Holding Views on Allowing Is Not Allowing

I pay homage to Gautama,
To him who out of compassion
Taught the true Dharma
As the relinquishing of all views.

-- Master Nagarjuna

The above was fished up out of the Muddy Pool. I don't know where it originally came from, or who left it there. A black turtle? A floating weed? I would like to know.

Master Dogen wrote that the standard is "the samadhi of accepting and using the self." Observing the behaviour of my Buddhist Master over many years, he has always been manifesting this standard in reality very conspicuously.

And yet, he explains the standard as "balance of the autonomic nervous system" and, it seems to me, attaches very strongly to this explanation, seeing it as a kind of bridge between eastern and western thought.

The key to realizing the standard, my Master teaches, is "to keep the spine straight vertically."

It remains a mystery to me: how can his standard be so constantly true, and yet his teaching be so consistently misleading and false?

The standard is our natural, innnate, original state. In order to manifest This Brightness, we do not need any kind of physiological understanding of what it is, and we do not need any kind of view on how straight the spine should be.

Rather, if we have some such physiological or anatomical view, the challenge might be just to relinquish those views.

What I could not understand under the guidance of my Buddhist Master in Japan, and have only begun to understand under the guidance of experienced Alexander teachers, is this:
To have a view on how straight the spine should be is totally antithetical to the practice of allowing the spine to do what it wants.

In saying this, I am doubtless guilty of holding onto another view--a view that is antagonistic to the view held by my Master. That is my usual way.

So, there comes a point at which one has to set aside even one's view about "allowing" and what one has learnt from wise Alexander teachers about the allowing of openness--intellectually, emotionally, and physically.

It is good to think things out before that point. The more clearly one's whole body has become informed with thought in preparation for it, the simpler the practice of allowing is likely to be.

But there comes a time--it might be shortly after one's arse has touched down upon a zafu--to relinquish all views and really just allow it.