Wanting What Is

by | Feb 9, 2009 | Uncategorized, Zen

When you do sitting meditation, zazen, you let everything come in, you don’t try to get rid of it, and you allow yourself to be with what is.  This is preparation for being able to choose what you get.  Otherwise, you will have–and you really will!—a lifetime of putting off everything to a future time or regretting a past time.  So the practice of zazen, what we also call remembering oneself, is to stop thinking for a moment and just be here.  A more forceful way of saying that is to choose what is.  It is to be here and be really here.  To want to be here.  So you don’t hold the idea that you’re going to be happy and start living when X and Y come to fruition.  You’re going to start now.  Always now.  You’re going to choose what is.  Choose what you get. 

 

Please work with this.  You will see that it’s very powerful.  It’s even more powerful than remembering yourself.  And don’t take it in a simplistic way.  I’ve got this house, I like it, I can always be thinking about how I’m going to move to California, in which case I won’t like it, or I can choose to like it, be here, and think I would like to move to California and that will be part of it.  But it’s a subtle difference.  For most of us, we’re always moving to California.  We’re never, ever choosing what we have.  Choosing what we get, another word for it, simply, is living.  Not putting it off, not regretting it.  It means choosing to be the age you are, choosing to be the sex you are, choosing to do the job you do.  Choosing the weather to be what it is.  Choose what you get; live right now.

Pre-registration for San Francisco workshop closing soon

by | Feb 5, 2009 | Uncategorized, Zen

The practice starts where concepts stop.
To encourage pre-registration, we are offering a $20 discount (workshop fee of $100, lunch included) for all who register by February 11, 2009. Please join us for the first of many Lost Coin gatherings in San Francisco!
Join Doen Sensei and the Lost Coin group in San Francisco for a one-day workshop. The workshop will help you see the conditioned story of your life, shed the fables that enslave you, and truly put yourself into your life.
The workshop will include meditation techniques such as zazen and koan study that are used to attain realization or enlightenment. We will also practice embodiment techniques including self observation, becoming “objective” to ourselves and others, and “losing” the story of our lives.
This workshop will be held on February 21, 2009 at a.Muse Gallery (614 Alabama Street, San Francisco). For more information and to register, visit http://tinyurl.com/7pws93.

Enter Your Life: Zen and Excellence

by | Jan 19, 2009 | Uncategorized, Zen

The practice starts where concepts stop.
Join Doen Sensei and the Lost Coin group in San Francisco for a one-day workshop. The workshop will help you see the conditioned story of your life, shed the fables that enslave you, and truly put yourself into your life.
The workshop will include meditation techniques such as zazen and koan study that are used to attain realization or enlightenment. We will also practice embodiment techniques including self observation, becoming “objective” to ourselves and others, and “losing” the story of our lives.
This workshop will be held on February 21, 2009 at a.Muse Gallery (614 Alabama Street, San Francisco). For more information and to register, visit http://tinyurl.com/7pws93.

Realization and Application

by | Jan 12, 2009 | Uncategorized, Zen

What becomes increasingly clear to me is how the two sides of practice are dependent on each other. Realization has traditionally been accomplished by sitting and often the use of other methods – koan study, talks, as well as one on one work with the teacher. There is, I think, an assumption that seeing the one mind, the true nature of the self leads to embodiment, or application in everyday life. I think this is not necessarily so. Even after we see who we are, find the Lost Coin, it is still very easy to be identified with the conditioned self. Its easy to still be really stuck in our old patterns, particularly negative ones, the ones that hurt us and others -fear, dissatisfaction and anger. Our realization can become a concept and the conditioned self can really be the part of us that is running the show.
The good news is that realizing this creates a real opportunity for us. It is the opportunity to engage in practices that observe the conditioned self. This is the use of consciousness rather than analysis. As our realization of the one mind deepens our identification with our conditioned self can weaken. We can find distance from it. We can see it. Just seeing it weakens our mechanical way of operating and the cause and effect it creates.
Working in this way we can really develop our practice and freedom in everyday life.

Zen Research

by | Dec 21, 2008 | Uncategorized, Zen

Zen practice is research:  seeing what is.  It can free us from thousands of years of incrustation caused by conditioning.  Some of the ideas we have been conditioned by are very primitive.  Perhaps they were useful at another time; now they plague us globally and personally.  In our daily lives they stand in the way of our freedom and  expansion.  I don’t think we know what our limits are.  I don’t know if that can be known or if there are any.
Research in the Zen tradition is direct looking into the mind, and it is a simple and pragmatic approach.  When we want to see what is “in” our universe, we use a telescope, or a spacecraft.  Here on earth historically we used forms of transportation like boats.  Preconceptions, particularly fearful ones, like falling of the edge of the earth, only block us from knowledge, from seeing what’s really there.  This is as true in our minds as anywhere else.
I believe it is very important to engage in traditions and practices that make us more conscious at this time.  It’s what Lost Coin is about.  As our technology gains power, as our machines become intelligent, we need to become more intelligent and conscious.  I think we need to enhance the same potentials we hope to create in our technology.  Small, negative views that are actually just primitive, combined with advanced technology, would likely lead to disaster.  But on the other hand, it can be a call for our awakening.  I think of Raymond Kurzweil’s inspiring book, The Age of Spiritual Machines.  When our machines acquire intelligence will their first book be The Age of Spiritual Humans?