Sublime

Traditional Zen training can, without a doubt, elicit and help resolve many personality conflicts that analytically-minded therapists would define and work with under very different conditions.

public interest software.

[C]ontemporary seekers of authenticity often lack any but the vaguest ethical or religious commitments. Their obsession with “meaning” masks its absence from any frame of reference outside the self. . . . The effort to re-create a coherent sense of selfhood seems fated to frustration. Every failure inaugurates a new psychic quest, until the seeker

There is no one true way to practice, no single tradition that has exclusive possession of truth, no one teacher who is the unique, authentic embodiment of the Way. When I hear of students or even teachers claiming that theirs is the one authentic way that everyone should follow, I feel as if I were meeting a musician who was telling me that

assimilate meditation into one or another self-centered project. With a Zen of “no gain,” we step outside of our usual realm of questions and answers, problems and solutions, off the endless treadmill of self-improvement and instead experience the completeness of our life as it already is.

As a young man, Wittgenstein himself started out by trying to define everything that could logically be stated—about everything else, he famously said, we should remain silent. But by the end of his life he came to conclude that there was no place to stand outside of our life, outside our language, outside our ordinary certainty about the existence

We all come to practice looking for techniques that will relieve our suffering. We all come looking for answers to our questions. But though practice can transform our lives, it does not do so by providing us with those techniques or answers we think we need.