Submitted by Philosoclown on
Humans do a lot of wiggling. We wiggle here, we wiggle there. We wiggle our hands and we wiggle or feet. We wiggle our eyes and we wiggle our lips. We even wiggle our minds and our hearts. We consider our wiggling to be very important and quite special. Sometimes we imagine our wiggling to be more important or more valuable than the wiggling of other humans. Sometimes we put great importance on how one wiggle is performed over some other wiggle. Sometimes we say one wiggle is the only type of wiggle and all other wiggles are in error. Believe it or not in some places one may even be killed for wiggling incorrectly. So be mindful of how you wiggle.
One thing we do a lot of is wiggle words. Word wiggling is something I do very often. A lot of the word wiggling I do is called Scientific Research which is the kind of wiggling where I have to make a lot of very small wiggly things wiggle in very precise ways and then, I have to make words wiggle in a very precise way that will reflect or describe the wiggling of the very small, precisely wiggling things. I know this sounds ludicrous but it is essentially what I do and this type of wiggling allows me to pay bills for other types of wiggling I also do (many types of human wiggling are not free and require a fee. (Isn’t it funny how close the words “free” and “fee” are, yet how different the meanings are?)
I also do another type of word wiggling where I wiggle words between two languages. Not just any words but special words. Words that were wiggled by another man who is a master word wiggler. He is what is known as a Zen Master or in his language, a Roshi. He is also my teacher. In his country other people who wiggle in ways called Zazen pay close attention to the words he wiggles. I pay close attention to the words he wiggles, not just because I have to wiggle his words into a new language, but because when he wiggles words they wiggle just the right way. One of the ways of wiggling that he teaches is to pay close attention to how and why we wiggle. Mindful wiggling, if you will.
This type of wiggling, when done with skill, is a wondrous type of wiggle. It’s spontaneous and all the other wiggles one may wiggle just fall away, leaving a kind of wiggle that is not a wiggle. When one practices this type of wiggling over time they say that one will develop what is called skillful means. The meaning of this is that one wiggles with original mind, sometimes called Bhodi mind. That is, one is wiggling in accord with all the other wiggling going on and that one becomes indistinguishable from the wiggles one makes. Further, that one is indistinguishable from the wiggles one makes, and both the wiggles and the one perceiving the wiggles is empty of any eternal, enduring, ultimate wiggle. In the vernacular of Zazen they say that the wiggle is “Empty.”
So think of all these things wiggling. People, plants, rocks, amoebas, trees, tractors, politicians, worms, vast clouds of gas and dust all wiggling together. One wiggle causing a multitude of other wiggles. Think of the past as a wiggle that gives rise to the present wiggle that will disappear and become the future wiggle. Think of our minds wiggling ideas, our hands wiggling this to make that. Observe that all this wiggling is continuous and without a start or without an end. Observe that all things wiggle. They wiggle up and then they wiggle away. If you look closely, you will see that in every wiggle one can make and in every wiggle of a wiggle there is no single unchanging wiggle that exists.
I am no master word wiggler, nor do I claim to have any special way of wiggling, but if I pay close attention to the words that wiggle in my head, these are the ways they wiggle. The wiggles don’t have much special or unique things to say but they are cute in their own way, like little furry caterpillars eating leaves.
Rodney Collins - http://umsonline.org/Reading/PastIssues/2007/Fall2007/WayOfTheWiggle.htm