In Zen Buddhism.
They make a distinction between three different aspects of what you might call the spiritual life.
I find them kind of helpful and interesting,
So I thought I'd share them with you.
Practice,
Realization.
Actualization.
Practice,
Realization,
Actualization.
The practice is your practice,
Your meditation.
Realization is the state of mind,
The quality of mind that your practice creates and cultivates,
An awakened state of mind.
In Zen,
They might call it Buddha mind.
Actualization.
Is the extension of that realized mind into your everyday life.
Into the things that you do,
Into the way that you live,
Into the person.
Who you are.
Practice.
Realization.
Actualization.
Could help you think about what is your practice,
What is your realization,
What's the quality of your mind,
And how does that extend into actualization in your life.
Inevitably they all go together.
Your practice informs your Awakening,
Your awakening informs your actions,
Your actions inform your practice,
Your practice informs your realization,
And it keeps going around in hopefully a virtuous circle.
You could think of it as like a plant.
Down below the soil there's a seed and the practice nourishes and helps to grow this seed.
And then the seed develops into realization.
The roots begin to grow.
They connect with the roots of other plants and they connect with nature.
They take in the rain and they grow and it grows out of the ground.
And then eventually,
The plant develops maybe fruit.
And the fruit would be the actualization,
The fruits of your practice and of your realized mind.
And all different types of fruit exist.
So your fruit might be different from my fruit.
And that is a beautiful thing to have a diversity of fruit.
As they say,
Eat the rainbow.
And that's a healthy way to live.
Eat the rainbow and express the rainbow in all the various ways that we can.
My fruit will be different from yours.
But I do hypothesize that all of our various fruit and fruits derived back from the same root.
The root that you might call Buddha mind.
Awakened mind,
The universal one that expresses it in an infinite multiplicity of ways.
Practice.
Realization.
Actualization.
