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I got into Zen and Taosim about a year ago (lol). I stopped doing Zazen at the Zendo though because it fell on the same day as Jiu Jitsu. I've tried doing it at home and have thought about buying a Zafu to help, but I find it difficult. Realistically I need to get back Zen Center if I'm ever going to stick with it.
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I've been wanting to go the Denver Zen Center for a while, but just haven't been able to bring myself to do it yet. I have a lot of respect for Zen, but I still get a bit weirded out by the concept of sitting silently for extended periods of time around similarly-dressed strangers in a zendo. I'm sure it's fine, just my bias against cult-like behavior. In any case, I've been doing zazen using a few pillows at home stacked up enough so I can do full-lotus properly, and I've been going for at least 10 minutes a day pretty seriously for the past year. It's actually one of the only things in life I've had the willpower and dedication to do by myself, mostly because of how horrific my mental state was last year and how desperate I was to sync my mind to the Present Moment. My main progress, however, has been "Moving Meditation" --- attempting to stay tied to the breath during the entire day, every day, focusing intently on whatever I'm doing, one thing at a time. Whenever I would notice I wasn't paying attention to my breath (usually by realizing I'm stressing out over something, like my ex-girlfriend), I just went back to it. Easy to do when you're not doing shit with your life really.
My landlady is quite stingy and didn't use much heat all winter (I rent out the basement in a separate unit), so I had a unique opportunity to pretend I was in some mountain hut, drinking tea in my bathrobe, studying texts, and sitting. I also highly recommend microdosing mushrooms (not enough to seriously fuck you up, but to give you perceptual effects) in nature. I always recommend mushrooms in nature. Preferably with cannabis handy. I have never experienced such beauty, and it's been in front of me the entire time.
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I've read the Taoteching several times and recommend the Red Pine translation for anyone interested. The religious side of it gets a little wacky, but I admire the philosophical branch. I regret not being more into it when I was in Taiwan. You might be interested to know how much Taoism has actually influenced Zen. The two converge nicely.
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My preferred translation is by the spiritual poet, Stephen Mitchell. I haven't read the Red Pine translation yet, but I like Stephen's because of how poetic and mysterious it is; if not a direct translation. When I was emotionally ruined and delivering pizza last fall and winter I listened to it over, and over, and over again in my truck. I also have the book -- the illustrations are beautiful. I'm actually going to teach myself Chinese/Japanese landscape painting when I get some free time.
Tao Te Ching: An Illustrated Journey: Lao Tzu, Stephen Mitchell: 9780711229648: Amazon.com: Books
And yes, the historical intertwining of Zen and Taoism are actually very beautiful in a naturalistic sense. I'm probably going to get a tattoo of Bodhidharma at some point, because I believe he was a badass motherfucker.
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However I still find myself unsatisfied with where I'm at regarding all of this. I remain convinced that the road to figuring out whether or not God exists ultimately has to travel through morality.
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Agreed. Moral and ethical purification are much more important than the God question anyways, which arises from suffering in the first place -- which is my main concern.
I also believe the word "God" is far too tarnished and archaic at this point, at least for those looking outside of Abrahamic religions. I much prefer to use the word "Universe" for we all know for a fact that the Universe exists, seeing as how we are inside of it.
The major hurdle I passed while researching all this and meditating at the same time was the sheer
awareness of what people call "Spirituality", in all of its myriad forms, on planet Earth. The sheer, staggering number of institutions dedicated to spirituality warrants a very serious examination --- now that I've grown up a bit, it does seem rather silly to write all of those people off as idiots. That being said, a lot of them are still idiots, as we see in the daily news constantly. Humans seem to have an innate and desperate tendency to convince others by any means possible that their view is correct --- as you all saw during my long stint of increasingly aggressive Atheism.
Chronicling spirituality throughout history is also very fascinating. Right now I'm studying a lot of Native American/Indian tribes and all of the different ways they interpreted whatever "Spirituality" is. Before the Europeans came, their naturalistic spirituality is actually very similar to the Zen/Taoist Nature-based fusion.
Truth be told, though, the spectre of Death still freaks me a lot and I wish it didn't. I'm pretty over the god/religion question at this point, and mainly just want to spend the rest of my time here helping others and trying to have a happy, moral life. I have no idea why I'm here, or any of us, but we're all in it together and since we all have a death sentence, if there is any meaning to life at all, it is to love one another and do our best to make the world a better place for those who come after us.
"I do not understand Buddhism." –
Hui Neng