My Zen Retreats Are the Best (and Here’s Why)
Now before I say what I want to say here, I want to point out that I specifically designed my Zen retreats to be the best possible retreats they could be. I didn’t even start running retreats of my own at all until I was able to run ones that wouldn’t be compromised into being […]
Quieting the Mind?
A reader asked about quieting the mind. She said she couldn’t find anywhere I’d written about it. I don’t generally write about quieting the mind because it’s one of those things that I find hinders rather than helps. It sets up a goal to reach and a comparison to make. You imagine what a quiet mind […]
The Orthodoxy of Being Unorthodox
Whenever I’ve seen Leslie James, the guiding teacher at Tassajara Zen monastery, give a talk she has started off by saying something like, “I’m just going to tell you about Zen according to Leslie. I don’t claim this is the official version,” or words to that effect. I was thinking about this the other day and […]
Enlightenment and Freedom from Suffering
There were 325 comments on my previous post the last time I checked. I haven’t read all of them. But a number of them appear to be discussing the matter of Enlightenment. Someone said that Zen is definitely a religion because it promises Enlightenment, which is the freedom from suffering. I never really understood that. My […]
Going Clear
Yesterday I took the #2 bus up Sunset to the Arclight theater in Hollywood to see the documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief*. There are already numerous articles on the movie all over the Interwebs. The most succinct one I’ve found is on the Los Angeles Magazine website. Salon.com also has a […]
