Sublime

That’s both the good news and the bad news: this is it. When we really see that’s true, we cannot help but laugh at our old pretensions, our old sense of specialness, our old certainty about the wonders we were going to find at the end of the rainbow. We’ve spent years facing the wall so that…well, so that we could spend years facing a wall. We hav

First, meditation practices that aim at cultivating samadhi, or states of clear, thought-free concentration, all too often end up fostering emotional dissociation and avoidance. Thus, rather than engage and work through the manifestations of fear, anxiety, anger, and self-centeredness as they emerge, meditation can create an oasis or bubble of clar

Loss of the opposition becomes, in effect, a loss of polarity, and a loss of mystery. Not so much the mystery of unknown things, of the next scientific horizon, but the underscored mystery of self, of being.

So, how do we connect to consciousness?

Norman Fischer, a former Abbott of the San Francisco Zen Center, has emphasized our resistance to leaving everything alone, and the temptation to turn zazen into a technique: “The problem is that we actually are incapable of seeing zazen as useless because our minds cannot accept the fundamental genuineness, the alrightness of our lives. We are act

when our sense of a subjective “I” disintegrates,