Month: January 2021

• January 22, 2021

  Peter Pans

  Maybe you too have the eerie sense that a fair number of young men are not growing up fully. In this respect, they are Peter Pans. I find it hard to state this thesis clearly. Toward the beginning of my “Secular Monks” piece, I gesture in this direction: Recently, I began to notice that well-educated,…
• January 21, 2021

  Reading The Tao Te Ching: Kenosis; or, Self-emptying

  And what is always here? What, indeed, is evident just when the self falls away?
• January 20, 2021

  Pandemic Boredom

  Recently, I’ve heard from a number of people with whom I philosophize that they feel a real hunger for newness. Maybe it is that quaint village they remember and wish to return to or that mountain they want to hike up or the aqua sea they long to dip their toes into. That hunger for…
• January 13, 2021

  The News IS Drama: A Danger

  It’s not that news stirs up drama, though of course it does that. It’s that the news is drama. But drama is not meditation. And meditation is the nature of universal consciousness. For those working in the media, something happens and immediately it’s “taken up.” As my Zen teacher says concerning practice, “Don’t turn it…
• January 8, 2021

  The Seeking Self Isn’t No Satisfaction!

  In a collection of Dharma talks entitled Zen Classics for the Modern World (2011), Rinzai Zen teacher Jeff Shore states, For the ceaselessly seeking self, nothing it comes across will give lasting satisfaction. Once the seeking self has come to rest, the most ordinary and commonplace is quite enough. “When hungry, eat; Tired, sleep.” The…