tsuki

Today's hexagrams: 63 After completion, line 3. 3 Making a new beginning.

@Serotoninluv You're not reading my responses, but reacting to your green ideology. Going through hardships of life does not ennoble you. It ennobles your self-image. I am giving the best advice I can and it is based on whatever life experience I have. Don't you dare to reduce my life to keyboard jockeying, or entertainment, mister moderator.

@Serotoninluv I never questioned her words and never wanted any evidence. All I am saying is that she needs to find resolve and take ownership of her life. This is the message. The other part says how to do it.

@Serotoninluv Like I said, relationships are mutual. There is a reason why she is attracted to him despite her thoughts about abuse and toxicity. I haven't found a single mention of how the said abuse is done other than it is verbal. For all I know she is unwilling to break off by wallowing in pity for him and herself. I was very careful to not suggest neither breaking contact, nor continuing. The quoted passage can indeed be me misread if not considered carefully, but I am neither condoning, nor condemning. The first step to healing is a conscious decision to undertake it and relationships can be a tool to attain clarity. Even if she's hearing advice to leave her current boyfriend from her environment, I am not going to deprive her of the resolve to make this relationship work. If a person is locked in a victim mindset, she is very likely to attract abusive environment that can suggest all sorts of ill advice. Regardless of her decision, first of all - I wish her resolve to take ownership of her own life and make decisions for herself. I know she can do it.

@Serotoninluv Very, very unfortunate. I suppose this is the true value of Actualized.org. A place where we can mix and match ingredients of various spiritual traditions while sprinkling it with our own advancements. In growing ourselves, we let our approach speak for itself and let other people decide what they gravitate towards. This way we don't have to convince anybody and avoid external conflict. I always thought that the lesser jihad is a distraction. I also think that criticizing traditions for their lack of efficiency in awakening people isn't right either. These movements are integrated with society and are something that helps establish its order. Spiritually speaking, at the very least they serve as big signposts that there is something out there beyond ordinary dormant state of being. There is a good reason that the path is called a path - one needs to find what serves him best and in doing that learn to transcend suffering independently. Actualized.org in this sense is a path within a path - a honeypot on the verge of society for those of us that want to go really deep. The last observation I have is that spirituality that is separated from everyday life is wasteful. If we can't get people interested in what we do simply by spending our lives doing everyday matters, then no verbal convincing and arguing will help. People that do not apply their spirituality and just engage in non-dual chatter are just as dormant as any other transmitter of culture. This is fine, spirituality needs to live, but there is so much more one can get out of this. This is why I think that depth is a trap and Zen deals with it very elegantly. It uses its simplicity to shine the beauty forth and lure people in as a form of marketing. From an outside perspective, zazen looks like an insanely advanced technique that is a pinnacle of a very long tradition. It's deceptively simple and anybody can learn it, but precisely because of it, it is so easily misunderstood. It's like all of those yogic traditions that sound superstitious to modern people because Western point of reference is out of focus with the context in which they were developed in. No wonder that Zen doesn't have much to show for, but there has to be a path within Zen for genuine seekers too. That lineage would have died a long time ago otherwise.

@7thLetter Ego's fixation about death is just hilarious. Exactly the same thing that was happening before you were born. Do you have a memory from before you were born? No? What if this is the genuine experience of non-existence?

@Dorotheus I get your point. Very good post. The thing is that willingness to die a virgin is a perfect ground for a mature relationship. So is being broken open by years of suffering in image-driven world of pickup. You cannot outsmart genuine growth.

@breathe582 You can do better does not mean that you should find a better boyfriend. It means that you could be a better girlfriend. Relationships are always an interplay between two people. At the very least you can investigate why that person is perfect to teach you about all the parts of yourself that you simply cannot accept. If you undertook the journey of loving what you hate within you, your relationship would improve, and you wouldn't need it anymore. The reason why you are attracted to him despite that it seems like he makes you suffer is because he also seems to promise to fulfill your needs. Needs that you have, but also cannot accept. Seeing what you don't want to see within him and loving what you hate about you is the key for growth in relationships.

@Serotoninluv I didn't mean to imply that Zen is the best teaching there is. I started this discussion in relation to the way in which Leo talks about spirituality using terms with cultural baggage. Since I have no experience in formal practices of this tradition, I avoided addressing this topic. After this whole discussion I came to realize that I was hoping that there could be universal, integrated method for enlightenment that would be resistant to egoic influence. Zen seems that way because it is a distillation of advanced spiritual teaching to the point of silence. This silence however seems like a reason for why it is so widely misunderstood and traps people in all the wrong places. I suppose that the best we can do for now is to attract highly realized people to observe commonalities while trying to minimize nondual bickering. Thanks @ajasatya @Serotoninluv @Joseph Maynor .

@Shaun It is not right to say that the world does not exist. More accurate would be to say that nothing within the world is the ultimate basis for everything else. Everything is interrelated and that includes the person - psychological being that is going to die. The dream Leo refers to is the illusion that there is something within you that has an essence of its own that grounds everything else. Every single thing within you is as "mechanical"/"organic"/"divine" as everything outside of you. All of your thoughts and emotions are not of your own making, but are an expression of this divine whole. This is how the mind realizes that it is ignorant, deceptive, and lets go of its beliefs. Once you are able to experience this divine whole, the mind will identify with that, which underlies all of it. Emptiness, love, truth, reality, God, consciousness, etc. This process of identification is actually the same process as dis-identification from everything else that exists in the world. Death. What is being arrived at is peaceful, stable, presence in the eternal now, your true self. The whole show that plays with itself.

You're the lucky one. You just have to read a book. Now I have to travel around the world and talk to Zen masters in person .

0 and 0. Have you read the book so that you can say that it's really possible to learn what the book has to offer from Zen masters?

@ajasatya This is why Watts' book shines. It's about broad historical context of Zen and its origins. It's impossible to learn that from sangha and interacting with Zen masters. Still, it doesn't teach what God is, but it shines through if you know how to read. Enough of my fanboyism!

That's a spiritual cop-out . Still loving you though .

Yes sir!

I think that Watts would respectfully disagree. He puts Zen in a context that is more appropriate for the Western audience. Traditions can't be copy-pasted across cultures. The history of Zen is the story of how Buddhism evolved when it changed locations. I haven't read Suzuki's book myself, so I'm just parroting what Watts said. Even if I resonate with it. Also, do you use Suzuki's authority to justify your choice of source? Asking, because I don't understand its relationship with your point.

@ajasatya These practices have been added to the core teaching of Zen to make it manageable as a vehicle of growth for the general public. Zen became very popular very rapidly at one point and it became unmanageable. Not saying that the core teaching is better though. Things evolve for right reasons.

@Joseph Maynor @ajasatya Alan Watts' description of Zen in his book "The way of Zen" fits both of your posts pretty closely. @Joseph Maynor Have you read it? He even references Suzuki's book several times.

Yep, and that's why I read the book instead of asking Zen masters .

@ajasatya What about the material written by Zen masters? Like Dogen's Shobogenzo, or koans.

@dimitri Enlightenment comes from synergy of doubt and curiosity. Kids are curious by design, but they haven't developed identity to be doubtful.

@flowboy Yep, a fully grown parasite that lives off your flow, boy . Well, parasite is a wrong word. We don't need the raft once we're on the shore.

@Leo Gura Do you believe that the 'point' is to get as many people as enlightened as possible?

In my experience, it's even more ominous. Deep down we all know that our thoughts/beliefs are grounded in blindness. The need to debate is how we divert our attention so that we don't have to face it. If we feel emotions in themselves, without the narrative of the mind, anger and fear feel energizing to the body. This energy is hijacked to justify the mind's subversive attitude and dissipated in bickering. The mind justifies bickering as introducing necessary change in others that are mistaken, but it is a deception. The effect is that belief structures of both parties are reinforced and polarized through repetition and imagination. It's not opposition, but co-dependence.

I have no problem with the idea of people talking about such things over my coffin. Why don't we mourn over all the poor people that die every second? Because @Sharp was one of us and he deserves a special treatment? I loved him like I love everybody else. The tears we shed over other people's deaths are how we release ourselves of attachments. The devil says they are tears of sadness, but in reality - they are tears of beauty. If it was a conscious decision, I salute him.