Meditation – true form of the self There are no difficulties in the heart of meditation. Meditation, as practised in the Soto Zen way, is manifesting the true form of the self. As the true form of the self is formless, meditation is not limited to any particular posture, activity, situation or time. Hence, in […]
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Home Late September 2022, Our frail and pinched mum, sister and I, exposed on the sweeping expanse of Godrevy beach. A place thinly transparent to everything beyond sight, at least for a time. We come together, we move apart, no one is in charge or knows how it’s going to go. The three of us
The Dharma Gate of No Restriction If you want to realize what the Buddha taught, then simply: when eating, just eat; when walking, just walk; when sitting, just sit; when thinking, just think; when talking, just talk, and so on. That’s it, gather yourself together, diligently apply yourself to directness, and let your intrinsic nature
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Compassion and a dreamlike world The material and physical world is as dreamlike as the world of the mind. So the self of a human being is dreamlike too. Dreamlike – but not – a dream. Though both are equally valid aspects of experience, they are not the same. Part of the ongoing examination of
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What do I get? ‘And what is blind ignorance? All wordly beings from time immemorial have matters turned around in a variety of ways so that they keep returning to the same place, just as anyone does who is lost and wanders off in all directions. They mistakenly perceive the four elements to be properties
Beggars Banquet All that continues to obstruct you revolves around thought. Both acceptance and faith are active states of unobstructed being. Letting go of thought is how acceptance and faith are made actual. Acceptance and faith are essentially two sides of the same coin, which is worth reflecting on, I think. Both reveal the immeasurable
Willingness to change It’s akin to a disaster for a meditator to approach life from fixed viewpoints (attitudes) of knowing, or not-knowing. Both are like a solid walls between the supposed self and everything else “out there”. Knowing pushes a wall onto the world and not-knowing is like a wall that hides from the world,
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Without impermanence, there would be no beauty. If it were possible to eradicate impermanence, from that point on there would only be a hellish eternity where nothing moves or breathes. My shoes Then and now, now Doubting impermanence, we may attempt to create a permanence and imagine that it is working. This could be a
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“When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly”. This dropping away is integral to the practice of zazen and the Soto Zen tradition, it is immediate realization of our true form and the
Wherever we are, whatever is going on, attention can move effortlessly around breathing, thought, sensation, the immediate surroundings, and so on. This integrated functioning is not special and is not a skill acquired through a technique, something to switch on or off. It’s the functioning wisdom of our real nature. We have probably become
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