Commentaries on Meditation, Zen, Buddhism, and Mindfulness
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Most of life is spent transacting or exchanging. We trade our time and skills for money. We trade that money for goods and services. This style of exchange is also deep in our Ego and interactions with people. When communicating, we often engage in pushing or pulling, missing the real.
Bringing mindfulness into the world can be challenging. We can, however, turn the world into a place of practice. Each moment we live is a chance to be mindful and present, never to be repeated again. Developing mindfulness is important to help us live presently in life. Here we look at a few personal and reader tips that have helped us view the Big Blue Room as a place of practice and mindfulness.
Life is filled with experiences. These experiences, regardless of good or bad, are stored as memories in the mind and body. Sometimes we ‘access’ memories to reply them, or to evoke certain states. We also ‘keep away’ other memories that we don’t want to process fully for some reason or another.
D.T. Suzuki was quoted as saying that “before studying Zen, mountains are mountains. While studying Zen, things become confused. After studying Zen, mountains are mountains.” This was one of the first Zen sayings I heard, and it continues to resound in me.
In Zen Buddhism there’s a lot of bowing. The idea of bowing to an image, idol, or godhead, to many brings up a lot of resistance and hesitation. When bowing, however, you aren’t bowing to a Thing. You bow to yourself, the world, the ideas, the concepts, nothing fixed.
How to Meditate is a big question. One that’s no longer just effecting a few people in private according to Google. It appears to be one of the hottest issues of our time, up there with who is god, and what is love. These are the big issues found by Google in the 2007 Zeitgeist, capturing what they call our “collective consciousness”.
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Life has been described like rice, and the process of cooking it. The rice needs to go into the pressure cooker, it needs to sit and process for a while. Take it out too early and you’ve got nothing usable, leave it in too long and you’ve got mush. In the middle, is rice just, sitting. How to Cook Your Life is a new Zen influenced movie, told from the perspective of the Tenzo, or head chef, Edward Brown of Tassajara Zen Center.
The last teaching of the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, is the Eight Great Awakenings. In this series we investigate the great awakenings. The awakenings each build upon and influence each other, allowing for development based on solid foundations.
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The Middle Way, tools helping with how to meditate
