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NO EDGES, NO BOUNDARIES

February 6, 2015

We are free, every one of us. We are born free, and the bondage, restrictions, and limits that we find in our life are self-created. The edges we perceive have been placed there by the way we use our minds. There are fundamentally no edges, no boundaries. But this practice has nothing to do with believing. We don’t have Zen believers. It also has nothing to do with understanding. Understanding implies a separation between the knower and the thing that the knower knows. It has to do with direct and intimate experience itself. Your experience. Not Shakyamuni Buddha’s, not mine—yours. Only you can make yourself free. No one can do it for you. The only one with the power to do it is you yourself. “Only a Buddha can realize Buddha”—and it is nowhere to be found other than on top of the seat that you’re sitting on. –John Dido Loori

February 4, 2015

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Wait without Hope

January 19, 2015

T.S. Eliot: “I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

Do not call to mind the former things…

January 11, 2015

“Do not call to mind the former things,
Or ponder things of the past.
Behold, I will do something new, now it will spring forth;
Will you not be aware of it?
I will ever make a roadway in the wilderness,
Rivers in the Desert…” ~Isaiah 43:18-19

Eiko Peiko 1995-2014

December 27, 2014

My beloved long time companion has left for another world.
Baruch Dayan Emet. ברוך דין אמתnina and eiko dec 26 2014

Macbeth, again and surgery update

November 26, 2014

Thinking about what is happening in Israel, I cannot find anything better than the below, from Kurosawa’s MACBETH, which I’ve already posted a few times, but it never gets old. Besides that I can now lift my left arm to about 160 degrees, Barucha Ha Shem…(yes, feminine on purpose).

Look upon the ruins
Of the castle of delusion,
Haunted only now
By the spirits
Of those who perished.
A scene of carnage
Born of consuming desire,
Never changing
Now and throughout eternity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XWogmntJls

Chan Master Han Shan

October 13, 2014

Why do you replace the pupils of your eyes with black beans? There is a way, easy to tread! Its as easy and plain as a pair of scales. Just avoid hankering after attractive side-shows and in time you will enter the Imperial City.

–Chan Master Han Shan.