The Marrow of Zen

The Marrow of Zen

Insight Meditation 

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

And then there was one..

What is to be done? Reality is One only. How can It be realised? Realisation is thus an illusion. Practice seems to be necessary. Who is to practise? Looking for the doer, the act and the accessories disappear.

Moreover, if Realisation is not present here and now, how can It, newly got, be of any use? What is permanent must be eternally present. Can it be newly got and be permanent also?

Realise what is present here and now. The sages did so before and still do that only. Hence they say that it looks as if newly got. Once veiled by ignorance and later revealed, Reality looks as if newly realised.

But it is not new.

~Sri Ramana Maharshi (expounding what many have said but few can hear)

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Anyone interested in direct and pure teachings should also read the Hua Hu Ching.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Violent Religion

(This post just flopped off my fingers so it must have a reason to be)

Taoism, Buddhism, Zen, Hinduism (certain areas), and probably other examples fit this post.

Some people obviously resist elements of these teachings that are violent and/or are so direct as to penetrate to the true being. Wei Wu Wei said something like "For truth to hit home it must penetrate like an arrow, and that is likely to hurt".

The Tao Te Ching and other such works pull no punches. They do not invite the reader to lands of angels playing harps or ways to achieve financial or popular gain but unremittingly sledgehammer the reader over the head with reminders of how simplicity is both the way and the objective of this method. "Nature is cruel at times and treats things impartially, so too is the sage who treats people impartially". Most would read this and perhaps say 'ah, ok, the sage treats all people the same no matter who they are' and this is true, but it also means that the sage will also directly tell you if you are being a fool or out of tune with the way. Taoism also accepts angry outbursts, acts of violence and weapons as life. Again referencing nature the Taoist would state that nature is not always at rest and can produce storms; animals have claws and teeth, and we have our own teeth, fists and nails - weapons are but an extension of these. They then remind us how, while outbursts may come, they must also disappear as quickly as the sun floods back over the land after the storm cloud passes, and there should be no residue or wave carried from the event. Act, move on.

Zen masters will hit students with a stick. If the master did not hit them then students may demand a new master as they expect to be hit. Zen masters will shout at students to wake them from slumber and Zen as practiced by the Samurai, the martial artist, the Shaolin Monk is used to justify and give a law to acts of fighting to the death. (Although the Zen is predominantly included to focus the mind here, and sorry if I tainted your art with my shoddy knowledge).

This violence is external and outward but is reflected also in the inward teachings. Yogis and other elements of the Hindu system will starve the body and force lines of inquiry so deep and so solid as to shatter the supposed self. This is also echoed in Zen and Buddhism as direct and forceful methods to the core of our being. Methods to expose the truth can not be softly softly all the time if they are to bear fruit with all practitioners.

It is the case with many people who wish to discover the truth that they will solidly refuse to cast off previous beliefs. Taoism and the others also tell you to unlearn all that you have come with before attempting to learn afresh otherwise the person will taint the new ideas with the old and will be unable and unwilling to go with new lines of thought. We see this with some initiations where masters leave the prospective student out in the cold, give them hard tasks and menial work to test resolve. These stories come to us from Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism.

When I say to a Christian friend that there is "Simply no room for God" they end the conversation. When I ask someone to put aside learning and text book replies they will lose footing and speak of this conversation now having no room for reason. When I say that the truth is out of the bounds of reason they accuse me of faith in the unprovable. When I say that there is no room for faith as who is it with faith and what is there to have faith in, they demand themselves to have reality and for this line of conversation to be called void as it now enters the metaphysical and can not be proved one way or the other.

These are all defense mechanisms employed to reinforce the fake I. Tools of the ego which will do anything to hold on to reality.

Unwilling to let go of the side of the pool they can never float and this makes further exploration, as the above is only initiation, impossible. To ask them to meditate and surrender to what they find they will get no further than closing their eyes. They will reason every point with preset ideas and never leave the fake self. The ego is a very cunning and very persistent beast that will pretend to be the self. You will hear voices of how the goal has been met but this is really the ego still present and faking it. Ego too will expect reward from inquiry and will be hard to shove when it realizes that the goal is its own end.

This is what these methods must have an impartial, cruel, violent and direct nature that exposes the weaknesses and pokes at them. While someone can relate the philosophies to daily existence it takes true power to truly know the self.

"Mastery of others takes power, Mastery of the self......"

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Seeing the Pole star in the Southern sky

I'm not sure who I stole this line from..

Zen is: "Seeing the Pole star in the Southern sky"

This is one of those phrases that not too often comes up in Zen; One with absolute simplicity, clarity, and pointing to Tao like an arrow stuck out of its forehead.

This concept is absolutely the message to be learned to enter Samadhi and once developed can lead to yet further inroads. Without understanding of this then you couldn't feel if you punched your own nose.

What it says should be clear but in its simplest form is the idea of everything being a relationship to what it is not.

People unfamiliar with these basic concepts will reply with very worldly statements.

Given the question "What is more important; the air in your lungs or all the rest?" - a very worldly response proves a failure of seeing this core truth of "Seeing the Pole star in the Southern sky". 

1) "That in my lungs as without it I'd die" - Worldly, simple, straightforward.

2) "All the rest, I've used this bit" (exhales) - Worldly, cunning, witty, open.

3) "They are the same ocean and I can not separate them" - Metaphysical, open, recognizes truth.

4) "[  ]" (saying nothing, smiling from the small of the back to the crown of the head) - Realized.

5) "Let's eat!" (grins, pulls you up off your chair and slaps your back) - Probably the Buddha.

This recognition is expected for Zen study as how can a person see to the truth in any Koan or passage without this core realization? They can not. There is no structure to Zen, you can not read a text book 12 times and you know it. You'll be dumber than the book itself.

With this basic premise (realized) the person is then able to see many more truths in statements that would pass others by. This is not an attempt at an "in-crowd" mentality by Zen but a very valid and powerful method for getting more from the written word than can be achieved through literal methods.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Imaginary friend

Who is your imaginary friend?

None?

Well you have an imaginary self!

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Any action you do is carried out by an actor. An imaginary center given a name and date of birth.

I wont hang around to discuss how we should get by without such labels. I wont take the ridiculous stance that language has no use. But I will say how nothing that is built from these ideas can have any more substance than the initial ideas. So none.

Self (the little one you think is you) is imagined. That same self is caught in the whirlpool of life and feels the ebbs and flows.

The true self is the flow.

Put the imaginary self away, cast it aside and grow up. Become what you were before your date of birth.

Pickup the plasticine person and squeeze them back with the rest of the dough, make a world and recognize yourself as that.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

I wave the flag

What must take place for me to walk to a flag pole and move the flag?

Too much to comprehend.

So what does it take for me to lift my hand and face the palm upwards?

Too much, far too much.

So what does it take for me to just sit here?

Even more!

The less I do then the more is done by the universe.

I am done by the universe.

If we sit Zazen in the same room and I fart. We both laugh.

Did the universe try to cheer us up or did I not chew my cabbage properly?

How egocentric it is to sit Zazen. What do I expect to gain?

I hope nothing. I can only sit to do less, to have less, to know less, to recognize how, in all of the vastness, I am being done as is the leaf falling from the tree.

So my ego would like to get. But my self is beyond such -ism. My ego would like to do, but my self does ALL.

My ego should get off the train and see how it still rolls. Ha, leave it behind!

The ego screams Fatalist!! so you feel you have no control? you are being done?!

No, I have no need to speak to the cast off ego but I will do it the favour of replying: I am not a fatalist, I would rather have the one self doing than to always have the ego getting inflated when it manages to do just as the self was already doing, or being deflated when it has a desire that is not in tune with the way.

Rather than attempt to follow Tao, I shall be.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

What is seeing? Zen.

To see the now we still have a duality. Much of this battle is with language - like who is having this battle?

Truly there is no one to be on the path to enlightenment. There can be no path, there can only be that which is. There can be no one to experience the now. There can be no now as what is now?

Now is a concept formed from concepts of past and future, so is as false a notion as either. Knowing now is a knower. Neither knower or now can exist as entities so we are bouncing around traps of language.

The aim is to summarize this oneness, timelessness, I-lessness without setting up a new trap in our dualist language.

The English language always has a noun doing a verb. It is next to impossible to escape this. But as long as we recognize that as what needs to be done then we can escape the duality; only we can not then speak of it.

But I will......

Mind, matter, "reality", I, world, space, time, are all mind.

The fact that you are an object to me, but you call yourself I, means that we are both the I. Both the I! Both the one I! Both the same one I!

There is only one I. I looking at object is split-mind but both I and object are I and are mind. There is no split only an idea, I splitting by focusing on bits.

That I can only exist in time means that I is an idea. Only the I absent of time can be enlightened. So no one can be enlightened as they are an idea cast through the idea of time. Enlightenment has no time or I only the recognition that all is.

The so called event of "I becoming enlightened" is naturally a false concept built on the false split mind ideas of I and time and being or not as separate things.

Enlightenment is not a state of extended bliss as what is extended, what is bliss and who experiences it? It is the direct recognition of what is. This takes no stages, is not had or had not and is instant as there is no time.

This mind, this world, these objects, these I's are all I and all the mind. Recognizing you as I, I as I, object as I, time as I, reality as I and all as mind; is the final recognition.

Zen.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Monk Mojo

I was walking past a shop that had a Coldplay song booming out from a set of not-quite-powerful-enough speakers - and I imagined a short cartoon of the same happening with a peaceful looking monk in my position instead of me.

The monk would walk over to the shop, pick up the amplifier and throw it into the ground smashing it to pieces, then calmly recollect his pose and walk on.

I got two ideas from this; That cartoons I made would not be that funny, but secondly that it would be great all the same to have cartoons about this sort of thing.

I came home to find an email from Leaf Dharma (of buddhisttorrents) and he had mailed me a link to Monk Mojo and his funny comics on Zen and all that stuff.

Now I'm supposed to pick one and place it here for you to see but instead I'll let you go there and view them all yourself. (if you have a self).

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Quote Myself

"Where Zen and Buddhism will say the truth, enlightenment, and so on can be reached through dedicated meditation and practice, a Tao master may sip some wine, fart, and go to sleep."

There I was innocently surfing the web, hoping to find some pictures of boobs on a Taoist website, and I happened across someone quoting me(!) - I googled the quote and found that 2 people have quoted it on separate occasions so I dug out the old quote that was hidden in a long waffley piece I wrote some time ago and have placed it here for the benefit of my ego. The piece ended with this:

"So look and learn but don't force anything, don't try to adopt things that just don't fit together with you. Don't get so tied to one shore that you miss the next beach. Don't get too comfy under one tree. Don't carry a pile of books around where there is loving living and dancing to be done."

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Nothing is

Time, formed by the mind, as.
The mind can not see all of space, it carves.
Bit by bit, looks at a section, stores, moves on.
That is time.

Like a bird and its jerky head, catches a frame, fills its perception, moves on. Sequentially mapping the void in bits it can manage.

Were you able to see the whole void of space in one, there would be no need for time, no time - only complete understanding.

In bits the picture is incomplete and leads to misinterpretation.

The worst bit is the point of reference, the ego.

Only the ego can seek, suffer.
Only an ego can be spoken of, laughed at.
Only an ego can care.
When you step back.
That's it.

All there.
Is.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Spiritual Halflife

Like many things in a cyclic world there seem to be half lives. It is perhaps the nature of the fractal or our very slight view on the ultimate reality of pure stillness that bring about apparent motions of decay where things spin away, to an apparent future, in an apparent idea of time, apparently before our eyes, and so we say are real -- that we see nuclear like effects from the micro-scale playing before our eyes in the macro - "HEY THIS IS REALITY" he says confidently to mask the truth, so he can play out the game of life in the way it seems so real.

The formation of reality is such a part of us that we forget, but when macro life plays out like science we see in the micro, the patterns link and the oneness of all is seen and because the patterns on no matter which scale are all acting, from the one stillness, where there is nothing, then life as we see it is demonstrated to be just a dream that is to be enjoyed. Why all the stress and strain?

The strain of everything taught as "the new way forward" or acted out as the 'new best thing' or any 'dreams,' and so actions, built from a desire to have 'more this' or this new that, are chasing the trails of patterns playing out in waves and forming the very reality that they are acting out.

Chasing them forms the action of them running away and so it perpetuates.

Half lives as seen in nuclear physics act out also in medical research, behavioral studies and most branches of thought. You drink tea and 2 hours later you are high, 14 hours later the half life is over. You have of course re-topped-up the peak and so extended the time until the half life would regress but had you not the half life would keep on decaying. Every 14 hours you'd be closer by half to being ever free of caffeine. Notice you can never be 'ever free' as there once was a was.

Again action leads to the event in time, and that relates to a perceived event in the future, the mix forms apparent time as an effect.

Harmony and right action leads to a better way and forced reactive living scrapes and scrawls its way along, making more fuss and bother.

'Harmony' - "being the way and the objective" is the way of Tao, and half lives and harmony are seen in science life and nature. What we also clearly see is disharmony in life and it's self-perpetuating, rude, rumble, through dreamworld.

There is no need to upset the dream and have any suffering, at all, not one bit: but the bare-bottomed, small-brained, blast through a few thousand years of history, has made it so, and it is rattling on from Phd's being written over "a better world of unity, globalism and prosperity" where they can not pass the subject without quoting so many others that not one original thought exists, to a populous obsessed over this or that.

All we have to do is sit back, chill Winston, take a breather, and it will all sort out. The people we can't relate to, those who go to war, those who incite war, those desiring leadership or change, are effects of the drum solo being played out in the dream reality - it is bad manners. They will rattle to a halt soon enough.

So here we go onwards, keep the spiritual half life well from decaying, strive on! Sit down, for a lifetime.

---

Read That is That by Wu Wu (only if you want, of course)

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

I think therefore

I think therefore I am not Zen.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Zen Crossword Puzzle

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Zen Birthday Card

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

A duel with dual

Mind is unreal
Matter is unreal

"Mind-Matter" is real! As you can see.

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Plus is an abstract nothing without minus.

Plus is unreal
Minus is unreal

Plus-Minus (or the infinity therein) is real

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Death is meaningless without life.

Life is unreal
Death is unreal

Suchness is real, as you can see.

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I is unreal
The reality unreal

I-reality is wow

~~~
~~~

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Original face

Drop the desire for enlightenment and then you are "not-I" and you regain your original face.

Anyone seeking enlightenment is of course not enlightened. Nor could anyone ever be enlightened, as on enlightenment, there is no I.

"I seeking enlightenment" is bound.

"Enlightened" is no-I, free.

So drop the idea you could ever achieve, as that achiever is not even possibly real. Drop the idea of an achieving entity so there is no longer a desirer; and then you reach the non-I, and there is enlightenment...

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

What to do in killing I?

It is not to remove this "I"

It is not to work on the "I"

It is to recognise the true reality

and that is absent of any "I"





To work on the "I", to improve, or fix,
To aim to remove the "I" or prove it unreal,
are to re-enforce the "I" which is to enforce an illusion.

To recognise the true nature of reality will kill any idea of "I"
Job done.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

No there no me no worries

Lets begin from the dual position that all I's live in.

There is perceiver and perceived.

Now:

Turn off perceiver -> there is nothing perceived.

or

Turn off perceived -> there is no perceiving.

So that dual split that people see as real and have so much trouble shaking is not even possible. It is not and can not be the case.

These emotions and feelings and qualities good and bad that are applied to things, they are only possible when there is an "I" saying they are there. And I has no reality, so what of these qualities?

They are a delusion of illusion.

There is no separation, there is an action: all.

You have very little choice in the face of this truth - you simply have to be blown away by it. You, the I is blown away.. it leaves only the true reality.

This is bliss.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

I assume you have the necessary equipment for enlightenment

You are with a computer now. So you have all you will need.

Enlightenment can not be got but if you keep learning that and you don't try to get it then it will get you, it will creep up on you and get you, you won't be able to stop it - There is no you who could get it, so trying is failing - but it will get you, you can't stop that, it will take you, you'll feel it and then you'll know you never were but are.

1) You looking at computer - Dual

2) You seeing computer as you - Recognising oneness, but dual - Important recognition - The last step of mind

3) One being - Neither ? or ! just     all

"It's a computer made of bits and I am a human made of goo?" NO big fail, these are past memories being dragged up and given reality and shaping reality and that is not reality.

Reality is not this, not that, not this knowing that that is also this - but                 neither | or | just     all

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Wei Wu Wei (Author)

I just can't ever be bored of this man. He is a dead man. Rotten, dusty and no fun at parties. But when he was alive he wrote some great books on Zen and Tao and now many of the best quotes sit here:

Wei Wu Wei Bits and Pieces

I was going to post a number of them but it is impossible to select some as worth posting with out posting them all - so off you go, take a look (link).

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao