Whoa Horse! I told you to stop, damn it!

~ Live & Learn

black and white,

There is a story in Zen circles about a man and a horse. The horse is galloping quickly, and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important. Another man standing alongside the road, shouts, “Where are you going?” and the first man replies, “I don’t know! Ask the horse!” This is also our story. We are riding a horse, we don’t know where we are going, and we can’t stop. The horse is our habit energy pulling us along, and we are powerless. We struggle all the time, even during our sleep. We are at war within ourselves…We have to learn the art of stopping – stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, the strong emotions that rule us. When an emotion rushes through us like a storm, we have no peace.

– Thích Nhât Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering Into Peace, Joy and Liberation

Credits: Quote – Sensual Starfish. Image: landscapre

 

28 thoughts on “Whoa Horse! I told you to stop, damn it!”

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  9. Paradoxically, the only way to get off the horse is to stop identifying with the rider of the horse. If we are not the rider then who are we?
    Here is an extract from the personal account of a great philosopher Douglas Harding, who was led to his “natural” state( which is the same as everyone/thing’s):
    http://www.headless.org/on-having-no-head.htm.
    He lost his head and gained the whole universe. The experiments on headless.org are wonderful tools to find the answer to the question, as old as the origin of man; “Who am I?”

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  10. Ok some kind of twin, you’ve gone and done it again. Seriously. This is so good. So timely. So helpful. I shared with a friend and she zeroed in on the phrase, ‘our habit energies’ and I found such resonance with the last sentence: “When an emotion rushes through us like a storm, we have no peace.” GULP. AIR. Yes.

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  11. Yesterday, as I was doing an exercise program, I kept thinking of all the things I hadn’t accomplished though out my day, I kept reviewing the list — and I would feel my whole self sigh and get weak… so tempted to stop — too weak to try. My husband likes to say that we often allow the tail to wag the dog. Thanks for sharing this profound snippet. I’m encouraged to find a way to quell the storm.

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