In a recent conversation about relationships, a fellow Zen Buddhist compared people’s tendency to expect changes in their romantic partner to shopping for a dog and bringing home a cat then expressing continual frustration to the cat that it doesn’t do what dogs can do.  People go out in search of something specific and, when they end up with less than what they wanted, make efforts to change the person.

We do this to ourselves, too.  We want to be a dog, but if we are a cat, we spend our lives pointing out to ourselves all the ways in which we are not a dog.  You might think, “Well, yes, but we have the power to change ourselves, whereas our power to change others is limited.”  However, this distinction between self and other breaks down at a certain point, because what you do within is reflected without, and what happens externally is really internal.  That is the essential Buddhist experience.

In some sense, the whole world is just one big cat, and samsara (or suffering) is the whole world wishing to be a dog, and love is to simply see what is and accept what is.

When we truly and deeply accept everything as it is, we find that this total acceptance is just like a dog.  We were both all along.

From Adyashanti in Emptiness Dancing:

“Everybody transmits his or her own realization, like a radio broadcast signal, twenty-four hours a day.  And everybody receives it.  When you realize that your true nature is already free, that it is inherently empty of image, and that it is pure spirit and presence, you will see that it is what everybody else is.  Without even thinking about it, you will transmit this.  If you think everybody is separate, you will send out that signal, no matter what you do.

With this freedom you start to realize there is no inner and outer, because it is all one, and the vision of this is more powerful than anything that I will ever say.  I guarantee you that one being who sees the Buddha in you is worth more than reading ten thousand books about the Buddha.  One being who actually knows that there is only the Buddha and that nothing else is going on has a more powerful effect than anything else.

The deepest feeling of a compassion that does not seek to alter anything, paradoxically, alters everything.  When you touch inside yourself that which is not seeking to alter anything, you’ve touched upon absolute nonresistance, and this alters your perception of everything.  When your conditioning touches that inside, which is unconditioned, it alters your conditioning irrevocably.  That is the sacred alchemy, and that is compassion.”