131–140 of 154 posts
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I would add the free, short, book "Mindfulness in Plain English". It changed my life. Here is the PDF: http://www.urbandharma.org/pdf2/Mindfulness%20in%20Plain%20E...
What exactly is mindfulness in simple terms? How is different from concentration?
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"Mindfulness in Plain English" is real and original Zen Buddhism, highly recommended.
The book is not about this variety of Buddhism; Zen is a school of Mahayana; the book discusses Theravada. This is mentioned in the book at some ponit.
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Practice leads to Zen. Practice isn't Zen. But yeah otherwise i agree.
You will be hard pressed to find a Zen teacher who would deny that practise is Zen. It does certainly not "lead to Zen". E.g. "Enlightenment and Practise are one" (Dogen), "There is no Zen master in great (Sung) China", the frequent warnings against step-ladder Zen, the idea that Zen is not useful and nothing is gained, "there is only the way, beginning, middle and end" etc.
One should judge a tree by it's fruits. If Alan Watt's enlightenment didn't prevent him from being an alcoholic who couldn't take care of his family, then I don't think that is an enlightenment worth pursuing. The Buddha was adamant about this fact: anything that depends on conditions (for it's appearance or maintenance) is not enlightenment. This leads me to believe that the author's experience, however delightful,…
I have to agree on this one.
An "enlightened" person is supposed to have a happy, reliable state of mind that serves as a mirror to the true potential of all beings.
Only then practitioners can meditate on this person's state of mind. This is how meditation works in Vajrayana-Buddhism.
A definition of enlightenment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCotuy5Y8u8
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Zen is meditation first school of Buddhism. You must learn to do zazen (zen meditation). In other words, sit down and shut up. If you want to become Buddha, do what Buddha did and don't just listen and think about what he said. I'm myself a Zen Buddhist, I train with a teacher and have spend time zen training in a zen temple and attend sesshins regularly. I'm also very secular and atheist person who don't like organi…
I apologize if this is a rude question. But what do you get out of doing all this? I went to a zen Buddhism workshop a few years ago and it all felt very strangely ritualistic and bizarre. I just didn't see the point of it. Why should I be doing zen or any other form of meditation?
I ditch all the rituals. You can get a lot from just sitting in a chair and meditating.
>Truth is not to be found by picking everything to pieces like a spoilt child What an idiotic attitude. Empiricism ("picking everything to pieces") is one of the few ways to find truth. Attempting to discredit it by comparing it to a "childish" activity speaks to the lack of arguments against it. All of the Zen/Buddhist blog posts I've seen on HN have been intellectually lazy and/or dishonest, relying on pseudo-scien…
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Just as a thought experiment: if you could take a pill that did all this for you, would you still do the practice?
In actual fact I did take a pill that did this for me .. that is.. thrusted me into a state of mind akin to some of what can be found in concentration states. That was what provided for me the impetus to explore meditation because after a certain MDMA experience I suddenly felt that "now I know" that there's a more clear, or natural feeling which conscious awareness can navigate to. It was unfortunately a fleeting ex…
Here is my own take on the Lao Tzu quote: ‘Those who know don’t say, and those who say don’t know.’ The introverts, they are the ones that go within and cut themselves off from the world. They are the ones getting "enlightened". The extroverts, talking all the time and sounding important, barely know what is what. These are two remarkably different ways of coping with the same problem: fear. Seriously, the introverts…
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In actual fact I did take a pill that did this for me .. that is.. thrusted me into a state of mind akin to some of what can be found in concentration states. That was what provided for me the impetus to explore meditation because after a certain MDMA experience I suddenly felt that "now I know" that there's a more clear, or natural feeling which conscious awareness can navigate to. It was unfortunately a fleeting ex…
I get and support the use of psychedelics to demonstrate the mind's potential, but I'm thinking more day to day. When you "approach this state without drugs," is it in the context of interacting with people, or only through meditation?
I realize that the description above may sound too general, or even like I'm describing a panacea, and perhaps I am, that's the thing.
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I cringed every time he referenced Physics. It's something I've seen other philosophers do in an attempt to legitimize their beliefs by implying that they codify the natural order. In truth, dynamic emptiness has absolutely nothing to do with quantum froth, which could be described using any objects and still make sense. This concept of some unseen physical manifestation of the model arises because of the terms a the…
Truth is not to be found by picking everything to pieces like a spoilt child. -from this very article