The One Who Prefers
“The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.” So begins the Hsin Hsin Ming, a poem written some fourteen hundred years ago by Zen master Seng-ts’an. The whole of the path, all its difficulty, reduced to this single thing. Having no preferences.
What is a preference? A desire for things to be a certain way. Most often presenting as an implicit belief that a situation needs to be altered. A subtle “no thank you” to what is.
But if peace is to be found by not having preferences, are we to banish our predilections?
We might try suppressing desire but all attempts at denial and repression will always fail. Consider the irony: the one attempting to become preference-free very much prefers it to be so.
To have no preferences is not to give up preferences. It’s to step out of the one who holds them.
The instant we notice there’s a me here, preferring, we are no longer standing in that me. Noticing has relocated us. We’ve now slipped into the presence that observes the preference. This presence prefers nothing. It rests, deeply content, merged with the is-ness of reality.
The practice isn’t to stop feeling. Every emotion is simply a preference being tweaked. The anger, the sadness, the pit of anxiety are all reports that something isn’t matching how we’d have it. We don’t silence the signals. We let them point us to the preference beneath, and rest in the awareness that noticed.
As A Course in Miracles puts it, “Judgment always imprisons because it separates segments of reality by the unstable scales of desire.” The way out is to notice the one weighing.
Join me in Thursday’s class where we’ll explore this quiet shift from holding preferences to witnessing them, and discover the expansive peace that has no preference at all. I look forward to seeing you then.