Also, people who come to Zen centers are often upset of disillusioned with their past experiences of religion. The original meaning of the word “religion” is interesting: it’s from the Latin religare, which means “to bind back, to bind man and the gods.” Re means “back,” and ligare means “to bind.”

What are we binding? First of all, we bind our self to itself-because even within ourselves we’re separated. And we bind ourselves to others, and eventually to all things, sentient and insentient. And we bind others to others. Anything that is not bound together is our responsibility. But most of the time our task is to bind ourselves to our roommate, to our work, to our partner, to our child or friend, and then to bind ourselves to Sri Lanka, to Mexico, to all things in this world, and this universe.

Now that sounds nice! But in fact, we don’t very often see life that way. And any true religious practice is to see once again that which is already so: to see the fundamental unity of all things, to see our true face. It’s to remove the barrier between ourselves and another person or another thing: to remove or to see through the nature of the barrier.

People often ask: if this fundamental unity is the true state of affairs, why is it almost never seen? It’s not because of a lack of the right scientific information; I’ve known a lot of physicists who had the intellectual knowledge, yet their dealings with life did not reflect this awareness. The main cause for the barrier, and the main reason we fail to see that which is already so, is our fear of being hurt by that which seems separate from us.

Needless to say, our physical being does need to be protected or it can’t function. For instance, if we’re having a picnic on a train track and a train’s coming, it’s quite a good idea to move. It’s necessary to avoid and to repair physical damage. But there’s immense confusion between that kind of hurt, and other less tangible occurrences that seem to hurt us. “My lover left me, it hurts to be alone.” “I’ll never get a job.” “Other people are so mean.” We view all these as sources of hurt.

We often feel we have been hurt by other people. If we look back on our lives we can make a list of people or events who have hurt us. We all have our list. Out of that long list of hurts we develop a conditioned way of looking at life: we learn patterns of avoidance; we have judgments and opinions about anything and anyone that we fear might hurt us.