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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brad Warner
Read between
April 22 - May 2, 2023
The very act of trying to play a song with a group of other people forces you to concentrate very clearly on the here and now. Now, when I say concentrate, I do not mean “think very hard about,” which is what most people mean when they use that word. A completely different concentration is required. You cannot think at all, or you will screw everything up.
During the practice it’s difficult to notice what is actually taking place. It can feel boring, frustrating, even silly. Or, conversely, you can feel elated, high, full of cosmic energy, and all that nonsense. But it’s usually not until after you’ve done the practice that you notice what has just happened. Of course, the very act of noticing what has happened is a small corruption of the practice. As Nishijima Sensei likes to say, “You can never notice your own enlightenment.”
There is a school of Zen in which students are given these questions and required to answer them in private meetings with their teachers. Dogen was not part of this school. In fact, he had nothing but bad stuff to say about that particular practice.
The correct physical posture is the single most important part of the practice of zazen. Keep focused on that, and everything else will follow.
And if you find you just can’t do this on certain days, no problem. Everyone has days like that. Everyone. Me, you, Dogen, the Dalai Lama, all of us. Effort is far more important than so-called success because effort is a real thing. What we call “success” is just the manifestation of our mind’s ability to categorize things. This is “success.” That is “failure.” Who says? You says. That’s all. Reality is what it is, beyond all concepts of success and failure.
There is one spot where your spine will balance perfectly on top of your hip bones without any effort on your part. It’s a little different for every person and can change from one day to the next. You find this spot the same way you learn to ride a bike without falling over. You just have to fall over again and again and again.
there’s a difference between “angry music” or “angry art” of any kind and real anger. Anger doesn’t make music, not even angry music. Music comes from a completely different place.
For me, so-called angry music has never aroused feelings of real anger — quite the opposite, in fact. I’d have been far angrier in a world where you could only hear so-called happy music. “Angry music,” exposing as it did its author’s truest feelings, let me know I was not alone in my own feelings of frustration. Far from making me angry, it made me feel as if there was something positive I could do with my feelings.
By bringing things to the surface, zazen enables you to see very clearly what you need to work on. That in itself can be stressful. This is one of the reasons Zen doesn’t really work as a short-term solution to being stressed. Plus, it’s not enough just to see what you need to work on. You’ve actually got to work on it.
When you get into the idea that helping a million people overcome some great catastrophe is wonderful but helping the guy next to you fix his pencil sharpener is trivial, you run into all sorts of trouble because you will never measure up to your ideal.
The “emptiness” referred to by Buddhists isn’t unreality. Emptiness is reality itself when we see it as it is, which is to say, when we see it as “empty” of our concepts about it — and that includes the concept of emptiness.
Most of us tend to divide our lives into these big peak moments of enormous happiness or horrendous sorrow on the one side, and everything else in between those moments, which we consider to be mundane, boring, and unimportant, on the other. In doing so, we miss out on almost our entire lives. If our brains are trying to regulate us, as Loewenstein, I think, quite rightly assumes, then is it those big experiences of intense happiness that we really want? Are those peak moments what really make us happy?
We miss out on the amazingness of where we are right now by comparing it with the past and trying to determine whether we’ve done this thing before or not.
what makes zazen even better than those things is that the practice forces you to zoom right in on the dullest, most tedious situation you could possibly face. It teaches you how to find the beauty in a state you normally regard as not even worth noticing. Once you’ve managed this, the ability to enjoy everything else in your life follows naturally.
On the one hand it is right and proper to understand that what we’re perceiving as the material universe is not the sum total of reality. On the other, we don’t need to screw around trying to imagine just what reality is or to picture reality as existing way off in some other realm we cannot experience right now.
Birth is special precisely because death exists.
Every thought, no matter how profound, how beautiful, how scary, how true — is nothing more than electricity bouncing around in your brain. Thinking the same thoughts over and over and over tends to create neural pathways of least resistance in your brain. The electrical energy always present in your brain then tends to travel through these familiar pathways. It’s hard for me to see any persistent fear as anything more than that.
A monk goes up to a Zen master and asks, “The three vehicles and the twelve divisions of the teaching being unnecessary, just what is the ancestral Master’s intention in coming from the west?” The Zen master says, “The three vehicles and the twelve divisions of the teaching completely being unnecessary.”
Okay, this is actually hilariously good.
The point being made is that even Buddha was not free from normal human temptations and folly even after his awakening, that he had to constantly guard and keep the state he’d achieved.
Every object you acquire comes with a certain degree of responsibility for that object. Most of us don’t realize this, which is why we treat most of the stuff we own so incredibly badly.
Eventually little bits of understanding — most of which you don’t even notice when you gain them — will start to accrue, and one day you’ll reach a point where the general principles will become abundantly clear.
