Everything is spiritual and nothing is spiritual.
I used to wonder why people didn't like the term spiritual. For them it meant an artificial and inauthentic rising above, where as true spirituality is rooted in the body, in reality, where you really are, and not about aping behaviors. Trying to be spiritual can be taking the moto "fake it till you make it" too far. For me true spirituality isn't just trying to go deeper, it's connecting with the transcendental, in the world I experience. Transcendental can sound above and beyond, but is not.
Overflowing with a feeling of reverence, I just had a feeling to bow down in the courtyard, next to where the laundry room (After the ecstasy, the laundry). Something about the trees and the bigness of the buildings. Freud talks about an "oceanic" feeling. For me it's a move towards purity and vastness. Some friends get anxious when I talk about purity. When I meditate, I see better lines of action. When I'm not as mindful, when I choose not to formulate and investigate my experience, is when I get into trouble.
I put a football on my shrine and I felt for a second that that was blasphemous. I put it there just as a place to put it, not that I wanted to take refuge in football. Everything is sacred, everything is profane. It's all about the attitude.
Remembering this Israeli movie Kadosh, at one point in the movie a pious man is pleading with god to bring him closer. It was an interesting kind of dramatization of the desire to go deeper. I wondered if it really worked.
Devotional chanting is called a puja, and that makes me go deeper, connects me with what is really important. Today at 1015am in NYC, the moon is full. In ancient times, the sangha would get together when it was a full moon and chant, meditate and talk about the Dharma, connect in spiritual friendship. Now sometimes a Buddhist community isn't true sangha, but a Buddhist without sangha is also a lost Buddhist. You can treat everyone as if they are a Buddha, and when you do that you see more of that in the world.
Life is a self fulfilling prophecy. We choose where we go, or we just drift along. I don't want to drift along, I want to move towards enlightenment.
This is a picture of Milarepa's last teaching--he pulled up his clothes to show off the calluses on his butt from meditating all the time. That's my kind of spiritual hero.
I used to wonder why people didn't like the term spiritual. For them it meant an artificial and inauthentic rising above, where as true spirituality is rooted in the body, in reality, where you really are, and not about aping behaviors. Trying to be spiritual can be taking the moto "fake it till you make it" too far. For me true spirituality isn't just trying to go deeper, it's connecting with the transcendental, in the world I experience. Transcendental can sound above and beyond, but is not.
Overflowing with a feeling of reverence, I just had a feeling to bow down in the courtyard, next to where the laundry room (After the ecstasy, the laundry). Something about the trees and the bigness of the buildings. Freud talks about an "oceanic" feeling. For me it's a move towards purity and vastness. Some friends get anxious when I talk about purity. When I meditate, I see better lines of action. When I'm not as mindful, when I choose not to formulate and investigate my experience, is when I get into trouble.
I put a football on my shrine and I felt for a second that that was blasphemous. I put it there just as a place to put it, not that I wanted to take refuge in football. Everything is sacred, everything is profane. It's all about the attitude.
Remembering this Israeli movie Kadosh, at one point in the movie a pious man is pleading with god to bring him closer. It was an interesting kind of dramatization of the desire to go deeper. I wondered if it really worked.
Devotional chanting is called a puja, and that makes me go deeper, connects me with what is really important. Today at 1015am in NYC, the moon is full. In ancient times, the sangha would get together when it was a full moon and chant, meditate and talk about the Dharma, connect in spiritual friendship. Now sometimes a Buddhist community isn't true sangha, but a Buddhist without sangha is also a lost Buddhist. You can treat everyone as if they are a Buddha, and when you do that you see more of that in the world.
Life is a self fulfilling prophecy. We choose where we go, or we just drift along. I don't want to drift along, I want to move towards enlightenment.
This is a picture of Milarepa's last teaching--he pulled up his clothes to show off the calluses on his butt from meditating all the time. That's my kind of spiritual hero.
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