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By Root 423 0

’ll say, “Well, I don’t see it that way.” He’ll say yes and I’ll say no. Yes no, yes no, yes no. Then we switch, just to make the other one wrong. He says no, and I say yes. Now Alex is twenty-nine and I’m fifty-nine, and we still poke fun at our opinions in exactly the same way. This “yes no, yes no” is the essence of what goes on in Alice in Wonderland. In Alice’s aboveground life, the rules are clear and everything has its proper place. At the beginning of the story, she is sitting on a riverbank with her sister, considering making a daisy chain. It’s a perfectly normal day. Then she sees a white rabbit with a watch, she follows him, and soon she falls down a hole. A big hole.

After she falls, nothing she knew aboveground makes sense anymore. None of the rules are the same. She wanders around getting bigger and then smaller. She meets all kinds of characters who don’t seem to be following rules at all, which causes quite a problem. They don’t comply with her expectations or her understanding. They don’t do anything she thinks is proper or right.

In time Alice goes to the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Alice finds the Mad Hatter and his friends, the March Hare and the Dormouse, sitting at a long table under a tree. Mysteriously, they’re all cramped together on one side of the table.

Alice asks if she can sit down.

“No room! No room!” they cried out when they saw Alice coming.

“There’s plenty of room!” said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large armchair at one end of the table.

“Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.

Alice looked round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. “I don’t see any wine,” she remarked.

“There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.

“Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it,” said Alice angrily.

“It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,” said the March Hare.

Alice has her ideas of how things should be. The March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the Dormouse see things completely differently. According to them, there really is no room at the table. According to Alice, there is plenty of room. In this same way, we come into our life and our practice with our own ideas of how it has to be. We erect the walls of our house and block the view of the sky.

Does Alice know what the Mad Hatter is talking about? How often are we willing to accept it when we don’t know the answer to something? We’d rather know and be right than live in a state of wonder and uncertainty. When we get to the other shore, to what I am calling Wonderland, we may experience One Mind. One Mind is what we experience when we remove everything we know. The last thing to fall away is the idea of our separation from the world. Once that idea is gone, there is nothing left, and then you are on the other shore, in Wonderland, and experiencing One Mind. We can call it many things, but they are all ways to describe something we experience for ourselves when our thoughts become quiet and our minds concentrated for long enough.

“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.

“Exactly so,” said Alice.

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”

“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same as ‘I eat what I see’!”

“You might as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”

Zen practice is the practice of liking what you get. We usually have a thin margin of acceptance; we like very little of what we get. We want something else. Maybe we want what we think we deserve or what we think everyone else has. We’re convinced, along with Alice, that if everybody would just change his or her behavior, everything would be great. If only we lived somewhere else, if only we were younger, older, smarter, dumber, rounder, thinner, or sexier—if only all of that were true, life would be good.

We’re told we’re supposed to go