feelings as a change in balance

Summary

Mike retells how Kodo Sawaki in a coal-mine lift felt they were going up although they were still going down, and says that, according to Kodo Sawaki, all feelings of happy, sad, good, bad are just a slight difference in our sense of balance. So we don’t need to get rid of something inside us called unhappiness: if we just practise balance, which can be zazen, our flow of feeling goes back again. Nishijima says that the peaceful state is a balance between love and hate, and that to be healthy in body and mind we need to maintain love and hate equally. Mike says that our life is full of wobbles, sometimes we are overexcited and sometimes depressed, even though we practise zazen.