Detroitboard.com: Today's Moment Of Zen - Detroitboard.com

:waiting:

You bore me.

What's next? Gonna dip my ponytail in the ink well? :smarty:

Zen is - without being worldly - a discipline more suited than classic
Buddhism to worldly men seeking a higher spiritual experience. It neglects
karma, reincarnation, and nirvana, but it still demands meditation,
Concentration and physical discipline. Its unique teaching is that
"enlightenment" may come to dedicated laymen, and that this enlightenment
may occur suddenly and intuitively not necessarily requiring years of study
and concentration.

The achieving of enlightenment in Zen is not at all a rational or methodical
process. It is completely non-rational, unexplainable, and intuitive. The
Zen training in concentration, in the characteristic cross-legged position,
and the Zen teaching of koans (non.iogical riddles and stories) are designed
to put the student in a state where he can abandon logic and make the leap
upward into enlightenment. In Japanese this state of enlightenment is called
satori.

In satori we are able to look beyond our immediate world into the universe
of original, eternal, Absolute Being often called the Great Emptiness -
which was before our world was formed, and will be after it disappears. In
this condition we lose our sense of Self, and know ourselves to be part of
the great Oneness of all. Knowing ourselves to be part of Absolute Being,
our ego and our problems of ego - sin, pain, poverty, fear -all dissolve.
This is salvation in Zen terms.

Having reached the state of satori, we become aware that everything in all
this world about us, all other living and non-living things, even our lowest
animal functions, are part of Absolute Being - and are thus essentially
holy. Mountains and rocks, trees and grass-blades, elephants and microbes,
all share equally in the Eternal.

This awareness permits us to go about our daily life with a new freedom, a
new sureness, a new sense of doing the work of Absolute Being even in the
smallest or dirtiest task of the present life. It is this sense also that
makes the tea ceremony in Japan a ritual of devotion; that makes a
seventeen-syllable haiku poem a universal statement of faith; that makes a
quick brush-drawing a gesture of piety in Eternity.

Beyond this awareness that all things are part of Absolute Being and share
its holiness comes a sense of the interpenetration of all things. Each of us
is the apex of a cone of past ancestors, and the beliefs, acts, and events
which determined them. Each of us also is a point from which a new cone of
individuals and events will arise, each in some part a product of what we
are. We are all a part of Absolute Being, and we are all a part of each
other.

This concept has been described in the allegory of Indra's Net: There is an
endless net of threads throughout the universe. The horizontal threads are
in space, the vertical threads are in time. At every crossini of threads is
an individual, and every individual is a crystal bead. The great light of
Absolute Being illuminates and penetrates every crystal bead; but also every
crystal bead reflects not only the light from every other crystal in the net
- but also every reflection of every reflection throughout the universe.

Thus we learn that we live in all other beings, all other things - and that
they live in us. Our lives are richer - and more filled with obligations -