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In the very first letter, Screwtape points out how enslaved human beings are to the pressures of the ordinary.  He posits that a focus of attention on the commonplace, the familiar, the obvious, will result in the atrophying of receptivity to the Unknown. 
 
Screwtape: Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things.
 
Screwtape contends that as long as attention can be directed to the mundane activities of day-to-day living, it cannot be on the awareness of the Universal. And, a human being habituated to attending to the practical can be easily held hostage to the conviction that the imperatives of lunch, laundry and livelihood are more “real” and therefore more important than the intangible realms of the mystical.
 
None of us is a stranger to the process that compels us to prioritize the to-do list before attending to the “spiritual.” And even when we make it past the familiar refrain of the voices and sit down to encounter the “Unknown” in meditation, the “ordinary” intrudes. A 30-minute sit can be whiled away composing an email, planning a menu, reviewing the activities of the day, rehashing a conversation, fantasizing about a holiday, ruing the state of one’s finances, worrying about the condition of the world…
 
But Screwtape’s perspective, that of the ego, is inherently dualistic, presuming that the spiritual is divorced from the ordinary, a perspective not shared by Zen. One of the most famous Zen adages suggests that awakening doesn’t alter participating in the activity of life.
 
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
 
The mundane becomes magical not because we cease to do, but because we awaken to the insight that is captured in this beautiful line by D.T. Suzuki:
 
Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?
 
From the perspective of whole mind, which doesn’t parse experience, experiencer, and experiencing, Life swallowing life is “me drinking tea.” In a non-separate reality, drinking tea, chopping wood and carrying water are all Intelligence experiencing itself. 
 
Awakening, according to Wei Wu Wei, is merely a readjustment, such readjustment being the abandonment of identification with an inexistent individual self, an abandonment which leaves us unblindfolded and awake in our eternal nature.
 
Our understanding of the ”illusion of me” is intellectual at first. But the practice of recollecting Awareness in each moment, whatever activity we are engaged in, is contact with “eternal nature.” Repeated intimacy with being conscious perfumes the ordinary with joy—the infallible sign of the Presence of divinity, according to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. 
 
This is why, in this Practice, we are encouraged to seek the Mentor’s company, no matter what we are doing. In the company of Wisdom, Love and Compassion, isn’t our ordinary, everyday experience extraordinary?
 
Gasshō
ashwini