tsuki

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.

@Leo Gura What about the Zen approach? These people seem to be very weary of the cultural baggage of various terms and deliberately talk in terms of things that have neutral meaning. It may not be as flashy as talking about experiencing God and may not attract as many seekers to your internet monastery, but I'm not sure that it's appropriate to aim for quantity, or for any goal in particular. Now that I think of it - you're obviously not aiming for quantity. Sorry. Ignorance is blindness, there is no outsmarting the devil.

@Tearos That's a tough one. I don't think that enlightenment can be mass-produced in the education system. It requires maturity that cannot be forced/forged. I think that it is best left in the hands of a seeker to find the teacher he or she resonates with the most. Our society is structured in such a way that once we're born, we're filled with information that form our identity. This identity is what is deconstructed during contemplation to arrive at the absolute truth that lies concealed under a pile of beliefs. It may be the case that if we incorporated the two processes together, in parallel - the awakening would be much smoother. It could even remove the jolt of 'AHA' moment of enlightenment. Some say that the sudden nature of awakening is counterproductive in refinement of the self and I agree with this statement. The question is: how to integrate construction of knowledge with its deconstruction? To an egoic mind that sees the world in terms of opposites that need to be balanced - this is indeed a riddle worth contemplating to death.

@Zigzag Idiot Unconditional love is such a sly word when understood as love in relative sense. Absolute love is more like receptivity. Emptiness that accepts all and is touched by nothing.

@Zigzag Idiot Thank you for this text, especially the last part resonates with me. It is very reminiscent of what Leo called a Teotlized heart in his Aztec nonduality video. When I tried to explain the significance of I Ching to my wife, I used its metaphoric nature as a basis of its teaching. Metaphors are ambiguous enough to not suggest any specific interpretation, while allowing a person to match them to their everyday experience. With any book that is approached conventionally, as a reality bubble associated with an object, the story ends once we return to our everyday commotion. I Ching however, is a book that allows one to read his own life through a lens of his own making. In a sense, relationship with the Sage is like fuel for the hermeneutic cycle of life. I was always astonished by the connection between identity and creativity. In the beginning of my path, I viewed it as opposition of forces, but I Ching taught me that it is false. I need to see how they form a synergy.

@SQAAD Everything is exactly as conscious as you. If all you see is people that are beneath you, then you still have many mistaken beliefs to work through.

@Wisebaxter You are conflating love in absolute terms with love in relative terms. Relative love is called love because of hate. Absolute love has no opposites and cannot be explained in terms of anything else. God's love is called that because it does not reject anything. Not even the relative hate, even if human resists the said hate.

@Preetom I actually had an insight recently about how the Ego builds its cohesion in the modern world. In a fast paced society where technology changes daily, how does one find a reference point to cling to? The easiest route is to claim that the internal, psychological world is constant. I'm foreseeing that this will get much worse when we'll approach the hypothetical technological singularity. People are unwilling to look inside out of fear of what they may discover. This is scary, world-shattering stuff. They wake up in a world where one's self-worth is determined by their ability to match their ambition with skill. Imaginative people that are born in poverty don't have a chance of competing with the privileged ones, so naturally, the gap increases. When you feel like you struggle every day to meet your basic needs - what is the incentive to look inside if all you can find is what shatters your world? Who would think that this is exactly what needs to happen to release oneself from suffering? To see that there is nobody inside? it is a tragic thing indeed that existential crises are shunned upon.

@Jack River Is foreignity associated with my use of English, or is it about the concepts that I'm trying to convey? I could work on the former, but the latter is problematic. All concepts are foreign until we have direct experience of what they point towards. I'm trying to put them in more practical terms recently. Thanks for your input .

@Jack River Thank you! I really appreciate it. Few people seem to resonate with me to the point where they actually respond to my posts. I wonder why .

@Seththomas The nature of conceptual work is such that you first gather examples that seem unrelated and build theories that connect them. There is, however, a point in which there is no need to do such a thing because you have seen "the bottom". That, which connects all examples. Enlightenment work is what is common to all of existence. By definition, nothing can be done with consciousness, because it cannot refer to anything outside of itself. The point of making this distinction is to say that there is a "destination", but a direction cannot be given to point towards it. At your current level of development, you cannot logically understand what consciousness is. You need to do the work. As you develop yourself more and more, hopefully - you will gravitate towards a place where you can talk about it. The point however is to express your knowledge sincerely, not repeat hearsay of spiritual gurus. At some point, you will need to learn by teaching.

@Preetom This post should be sticked somewhere. My respect for you increased 10-fold. It may have been appropriate to talk about death in the context of enlightenment in the past, but unless you have experienced it, the cultural baggage surrounding this idea will mislead you to no end. Harming the body is not a path to enlightenment. It is ignorance grounded in a belief that a mind can be liberated from flesh. Flesh is not a prison.

Leo the white.

@now is forever I think that @Zigzag Idiot referred to that the energy needs to be spread equally throughout the system. If it stagnates in the thinking center, it becomes fuel for imagination and it's counter-productive. There is thinking, feeling and sensing. Don't forget the last one.

@How to be wise He was telling the truth in the context he was currently referring to. I haven't watched that video in a long time, so I can't answer directly, but calorie intake is a very crude model that does not deal with the composition of the food you're eating. My guess is that even if you wouldn't gain weight on KFC, it would decline your overall health due to undernourishment and chemicals.