdom, and you’re just following it because it’s wisdom. Because you feel that it’s wisdom. Because you have a direct perception that it’s wisdom.