Sat Chit Ananda

Well. The more i mess about in this new-age consciousness business, the more i think that everybody is saying exactly the same things. It can’t be described directly, of course — that’s the catch-22 of the whole game — so it must be illustrated obliquely, through yogic posture or Buddhist ritual or, most often, linguistic [...]

Surfmonkery

I finished (finally) the above book, which according to the blurb on the Long Beach Golf Course links page is “an e-novella by Mathew Stryanka that takes readers into the angst-ridden life of Roy Merck as he surfs across Canada, looking for a place to call home.”  It’s always interesting to read a piece set [...]

Zennish thoughts

Some straight shooting from Huston Smith, The World’s Religions (p. 132): Zen is not interested in theories about enlightenment, it wants the real thing. So it shouts, and buffets, and reprimands, without ill-will entering in the slightest. All it wants to do is force the student to crash the word-barrier. Minds must be sprung from [...]

Destroy people’s beliefs

[In the face of repeated questions, Buddha] maintains what is called Noble Silence, sometimes later called the Thunderous Silence, because this silence, this metaphysical silence, is not a void; it is very powerful. This silence is the open window through which you can see not concepts, not ideas, not beliefs, but the very goods. But [...]

Zen & the Beat way [2]

Sorry for this long, messy post. I’m slamming it up on my tiny new subnotebook in the bus station on the last of the battery power, en route in 15minutes to the meditation retreat in Merritt. Peace! More from Alan Watts’ Zen and the Beat Way. Big Al knows what he’s talking about, all right. [...]

All those people, all those agendas

A week in the city has my head spinning. Too much free time, with too little focus, plus too much concentration on the spiritual, has made everything lose meaning, in the same way that repeating a word over and over turns it into noise. All that talk and action, incessant around me … i hadn’t [...]