Environment - Cause and Effect

For a certain effect to occur we need certain conditions. In our tradition, one of the most important awareness we develop is of the environment beging created.

Everything we think, say, and do interacts with everything and everyone else. This interaction creates an environment. The environment is either conducive to or not conducive to certain conditions.

We always begin with an inside out approach. So the first environment is our own internal one, and using this to settle the root of our practice. But since it's not really separate, is it? So we extend this awareness out as far as our current consciousness will go to include the entire cosmos. We call this Ten-Jin-Chi or Heaven-Person-Earth; with the person being in the middle and the link between the other two (that's not two, of course).

The center of the space is next. Sometimes this refers to the actual physical center and other times it refers to the Sacred Center; and these are often the same place too.

Next is the entrance and the approach to that entrance. We like this to be varied and meandering, so the energy proceeds in a nice mellow manner... ebbing and flowing like a gentle breeze that drifts along picking up a few dried leaves as it goes.

There needs to be an exit. Where this exit is, and how it is used, is very important. Of course a place for the refuse is needed to.

Then we take care of everything thing else we can find, searching for the last place of awareness, anything we may have missed.

Eventually time runs out and we begin again...