Month: August 2020
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To Rejoice And Grieve With Our Whole Hearts
In the opening part of his essay, “Religion Challenged by Modern Thought,” which is included in Zen and Western Thought (1985), Masao Abe writes poignantly about what is lost in the secularization process: I believe that this phenomenon [namely, secularization] has, in the last analysis, been caused by the fact that modern people have gradually…
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Ego = Lack
Seemingly No Way Out Deepen your meditation practice enough and soon you’ll realize something: unless you realize your true nature, the dis-ease you experience will never, ever end. This is because the root of your dis-ease is not living in the wrong place (so moving elsewhere won’t bring lasting peace and happiness), being around the…
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Four Basic Negative Emotions Arising From Ego-selves
Once you look into the research further, you realize that there are as many classification of basic emotions as you can shake a stick at. Still, I don’t know how many are beginning from the actual experience of meditation. The latter will be my starting point. While I don’t want to say anything conclusive here…
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Fledglings And Us
When I looked at them, they struck me as spellbound. For long hours, they would sit beside the pine tree in the corner of the yard, wearing the guise of the uninitiated. Big eyes. Tender feet. Trepidation when flying was proposed. You mean now? The fledglings were brother and sister, or brother and brother, or…
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The Zen Koan’s Life Challenge
There is an unbridgeable gulf between the therapeutic dispensation and Rinzai Zen. While the former seeks to “cool your jets” and help you “cope” with secular life’s vicissitudes, the latter wants to show you how to turn up the temperature on your own dis-ease with a view to your fundamental, direct realization of your being.…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 