Yeah... years ago when I came upon all this stuff I was on cloud 9, thinking I've found the solution and no more suffering to be had. Then the last 5 years have been an unstoppable avalanche...
Yeah and it's funny that certain traditions (like Chan) are basically a mashup of Daoist return to nature meditations and Chinese breathing/body/mind techniques combined with Mahayana concept of enlightenment (and Indian breathing/body/mind techniques).
The ‘great doubt’ is an important part of the Zen process, but what you describe doesn’t sound…healthy or at all pleasant. We do live in an increasingly uncertain world but it’s not worth despairing over things we have little control.
When I was a kid, I had a Sega Megadrive with the Space Invaders game. It was challenging and a bit frustrating. By some weird fluke, I discovered that flicking the on/off switch a couple of times I could glitch the game allowing my ‘artillery space laser cannon’ to fire two rounds in quick succession - no waiting for the fired shell to hit a previous target! I DESTROYED those aliens and reached unimaginable scores and was the envy of all my friends (whom I didn’t tell or noticed).
It’s all man-mad. I’m reading about Neo-Confucianis and this mash-up so obvious!
That's great.
Is that Chozen-ji? A wonderful lineage…I buy lots of stuff from their shop! 😄
Really happy for ya mate, that's really awesome to hear
. I really miss group sittings.. I must look into finding a group I think.. something really powerful about the group energy and aligned intention.
Yes.
Sogen Omori and this lineage, for me is the epitome of what I want to be involved with. Ken Kusher is an excellent teacher too and he put me in touch with one of his students, Andy Robins, here in the southwest of England. Alas we never managed to arrange a meeting.
Yes, I find that obscures things. It’s like scientific paper authors that write in such a complex way that it excludes some people from understanding it’s content and I think they do it deliberately to appear deep and mysterious! Keep it simple so we can all understand!
I‘m a ‘cognitive misanthrope’ in that I don’t like the thought of other people! But you’re right, there’s some sort of ‘energy’ in group meditation that’s hard to define and it certainly helps with ones own practise.Really happy for ya mate, that's really awesome to hear
Those may or may not be Omori Sogens calligraphy. He was the inheritor of the Teshu line of Shodo. In training they had a book like that of Teshu's work. The Roshi would select one of the works and then each student would have a turn to write it.
