Practice

There is nothing more important than practicing kindness.

To practice kindness, we must go very deep – bottomless deep. It requires everything we have plus selflessness.

Someone can be the most knowledgeable and instrumental person in the world but if they are not kind, they are a conduit for immeasurable suffering.

Many now say that appearance is everything. This saying has become the implicit American motto. But I say appearance is just another veneer that weathers, increasingly revealing what truly has been and is.

Let us scratch our own surfaces and look deeply.

Regarding others, how do we know the good from the bad and the truly spiritual from the phonies? To me, the knowing is a matter of direct experience and intuition. If we experience ongoing kindness from another person independent of any negative conditions they may be experiencing, and we sense100% goodness within them, we are interrelating with a real spiritual being. If not, we just take it from there. However, taking it from there, we must summon kindness.

Starting Silent Temple, I am a rebel. Some will say I am unkind, disrespectful, and presumptuous. However, stripping away the veneer that is now the Zen of appearance, I am kind. Not clinging to ossified ideas and rituals, I am kind. Being willing to “kill the Buddha,” I am kind.  

Please rebel with me in Love as kindness!

I will offend some by saying Jesus was not perfect, Buddha was not perfect, Lao Tzu was not perfect, and Mohammed was not perfect. But to veneer these beautiful people with perfect lives is to be unkind to them and all of humanity. One must subsume failures to transcend them and one must see failures as opportunities to become better to actually become better.

Fully owning our failures, we can practice kindness and humility. Denying them, the clarity of vision and inner being needed for kindness are compromised.   

When I make a mistake, I feel so badly! And by feeling this way, my compassion for others that make mistakes increases. Deeply feeling and acknowledging my failures, I can turn my mistakes into goodness.

Not having been born into wealth or power, impersonal failure was mine on many levels. Nevertheless, having deeply experienced failure was a great benediction. To be forced to dissolve the egoistic self to arrive at true essence, I am completely autonomous, healed, and free. Failing and in poverty, I can subsume self, ego, and lose while ascending to that heaven that is ironically only found within.

Jesus said the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. So beautiful! So profound! But he forgot to mention the Kingdom of Hell is there, also. Ironically, to not fully engage with the deep suffering and sense of shame within us, we deny heaven. By adhering to the saccharine gospels of the mind, we unwittingly promote the Kingdom of Hell.

Descending within myself, I can then ascend, releasing all the causalities within hell’s gate.

Please, deeply love your selfless self! Spiritually and psychologically autonomous, loved, and healed – you are the divine.

The Stairway of Existence

by Hafiz

from The Gift:

Poems by Haziz the Sufi Master

by Daniel Ladinski

We
Are not
In pursuit of formalities
Or fake religious
Laws,

For through the stairway of existence
We have come to God's
Door.

We are
People who need to love, because
Love is the soul's life,

Love is simply creation's greatest joy.

Through
The stairway of existence,
O, through the stairway of existence, Hafiz

Have
You now come,
Have we all now come to
The Beloved's
Door.

This wonderful spiritual life of ours is not one thing. It is many non-things as one non-thing.

Poem by Nyogen Sensaki

from

Essential Zen

Edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi

and

Tensho David Schneider

Some old papers were recently excavated

from the ruins of an ancient city

in Eastern Turkestan.

The scholars say that they contain

the thought of Bodhidharma,

and they have been busy turning out commentaries,

both in the horizontal writing of the West

and the vertical lines of the Orient.

Who knows exactly the thought of the blue-eyed monk?

Some imitate his zazen and gaze at the wall

until the sun goes down.

Hey – you are all wrong.

Please deeply love yourself and others purely and selflessly, and make your practice goodness. Neither striving nor avoiding, simply be Innocence. Realizing it is not one thing, be one non-thing as suchness.

When I was a child of six, I lied in a field and experienced Ecstasy. Recently, Bodhisattva Eveleen Forkin said to me, “That child in the field – not caring about school, institutions, laws, rules, or regulations – that child only being concerned with the divine – that is who you be.” And most of my life was an implicit returning to that which I really was from the beginning – despite my explicit self.

If having had a Peak Experience as a child, please return to it as selfless being.

(Sound bell to begin meditation. All segments of the meditation are best taken and realized very, very slowly.)

Please get into a comfortable but alert position.

Become aware of your body.

What is it telling you?

Now, become aware of your breath.

What is it telling you?

Stay with your breathing. Totally relax.

Thinking back into your childhood and remembering a deeply wonderful solitary experience, what was it telling you?

Who/what were you at that time? Who/what do you really be?

Having established the feeling of what you really be, please calm the mind now and suspend thinking the best you can, and simply be that which you really be with little if any thinking.

Now, look at your present self in your mind’s eye and see it. Approach it with love and kindness.

Become one with your present self.

Silently say, “Breathing in, unending,” with the in-breath.

Silently say, “Breathing out, unending,” with the out-breath.

Please stay with this verbal pattern for some time. Allow yourself to fall into it as your true being.

“Breathing in, unending.”

“Breathing out, unending.”

Throughout the week, please remember to be kind to yourself and others.

(Sound bell to end meditation)