"This absence of mental engagement is Mahฤmudrฤ.
The freedom from extremes is the great Middle Way.
Since all is here included, it is also Great Perfection.
May I acquire the confidence of knowing one and realizing all."
I worked for ~10 months in an extremely busy restaurant, prepping ingredients, making sides, making massive amounts of dough in an industrial mixer, running the register and preparing orders, on my feet constantly moving all day, two strictly timed 15 minute breaks.
Never
Been said before but worth saying again, as a reminder to myself as much as to anyone else: a good walk, strenuous cardio and/or resistance training is often more appropriate than sitting in a formal meditation posture as strong emotions roil through the body-mind.
Something I learned in private and in public through Zen training is earnestly making a fool of yourself while trying your best without regard for how you appear is the quickest way to learn and a good goad for letting go.
Embracing failure -> success!
Someone has to say it:
TPOT is full of people who had some adverse, aversive early experiences of attempting to engage academic philosophy, and never bothered to engage the existing literature on any topic of interest again.
This is bad, and dumb.
I once again would like to express my confusion and disappointment with the fact that, despite our species' successful mechanization of agricultural labor and prodigious industrial capacity to provide heretofore unbelievable surplus, we continue to toil our lives away producing
Without knowing anything about a particular person's proclivities, a practice path I'd happily recommend to just about anyone:
Metta -> Jhana -> Vipassana -> Nondual practice(s).
It is embarrassingly common for mystics to mistake their radical phenomenological shifts as universal metaphysical truths.
You experience everything as the One Light of God's Love.
Neat.
So what?
I experience myself as a blazing deity sometimes.
And?
Emptiness cuts through it
The nastiest, most vindictive characters I've had the displeasure of navigating, in communes, in monasteries, online, at work, everywhere, are always those who believe themselves uncritically to be acting in the service of Love and Truth.
"Never mind my lying, cut corners,
Siddhartha Gautama's historically unique religious genius was not to mistake his dependently arisen altered states of consciousness for the ultimate nature of reality itself independent of his mind, to utterly see through to the very end the empty, selfless, fabricated nature of
Over this last year teaching meditation full-time on donations I've tried a few different avenues of making it financially viable without betraying the spirit of what I've received from my own teachers and training.
Before I turned from the monastic path I had intended to wander