by Daniel Doen Silberberg | May 22, 2010 | Uncategorized, Zen
photo credit: h.koppdelaney
I was reading Tim Ferriss’ blog yesterday. I always enjoy it. It is often about Tim and all of us doing what we want. The blog entry brought back a memory. I was in my twenties and a student in a Gurdjieff group. I had been given an exercise and asked to do it daily. It was a kind of meditation and required about twenty minutes. That summer I was traveling across country with friends and had to find a way to do it. Part of the excerise was an agreement to make it completely private, that is not to reveal the activity to anyone. Another aspect of it was the discipline of doing it at the same time every day.
We were driving past the small town of Mule Creek Junction, Wyoming. When we passed a small wooden outhouse, I asked to stop there saying I needed to use the bathroom in order to privately do my excercise.
The smell wasn’t inspiring but the view and my sense of resolve was.
I hear people say they sometimes have trouble sitting everyday. I think that is a step toward, a way of saying, that we can’t do what we wish with our lives. But we can. It is our life and barring major disasters we can do what we want. Even during disasters we have choice.
Let’s not give our lives over to a feeling of powerlessness. I think we can do what we want. It may take some effort, but that’s the price. As our esteemed president said “Yes we can.” And he did. I vaguely remember a line from a Staple Singer’s song that went “You know you can can”
Dogen Zenji referred to sitting as the “backward step”. Let’s take the backward step and the forward one as well. The forward step is claiming the freedom to do what we want with our lives. These two steps could be a great new dance. We can call it “The Freedom Boogie.”
by Daniel Doen Silberberg | Dec 19, 2008 | Uncategorized, Zen
The tradition I have trained in has developed, researched, and refined a non-dualistic understanding that I feel is very important at this time. It has cultivated a “singularity” of consciousness that has been validated by practitioners for thousands of years. Anyone that looks into his or her mind by means of certain forms of meditation and other practices has access to this understanding. Basically it is the understanding of all existence as one thing. This has historically been referred to as enlightenment or realization. This realization includes its integration into dualistic, pragmatic terms–our lives and everyone’s life.
Today this relates well to the quickly expanding direction of technology and I believe our increased union with technology is capable of making us “better than well” – a phrase I read and liked very much. It is a wonderful time for a psychological technology also capable of making us “better than well” to merge with and unify all our efforts to develop and evolve. I think we have incredible possibilities available at this time. Lost Coin Development is about using our knowledge to contribute to this process of evolution, which is likely to be both human and transhuman.
Throughout history Zen has adapted to its time, letting go of old forms. At this point I believe it is time for it to adapt again – away from old religious and monastic forms. a history that we can appreciate but also move forward from. It has been said that Zen practice is about becoming one with our lives. We cannot become one with a life that is centuries past. Our life today is science, technology, the internal expression that is art, and engagement with the state of our world. I believe that all this can and must move forward as one thing: one thing that is both one and multidimensional, like a coin in which heads, tails, and the whole coin are equally the truth.
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