I’d replace ‘discard’ with ‘let go of’. No doubt the quote is intended to address the perennial problem of clutter. An encouraging thought and a direction to take for the popular past time of de-cluttering and its companion minimalism in all its forms. But I’ll take this quote out of the external world and into the internal, reflective realm of meditation and contemplation. Both formal zazen and everyday meditation.
Yes obviously it is necessary to organise our thoughts and feelings, to get our ducks in a row for all sorts of practical reasons. However I’d like to suggest that its worth questioning oneself as to just HOW necessary it is. For what purpose? Truthfully.
Yes sometimes posts here can disturb and be thought-provoking with little offered in terms of answers. I’d like to suggest that it is the disturbance itself rather than the thoughts provoked which can be usefully ‘let go of’. Just a thought.
Quickly forget those Jade Mountains posts! Come back soon.
There is a post on Field of Merit site called The Non-Ferocious Way which I wrote yesterday.
We set great store by being sharp, being focused, being brightly alive. In short being THERE or better, HERE. In Zen practice and any other kind of practice for that matter being one who trains hard is better than being known as a slacker! But what does it mean to train hard, in practice. Are there particular times or circumstances when training hard is what’s asked of us or is the instruction itself a bit of a red herring? Did the intended meaning get lost in translation?
I’ve not got too much more to say on this for the moment so hope you get something out of what I wrote.
May the merit of this post be offered to all those who find the colour has gone out of their life and faith is fragile.
There are things we take on faith, without physical proof and even sometimes without any methodology for proof. We cannot clearly show why the ending of a particular novel haunts us. We cannot prove under what conditions we would sacrifice our own life in order to save the life of our child. We cannot prove whether it is right or wrong to steal in order to feed our family, or even agree on a definition of “right” and “wrong.” We cannot prove the meaning of our life, or whether life has any meaning at all. For these questions, we can gather evidence and debate, but in the end we cannot arrive at any system of analysis akin to the way in which a physicist decides how many seconds it will take a one-foot-long pendulum to make a complete swing. The previous questions are questions of aesthetics, morality, philosophy. These are questions for the arts and the humanities. These are also questions aligned with some of the intangible concerns of traditional religion.
Another health adventure
not knowing more than
the next breath.
Breath just
keeps on
breathing – you.
While I walked today my thoughts were very much turned towards a long time sangha friend who has recently been diagnosed with cancer. Hard and heart-breaking.
Practice Within The Order of Buddhist Contemplatives
