Pineapple Origination

So, I had an interesting thing happen today during the meditation period at our Sunday service. I was starting to drift away a little bit and a random thought came into my head, as they do. It went something like: "Wow, you are not very hungry right now even though you only had a few pieces of pineapple this morning." At that point I saw a piece of pineapple in my head clear as day and within a few minutes, my stomach was growling my body trying to digest that piece of "mind pineapple" I was just thinking about.

(Reenactment)

Now - anyone who has tried meditation on a regular basis, or been to a longer practice period, or really has just sat with other people know that this type of thing can happen. No sooner then it gets quiet in the zendo that the stomach thunder starts rolling in. So, not really so amazing...

But what struck me, was that the shear idea of pineapple caused a reaction in my body - I reacted to an imaginary piece of pineapple even tried to digest that sucker. My body reacted, my mind reacted (by visualizing said piece of pineapple, etc). It wasn't real, I made it up, yet acted as though it was. For the most part I reacted whether it was real or not.

How often do we do this with other things in life? We question ourselves in our mind, we create scenarios; doubts, fears, objections and without really knowing it our body reacts, our mind reacts we bring these things from nothing into something. But just like the pineapple - they don't exist. So we think we can't get through those prostrations, or live our lives, or make do with less, and viola - we don't. Think out our stress - it is like the pineapple - totally self induced, totally self created, the sum of all those fears, doubts, etc rolling around in our heads making our stomachs rumble. Its not real, we just make it so.

One of my favorite quotes is:

"I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened"
- Mark Twain

The idea of dependent origination is similar to the pineapple piece. All things are the effect of something that caused it to be, thus causing new effects and new results, all intertwined, all linked together. The point is: you can't separate the parts, you can only respond to the cause or the effect. You can also be the cause, you can be the effect and in the process you effect the entire net. A lot of times people mistake the idea of Karma to mean the effect - something happens to you and we say "That's Karma!" but karma is actually the cause, not the effect - it comes from the beginning. all the way back to the intent of the action. Good or bad intention causes good or bad karmic effects.

So we can create sweat pieces of fake pineapple to bring into the world, or we can imagine all sorts of things - like unhappiness, mistrust, anger, doubts, fears and bring those into the world - it all comes from the same mind, all the same place.

Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate bodhi svaha!