This shows that he never understood even a single dew drop of the Zen experience he became the propagator of Zen philosophy in the west, but not knowing what he was doing, not experiencing anything of what he was talking about.
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Try this. Who ever is unable to go out can use this technique as well as the meditation for sleep which is to be done at night. You can do them both just before sleeping. The body can be purified in this way.
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The obsessive desire that often accompanies passionate love can degrade affection, tenderness, and the joy of appreciating and sharing the life of another. It is the diametric opposite of altruistic love. It arises from egocentrism that merely cherishes itself in the other or, worse still, seeks to forge its own happiness at other's expense. This kind of desire wants only to appropriate and control the people, objects and situations that attract it.This is how one dictionary defines passion: "Powerful, exclusive and obsessive love. Violent affectivity that hampers the judgement". It is fuelled by exaggeration and illusion and insists that things be other than the way they actually are.What about sexual infatuation? We may agree with Christian Boron an author and CEO, that " sexual attraction is not pathological, but it is not an emotion either. It is the normal expression of a desire like hunger and thirst. Nonetheless, it arouses the most powerful emotions in us because it draws its strength from all five senses combined: sight, touch, sound, taste, and smell. In the absence of inner freedom, any intense sensory experience unleashes its succession of attachments and subjugates us ever more cruelly. It is like a whirlpool in a river: we pay it little heed, with think it is safe to swim, but when the Eddy Suddenly accelerates and deepens, we are sucked in without hope of rescue. Conversely, the person who can maintain perfect inner freedom feels all these sensation in the simplicity of the present moment, with the delight of a mind free of attachment and expectation.Obsessive desire exaggerate the intensity and frequency of the mental images that trigger it. Like a scratched record, it endlessly replace the same leitmotif. It is polarisation of the mental universe a loss of flow that paralyses inner freedom. Elaine writes: " what would be left of the sorrow of the thwarted lover tossing and turning in his bed fantasising dubious schemes of revenge. if he were to stop mulling over the past and the future? " Such obsessions become extremely painful when they are not assuaged and grow in power when they are. The universe of obsession is one in which the sense of urgency is bound to powerlessness.
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One evening a group of friends were out to have some fun. It was a beautiful full moon night and they had drunk a lot. It was a beautiful night, so they all decided to go to the lake and take a boat trip. They sat down in a boat, picked up the oars and started to row. They continued to row until that last hour of the night. By dawn when a cool breeze stated to blow and touch their faces and the moon had almost disappeared from the horizon they had become a little sober. A couple of them became sober and said , " Friends we must have come very far. We have been rowing the whole night; now it is time to go back. By the time we reach home it will be midday. We must be far from the shore. " They thought, "Let us see how far we have come."They were stunned at what they saw, they had not gone anywhere; the boat was in exactly the same place. They had forgotten to untie the chains, and so the boat was still in the same place. The chains were still tied to the boat. They were very surprised; they had rowed a great deal, but hadn't gone any where. They said, "We just wasted our effort in rowing the whole night and thinking we had gone a long way. We are in the same place.Someone who wants to free his thinking and intelligence must inevitably untie his chains from the shore of belief. Someone who is tied somewhere to a belief must remember that he can't set off on a journey in the world of truth. He will not reach anywhere. At the end of his life he will find he is standing exactly where he started ; he standing exactly at the point where he was given the belief by his parents. The journey has been futile; the rowing has been futile. The effort has been wasted. AT the time of death he is still bound by the same thought and beliefs that his parents and society game him. The life of such a man has been misfortune. His journey has been wasted. He forgot to untie his chains from the shore.
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Christmas Humphrey calls Zen Buddhism that is starting in the wrong direction from the very beginning. Zen is not buddhism - the essential core of the heart of Buddha, certainly, but it is the essential core of Moses too,
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The human mind tends to covert every experience into a question. That is a very destructive step. Please avoid it. the purpose of being closer to a master is not know that which is not knowable, to know that which is not expressible, to know that which cannot be put into words. When it stats happening don't make a problem out of it, don't create a question out of it, because your very questioning will become a stopping. Then your mind will have a stated something else. Then you are distracted.When it starts happening, enjoy it, love it, be nourished by it, savour it, dance it, sing it, but don't make a question about it. Just be it. And allow it total space. It will grow. It needs space in you to grow.Don't be in a hurry to make a theory out of it. Theories are very dangerous. They can kill the child in the womb. The moment you start thinking in terms of analysing , knowing what it is and what is not, comparing ,labelling, you are moving towards an abortion. You will miss something that was going to grow - you killed it. Don't be suicidal, don't be analytical, just allow it.Feel its presence - but not with the mind. Feel its presence with your totality. Let your heart be open to it and it will grow.And in that very growth by and by understanding will come. Understanding is not going to come through analysis, through thinking, through brooding, through logic. Understanding is going to come by deeper and deeper experience.You say something has happened to you though me, but it is something which is inexpressible. Let it be so, Be happy. You are blessed when something inexpressible starts happening then you are on the right track, you are moving towards godliness the ultimate mystery. Whenever you have something within you which you cannot understand that simply shows something bigger than you has entered in you - otherwise you could have understood it, you could have figured it out. Something bigger than the mind has penetrated you, a ray of light in the dark soul, a ray of light in dark night of the mind. The mind cannot comprehend it; it is beyond its understanding. Bt not beyond understand remember. Beyond the understanding of the total organ of your total being of your totality.
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Altrusitic love acts as a direct antidote to hatered, the more develop it the more the desire to harm will wither and finally disappear. It is not a question of suppressing hatered but of turning the mind to something diameterically oppose to it: Love and compassion. Following a traditional Buddhist practice, you begin by recognising your own aspiration to happiness, then extend that aspiration to those you love, and ultimately to all people - friends, strangers, and enemies. Little by Little, altruism and benevlolence will saturate your mind until it becomes second nature. In this way, training yourself in altruistic thought can offer lasting protection against chronic animostiy and agression. This will also be accompanied by a genuine readiness to act for the benefit of others.It is equally impossible for greed or desire to co-exist with inner freedom. Desire can fully develop only when it is allowed to run rampant to the point where it monopolises the mind. The trap here is the fact that desire, and its ally pleasure, are not ugly like hatered. They are even extremely seductive. But the silicon threads of desire, which seem so light at first, soon tighten, and the soft garment they had woven becomes a straight jacket. The more you struggle the tighter it becomes. In the worst cases, desire can drive us continuously to seek satisfaction at any cost; the more satisfaction seems to elude us, the more it obsesses us. On the other hand, when we contemplate its disturbing aspects and turn our minds toward developing inner calm, the obsession of desire can begin to melt like snow in the sun. Make no mistake - there is no question here of seizing to love those whose lives we share, or of becoming indifferent to them. When we stop projecting the insatiable demands of our attachments on to people we are able to love them more and to feel genuine concern for their true wellbeing.
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In early research studies, It is found that grittier kids at the national spelling bee practice more than thier less gritty competitors. These extra hours of practice, in turn, explained their superior performance in final competition.These findings made a lot of sense. As a math teacher I had observed a huge range in effort among my students. Some kids spent, quiet litreally, zero minutes a week on their homework Others studies for hours a day. Considering all the studies showing that gritty people typically stick with their commitments longer than others, it seems like the major advantage of grit was, simply, more time on task.At the same time, we could think of a lot of people who would racked up decades of experience in their jobs but nevertheless seemed to stagnat at a middling level of competence. I am sure you can do . think about it. Do you know anyone who has been doing something for a long, long time - may be their entire professional lives - and yet the best you can say of their skill is that they are pretty much OK and not bad enough to fire? As a colleague of mine like to joke:some people get twenty years of experience, while others get one year of experience... twenty times in a row.Kaizen is a Japanese for resisting the plateau of arrested development. Its literal translation is; " continuous improvement. " a while back, the idea got some traction in American business culture when it was touted as the core principle behind Japan's spectacularly efficient manufacturing economy. After interviewing dozen and dozens of grit paragons I can tell you that they all exude Kaizen. They are no exception.Likewise, in her interviews mega successful people, Journalist Hester Lacey has noticed that all of them demonstrate a striking desire to excel beyond their already remarkable level of expertise: " An actor might say I may never play a role perfectly, but I want to do it and as well as I possibly can. And it every role I want to bring something new. I want to develop." A writer might say, "I want every book I do to be better than the last".It is a persistent desire to do better. Hester explained it is the opposite of being complacent. But it is a positive state of mind not a negative one. It is not looking backward with dissatisfaction. It is looking forward and wanting to grow.
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