There’s a new product on the market called Zen12 that let’s you get an hour’s worth of meditation in just twelve minutes! Or as Arj Barker says in The Sickest Buddhist, “The instructor just told us to do a 45 minute meditation. I nailed it in ten!”

So you probably won’t need to come to Culver City tomorrow for our first Half Day Sitting of the year at the Kaizuka Room at the Veteran’s Memorial Complex, 4117 Overland Blvd., Culver City, CA 90230. Why sit half the day when you can get the same amount of sitting done in, like, 36 minutes?

See? This is the problem with meditation. It takes too damn long! Who has the time for that? We’re busy people! We got stuff we gotta get done!

Big Mindâ„¢ was a great solution for its time. It promised you an Enlightenment Experience just like Buddha’s in a single day. It took Buddha – what? – like seven years of wandering around in the wilderness and gosh knows how many hours of meditation. But – damn! – now you can get that shit done and over with in a day! Maybe go shopping in the afternoon. Get some bells and beads and stuff. Take that, so-called Enlightened One!

It’s simple. People want to slow down their minds. But they want to get that done quick cuz there’s so much else to do! You gotta get people grounded fast so they can take off again for the next thing! D’uh!

Anyway. It’s a New Year. Let’s set some intentions and what-not. My intention this year is to get a center in Los Angeles happening. I’m gonna start blogging on that topic in a special series. First I’ll explain why Los Angeles of all places, then we’ll go from there.

I’m often asked about how one can be “in the moment” and still have goals. For one thing, I kind of hate that phrase, “in the moment.” But I guess we’re stuck with it. The way to have goals and be in the moment, though, is pretty straight-forward. Set your goals now. That is, do your goal setting with full participation in the moment in which you are setting goals. Just set your goal. Don’t worry about the rest.

Know that you might not attain those goals. Know that you’ll have to be flexible when your plans don’t pan out. Know that your goal won’t be anything like you imagine it’s gonna be. But just do it.

Zen practice is goalless. But once I had an interesting conversation with Nishijima Roshi. I was working for a company that had lost its way. They didn’t know what they wanted to do. I said this to Nishijima and said, “I know in Zen we have no goal in practice…”

He cut me off and said, “Yes. But in business you need to have a goal!”

So there are different spheres of life that you approach in different ways. When you start to understand the goallessness of Zen practice, goals like you have in business or in opening a Zen center start to make a kind of sense they never did before. Then you can do the actual work it takes to do what you want to do.

Speaking of things people want to do, I’m still on the look-out for anyone who has a car they want to make into a tax deductible donation. For a hot minute there I thought a reader of this blog had come through with something, but evidently he changed his mind. So the plea still stands. This current move is probably the most expensive I’ve done in my life – and I once moved me and my then-wife from Japan to the USA. I think this is actually costing far more. So help with getting a car would be appreciated (and tax deductible). Write me at bw@hardcorezen.info if you’d like to discuss it.

Thanks!

As always donations (including micro-donations of as low as a dollar) can be sent to PayPal via this link.

Happy Kwanzaa!