Fully rounded Zen practice

If you want a fully rounded Zen practice, it's meditation, it's precepts, and then it's deepening that insight of presence and of non-duality. The synchronicity of all those things together give you a rounded practice.

Reflection and Presence 2, talk by Geoff Dawson, May 22, 2022, Ordinary Mind School of Sydney

No Crisis of Faith

May 17, 2022

As I think about my faith journey and how people might react to it, It seems to have been a natural progression. From reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse in high school to seeing the Dalai Lama in 1984 at UCSB to meditation with Clarence Liu at the Matthew Fox conference in West Yellowstone to Bishop Spong saying "Jesus did not die for my sins" in April 2006 at California Lutheran to Saturday morning with Kevin at the Ventura Buddhist Center to the third Saturday group, it all seems like a flow.

I did a search of my blog post to see if I could find the date of the Bishop Spong's lecture at CLU. I really like his description of God. I also like his explanation, "The Bishop of Rome turned the power of his location in that capital city of the known world into the ability to define Christianity and to limit the understanding of the past to his particular interpretation of the past." While I remember the turning point of hearing "Jesus did not die from my sins," I had forgotten that I read his blog and other sources for a while and found them very helpful as my faith gradually transformed. The Dalai Lama has told people not to leave their faith community to follow Buddhism. Bishop Spong has helped me to understand how I can remain Christian and yet be way out of the mainstream.

- - - - 

August 8th, 2022

This last Sunday our pastor challenged us after telling the story of the hymn blessed assurance by Fannie Mae Crosby. The music writer she was working with brought her a tune and asked for her reaction. The words just poured out as she wrote the first first of blessed assurance. As I think about this challenge I kind of went back to this blog entry that I had already made and thought I would extend it. I am constantly noticing the consistency with Buddhist practice found in the Christian Church. It's easy to think of a lot of things that are not compatible but as I think about how my faith has matured and I've gotten to this point, I find it heart mean to hear those images within the worship and activities of the church I participate in. I noticed that the liturgy contains precepts. Oddly the main book called the holy Bible is an oddly organized collection of randomly preserved documents. As one becomes aware of the apocrypha and then learns about the Gnostic Gospels, it becomes quite obvious that the books in the Bible are where the result of an arbitrary chance. The Jewish scriptures are more organized and were apparently written more recently than people believed to create a history. The gospels were not the first books to be written and included in the Christian scripture even though they are the first books listed. Well the synoptic gospels tell the story in a very similar way, John is actually a pretty crazy book that starts with Greek thought and has Jesus mansplaining quite a bit. The book of Acts is similar to the synoptic Gospels as they believe it was the same author as Luke. Then we have a bunch of Paul's letters that were kept by various faith communities and many letters that were ascribed to Paul even though he probably didn't write them. What we're missing is the many, many, other groups of Christians who didn't have someone as prolific as Paul. Paws are apparently the earliest writings but we have a huge gap from the death of Jesus to the first descriptions of Christian activities and beliefs.

Buddhist have precepts, vows, sutras and stories that do not need to be taken literally, but have lessons that are accepted by many within the diverse group of Buddhist traditions. There is so much confusion in the Christian church about what is to be taken literally and what is just a reflection of the culture at that time. Can we extract the spiritual truth that was being conveyed? I find it hard to tell someone to read the Bible as a way to enhance their spirituality and understand the meaning of life.

Another interesting aspect is that my Buddhist teachers both virtually and in person have never discouraged me from my Christian beliefs. They are also not afraid to use Christian images and stories to explain Buddhism. All my views about Christianity that do not conform to the traditional story are from reading People associated with the Christian religion that I have mentioned several times. And they have not weakened my belief, it's just been radically changed from the traditional Christian understanding of Jesus.

Buddhist chaplains on the rise in US, offering broad appeal

Buddhist chaplains on the rise in US, offering broad appeal

By GOSIA WOZNIACKA

“Buddhist chaplains are in the habit of speaking in more universal terms, focusing on compassion, being grounded, feeling at peace,” she said. “A lot of Christian chaplains fall back on God language, leading prayers or reading Bible scriptures.” said Leigh Miller, director of academic and public programs of Maitripa College, a Tibetan Buddhist college in Portland.

Meanwhile, training in mindfulness and meditation, as well as beliefs regarding the nature of self, reality and the impermanence of suffering, give Buddhists unique tools to confront pain and death.

“The fruit of those hours on the (meditation) cushion really shows up in the ability to be present, to drop one’s own personal agenda and to have a kind of awareness of self and other that allows for an interdependent relationship to arise,” Miller said.

Buddhist chaplaincy also faces challenges, including how to become more accessible to Buddhists of color. The Mapping Buddhist Chaplains in North America report found that most professional Buddhist chaplains today are white and have a Christian family background, even though nearly two-thirds of the faith’s followers in the U.S. are Asian American, according to the Pew Research Center.

Rev. Jo Laurence, a hospice and palliative care chaplain at Portland’s Providence Home and Community Services said that as more people become unchurched, many patients don’t have a language for their spirituality or it’s tied up with religious trauma. Laurence supports them in whatever way they need, be it through Christian prayer, the comfort of a cool washcloth on a forehead or a Buddhist-inspired blessing.

“For some people the language of Buddhism is a respite,” she said. “It doesn’t have the baggage, and it feels so soothing to them.”

Radical Sense of Acceptance

Dharma practice comes back all the time to a radical sense of acceptance, an acceptance of your own being. Your purpose in life is to deepen that acceptance into who you truly are, your true self. Positive thinking is always caught up with change, You can change everything. But acceptance is often the wisest relationship we can have to an illness or the trajectory of the illness. There's a peace and serenity that comes with that rather than fighting it. Years ago you may have read a book, Grace and Grit: A Love Story by Ken Wilber. It was actually based on his real life experience of his wife dying of cancer and then dying, and how she fought to the very end. She exercised until the very end, over doing exercise and diet and things like that and she died of cancer. If you're caught up in the idea that the mind can overcome everything and you can just change it, do you spend the rest of your life, the precious days or months or years you have fighting it all the time? Or would you have much more quality of life if you accepted it. Would that be a wiser way to go? Sometimes we can change things but we can't always change things. The inevitability is, to go back to Dharma teaching, we will all grow old, get sick in various forms, and we will die. And that's the way it is. We can fight it or we can accept that that's the kind of way things break down over time.

Buddhism and Wholistic Health, talk by Geoff Dawson, May 1, 2022, Ordinary Mind School of Sydney

Identifying With Thoughts and Feelings

May 1, 2022

These people have a pattern in their lives that if someone doesn't validate their view, not even criticizing their view, then "you are not validating me." "My view is me," they can't make a separation. The suffering that comes out of that is that "this makes me unworthy." Then they become angry. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, they are so angry at people all the time that people do start rejecting them. It's really clear that when we take things personally when our view is not validated, we are identified with our thoughts, views and opinions.

And when I reflect on this, I've done the same thing. I can think of instances in my life where someone didn't accept my view, I take it personally and do what these people do. I may not do it to the same extreme.

Identifying With Thoughts and Feelings, talk by Geoff Dawson, December 4, 2021 Ordinary Mind School of Sydney

See also: Undeniable Realities and Zazen