Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Ran across this talk by someone named Koun Franz and just thought it had a nice tone combined with some useful information for anyone who may be excited about Buddhist practice.
0
Comments
federicaSeeker of the clear blue sky...Its better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubtModerator
I like this:
One of my teachers describes this like turning a screw — if you look from the top, it seems you’re just going in circles, but if you look from the side, you see that you’re constantly going deeper and deeper.
Nice observations. And I suppose we’ve all been there, more or less.
Looking back I think when a guy is in this stage, practice is a thing in the head (or in the heart even if you like) but there is no actual experience of it. It is about following a dream; about falling in love with the girl on the cover of a magazine.
When I started out I thought the real thing was happening in Japan. So the first sesshin I participated in was in Japan. And guess what, I learned something. I found that Japanese are human and the monks too.
We all start out to get something. And somewhere on the way we learn that it’s probably more accurate to say that practice is about losing things, not about getting them.
One of my teachers describes this like turning a screw — if you look from the top, it seems you’re just going in circles, but if you look from the side, you see that you’re constantly going deeper and deeper.
Anyone with any circumspection can see that the turning screw is biting into the object and going deeper. You can and do see that from the top. Another useless analogy, really.
Comments
Looking back I think when a guy is in this stage, practice is a thing in the head (or in the heart even if you like) but there is no actual experience of it. It is about following a dream; about falling in love with the girl on the cover of a magazine.
When I started out I thought the real thing was happening in Japan. So the first sesshin I participated in was in Japan.
And guess what, I learned something. I found that Japanese are human and the monks too.
We all start out to get something. And somewhere on the way we learn that it’s probably more accurate to say that practice is about losing things, not about getting them.