Peace and Quiet

[Godzilla]

Re: Peace and Quiet

Thanks Jundo and Will,
I do see this as being an issue of balance.
There are environments which I see as being more suitable for me to live in, but as you both say you can't keep running away from perceived unpleasant situations. But then again I'm also not entirely comfortable with the idea of locking myself up in a monastery away from the world. I think the treeleaf tagline sums it up well.

[AlanLa]

Re: Peace and Quiet

It's not so much the "noise" that disturbs my zazen as it is the nature of the noise, so true peace and quiet is not the goal or issue. I moved zazen into the living room today, where I am away from my neighbors TV noise and now more surrounded by all the apartment noise. So the clock ticking, refrigerator running and AC turning on, etc. are all better than the TV sounds. I know this is just another thought/judgment, but the noise in my head is enough without adding TV noise to it.

I do insta-sits (c) periodically and love them!

[Dojin]

Re: Peace and Quiet

Hey Lora, and everyone else who wrote in this thread.

took me some time to finish reading this post since i have been busy lately, but better late than never...


i also feel sometimes an affinity to peace and quiet.
sometimes i actually notice the limitations of words... i feel that words lack the ability to truly express what i wish to say.
actually its not just what i want to say, but what needs to be said... somethings are beyond words and no amount of words could ever explain it. the more i speak or write i feel i have gone further from the point and what i wanted to convey.

sometimes i even sit with people and have nothing much to say. i am just quiet, i pay attention. it is like watching everything from afar yet being in the middle of it, seeing everything from a wide angle is more accurate.

i also sometimes stop in the middle of the street or during something i do, it can be anywhere any time.
in the train, on the street, in the house, in the garden, alone or with people... no matter the situation.
i just stop and absorb it all. it feels bitter sweet, a warm melancholy feeling. it feels like everything is connected everything is part of everything else and the universe is just what it is. i feel i understand or i am so close to understanding everything but i just cant grasp it. although i know deep in my heart what it really is... with time i stopped caring and let it be.
the interesting thing is that it makes me ant to cry sometimes. it is not tears of happiness or sadness, but rather tears of awe of the beauty and splendor of life... i just let go of everything and see the world just like it is, and it amazes me each and every time.

Gassho, Daniel.
thanking you for listening to his pointless rambling about pretty much everything.

[Undo]

Re: Peace and Quiet

I think this has been posted recently? It's the Shunryu Suzuki Sound and Noise link.
If you haven't seen it or want to see it again, click on clicky

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=pHNyCAJXUXE

[Jundo]

Re: Peace and Quiet

Two young boys raised in the same village were the best of friends for years. When they were older both left their village and went their separate ways in search of the meaning of life. Many, many years later both headed back to their village from different directions. One was now a Zen Master and the other a highly respected Yogi. They met up and came face to face with each other. The Yogi placed his hands together and gave the traditional greeting of "Namaste". (The Divine in me salutes the Divine in you.). The Zen Master said nothing, he simply bowed his head. After a few seconds, they parted and went their separate ways once more. The Zen Master thought, "That guy still talks too much."

The story that started us off came to mind when I read the below today ... You have to read it through toward the end to see why ...

How the child of an atheist found God
By Martha Woodroof
Chicago Tribune
08-02-2008

CHICAGO — My father did not shake his fist at God so much as thumb his nose.

Pop was born in North Dakota to dirt-poor farmers: devout, German-speaking Mennonites for whom God's comfort must have been one of the few. It's not clear to me when Pop decided God was not for him. His four sisters certainly stuck by the Almighty.

Aunt Ruth became a Baptist missionary in the Congo (newly liberated from Belgium at the time). One evening while studying in my prep school library, I picked up The New York Times and read that both of her hands and feet had been chopped off by her ungrateful native "children." This later turned out not to be so. While her companion had, indeed, been hacked to death, my aunt was airlifted out safely, dangling from a helicopter rope above her dead friend and a howling mob, which, like Pop, had had it up to here with the Christian religion.

Pop didn't hack or howl; he simply left. At 19, he stuck out his thumb and began hitching east, ending up a student at Columbia University in New York City. It was there, I suppose, that he transformed himself into my father: handsome, urbane, erudite, the husband of my mother. By the time I got to know him, the only discernible mark left on Pop by his childhood was a visceral antipathy toward religion.

Pop was pure Marxist in this respect. Religion, to him, had been the opium of his people. He had grown up among those who praised the Lord for not sending them enough to eat. Faith, God, religion — they were all the same, and all nonsense, to Pop.

Pop was, however, ethical to the bone. His insistent, loud-mouthed conscience cost him both money and social prestige. When I look back, it seems strange to me that Pop, who was curious about everything else, seemed to have no curiosity at all about the nature or origin of a person's conscience. His conscience was there, he obeyed its directions to a fault, and that was the end of it. He had no interest in exploring the presence of this mystery inside himself. Either that, or its presence made him nervous.

My parents moved to North Carolina shortly after they married, so I was raised godless in the Bible Belt, becoming such a worrisome heathen by the 2nd grade that my public school class would pray over me.

Every Monday morning, my teacher would ask anyone who had not been to Sunday school to stand so that the class might intercede with the Almighty on his or her behalf. Every Monday morning, I stood up alone. I asked my father once if I could lie by staying seated, and he said certainly not, that I was always to stand up for what I believed. And he emphasized that "always" part.

Standing up for my beliefs — both literally and figuratively — was hardship duty when I was a 2nd grader, but it was the only way my father knew to operate. For better or worse, we are our fathers' students.

The experience toughened me in what I think are good ways, and it also contributed mightily to my growing curiosity about the nature and origin of the human conscience—that touchstone against which, according to my family's tenets, all actions are to be tested.

As I got older, I increasingly felt a need to give this touchstone a name that signified not just what it did, but what it was. So, sorry Pop, but in my early 40s, I decided that this voice embedded in us that didn't seem to be of us, this voice that drives us to relate to our fellow humans in ways unrelated to surviving as the fittest, this voice that you, Pop, called your conscience, I would now call God.

I don't mean to imply that I believe God is some mysterious entity somewhere else that speaks through my conscience; I believe God is my conscience. God is whatever it is in me — and was certainly in you, Pop — that constitutes the commonness of my humanity, that tells me clearly what the next right thing to do or think is, urges me to do it or think it (even when it runs counter to my own self-interest), and gives me the capacity to do it with what feels suspiciously like joy. I don't get to understand why this still, small voice is there, or how it gets there; I just get to accept that it is there.

I am not now, nor — God willing — ever will be, conventionally religious. In this I remain my father's younger daughter.

I have no desire to participate in any of society's attempts to corral the Almighty. It has always seemed to me that Yahweh, the great I Am, is the one truly unfathomable mystery of the universe, and as such can best be related to by me through wordless faith, rather than through religion's limiting show. God is not something I can explain, but something I accept and live with and listen to. Unlike my father, I enjoy the presence of mystery in me.

As for Pop, he has been dead a decade. I sometimes wonder what he would think now that his daughter has come out of our family's closet as a person of faith. I'm sure he would applaud me for standing up for my beliefs, but I suspect he would go right on thumbing his nose at God.

I don't for one moment believe that Yahweh — in whatever way Yahweh considers these things — would think any less of Pop because he never called God by name. We are how we do by each other, after all, and my father did just fine.

[lora]

Re: Peace and Quiet

Hi, Everyone,

Thanks for your postings, they are well taken.

I read your post, Jundo, and I get it.

I read something everyday, preferably Buddhist stuff, but not necessarily and I came upon this, it's from a book translated by Thomas Cleary called "Zen Essence". Zen Master Yuanwu wrote, "What is most difficult to rectify is half-baked Zen, where you stick to quiet stillness and consider this the ultimate treasure, keeping it in your heart, radiantly aware of it all the time, carrying around a bunch of mixed-up knowledge and understanding, claiming to have vision and to have attained the approval of a Zen master, just increasing your egoism."

Now, I don't claim to have the "ultimate treasure", I don't, but I wonder if I am looking for approval from somewhere, perhaps not necessarily approval but a sense of belonging. I also increased my egoism (like I needed any more of that!). I feel now as if I've been cast adrift with no map, no guidelines, stumbling around in the dark. I'm trying to rectify the "half-baked" part, (not Zen), but leftovers from a previous group.

I don't think this is making much sense, Master Yuanwu says it better than I.

Yours in confusion,
lora
Many Blessings

[Godzilla]

Re: Peace and Quiet

I have to admit that I have a bit of a ocncern about these kinds of forums as being platforms for ego, for people to show off their knowledge and make themselves look smarter than other people, or better. They can be a space to win arguments and be a bit of a big shot. I've done it myself in the past on music forums and things. But hopefully Treeleaf won't be like that.
I met someone recently who has said to me a couple of times that maybe she should just find a bunch of Buddhist friends ot hang out with and they''ll be peaceful and respoectful. I try to tell her that Buddhists of any kind are still just people with the same flaws as everyone else, we just intersperse the mistakes with periods of zazen
Maybe it all boils down to the difference between walking the walk rather than talking the talk, and doing the walking without having to be noticed by anyone else in so doing.