Fishy Story

Buddhism is different than many other religions in that it doesn't have a system of core beliefs that you're expected to blindly accept and maintain.  Rather, the teachings of the Buddha are more like a bunch of mathematical theorems that you're expected to examine and prove or disprove for yourself. You're free to accept some of the theorems and reject others, if that's what your own careful observations, experience, and testing indicates.

Personally, I've found a lot of evidence to support the theorems on impermanence, interdependence, and emptiness, but don't see the evidence to support reincarnation and some aspects of the concept of karma. But that's my personal observations - your's may differ, and I'm not trying to win anyone over to my observations.

In fact, I was already convinced of many of the theorems myself before I had even started Buddhist study, but never had formulated them into a belief system.  One teaching, not so much of a theorem itself but a technique used to investigate those theorems, that was intuitively obvious to me was the power of stillness. That is, not rushing around to experience as much as possible, but instead being still and quiet and letting the universe unfold and reveal itself before you. That lesson wasn't something I picked up reading the sutras or drummed into my head during the many hours of Zen practice, but something that I had observed on my own many times, even before I started my study of Buddhism.   

Back in the very early 1970s when I was in high school, I befriended a girl I'll call Mary.  She had long dark hair and was cute in an elfin, pixie kind of way but she's wasn't a girlfriend, just a platonic pal, although in retrospect I think I may have been missing some signals on her part.  In any event, Mary lived pretty far out in the country, far from my family's in-town house, so we usually could only see each other at school, but one summer weekend afternoon I went out to her country home.

She had a whole bunch of cool, laid-back, long-haired brothers and sisters, many more than I had known, and her family's property was large enough to support more than just a mere pond, but a small lake.  At around dusk, she took me down to the dock and taught me a family trick that had been passed down from brother to sister and possibly even across generations, which I will now share with you.  

She gave me a slice of white bread, and told me to roll about a quarter of it up into a tight, round ball.  She did the same, and be laid stomach-down on the dock together with our hands in the water, holding the ball of bread between our thumb and index finger.  "Don't move a muscle," she said, "no matter what."

The two of us were as still as statues, gazing down into the water.  For the longest time, nothing happened, but we stayed still, our arms not creating even the slightest of ripple on the surface of the water.  Eventually, though, down in the inky blackness of the depths of the lake, something started to move.

It was hard to see as first, just black-on-black shadows slowly taking form.  But ever so slowly, the shadows took the form of two large catfish, slowly, cautiously, moving toward the bait we were holding, their mouths constantly opening and closing.  Mary whispered, "Stay still," and eventually the catfish came right up to our hands and took the bread from between our fingers so gently that if you weren't watching you might not even have noticed, and then quickly disappeared down into the murky depths again. 

I didn't know how her family had discovered this trick (who lays around with a handful of bread in the water for no reason?), but I thought it was a very cool thing.  If we were to have moved even in the slightest, we would have scared the catfish away. Just one ripple in the water would have been enough to send them back down to the bottom - one flinch as their open mouths approached your fingers would have done it.  It was only in total quiet and stillness that this intimate moment with nature could have been achieved.

Doubtless, you've had similar experiences, and like me, you may have largely forgotten them.  But the memories of that summer afternoon, and little Mary with her country home and large family, came back to me one day during sitting meditation, and I realized that in many ways, that was my first experience taking the backward step.  

Be still, and the universe will come to you.