I'm entering a weeklong silent retreat in a Zen Center north of #Asheville in the coming hour. This is the view from the back yard currently. 🙂 🙏 #BloomScrolling

#meditation note— Seeing references to "selflessness" or "non-self" in contemplative literature, esp. Buddhist materials, I suspect it's easy for us to presume such an experience is kinda dark or vague. The glimpses I've had are to the contrary — living being is all the more alive and vivid there.

On the other hand, the Virginia creeper on my house has begun turning red...

On the one hand, some end-of-season wildflowers are still blooming here ...

good morning (outside #Asheville, NC)

I'd not realized, a favorite movie documenting a Goenka-style Vipassana meditation retreat conducted in a maximum-security Alabama prison is on Youtube. (Isn't a highest quality print, but appears to be most if not all of the documentary.) h/t @robinreed.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=phHi...

tonight's #meditation was sweet-simple like Zen teacher Mazu's "just don't contrive" and Sengcan's "just don't pick & choose" and the suggestion of the Christian contemplative author of *The Cloud of Unknowing* that we just not "defoul with conceit [=concepts]" tonight it was "just don't impose"

two of us in eyes-opened meditation just now 🙂 🙏

1/2 "Altura's" post translates... Irregularities (anomalies) are leverage points for those interested in understanding the nature of conventional structures. Their power, however, is not limited to the epistemological field, but also to their implications for the ethical sphere. and reminds me...

I had the good fortune to see Rumi's Mevlevi dervishes "turn" in a ceremony in Konya years ago. They were on a basketball court (the Turkish gov't at the time was not supportive of Sufi practice). But when they started to turn, it was like we were all transported to a celestial plane.

“I was looking for books that offer good, practical ideas on how to make the world a better place” fivebooks.com/best-books/s...

🙂 🙏 ... This has now reminded me, when Buddha-dharma came to China, the word the Chinese used for "emptiness" was the same they used for "sky." Lots of discussions of emptiness in Buddhism, of course, but to me it's a form of *honest presence*— always already here before we start making stuff up.

1;6 Sitting in #meditation tonight I was reminded that the body effectively knows how to meditate. Just taking the posture, a gently blissful calm came up. That pleasant calm had a physical dimension, but it wasn't physical only.

1/5 Reminded today how far some of Western pysch/ neurosci has yet to go to catch up with the world's contemplatives. I attended an online lecture on visual consciousness. It spoke of lag-times between the ocular registration of a stimulus and the conscious phenomenal experience of "seeing...."

A second #meditation tonight was rather blissful. And there was a sense, that the point isn't the being blissful. The point is that anything at all is happening.

I've had life-altering ecstatic experiences—moments showing in a sobriety beyond doubt there's a life & unspeakable beauty all things participate in & are expressions of. Tonight's #meditation felt kinda nothing-special-dull. That it can feel dull while there's a Miracle going on—is miraculous. 🙂🙏

Facilitating #meditation groups, I've spoken of it as a practice of honesty. I had a friend once say he assumed that meant "confess your faults" or something. But that's not it. Rather, honesty is not making stuff up. And when we do that—the way things already are can be the miracle it already is.

In tonight's #meditation there was a sense for how Zen's calls to "just not contrive" and "just not pick & pick choose"—i.e., its calls for us to *not make something happen*—is because that way we can realize the worth & wonder of what's already happening (& of which our egoic trying is the child).

1'2 went out to take picture of tonight's sunset, outside #Asheville, but realized I had a visitor ... so I stayed inside and took a picture of the sunset from my kitchen window

single-item yes/no "poll": "Do you support the deployment of the National Guard to crack down on violent crime in America's major cities?" (Chuck Edwards is the Republican Congressperson representing the Asheville, NC area ... looks like anybody can take the "poll")

Reviewing slides for a talk on the art of the Zen teacher Hakuin I'll give in a few weeks, I'm currently struck by this one. Kannon is the bodhisattva of compassion — she who hears and responds to the cries of the world. And Hakuin suggests that when we experience awakening, everything is Kannon.

and this goes the other way, too — the more kind and open-hearted we are, the more aware we are of what is in fact going on — wisdom and compassion are twin paramount virtues in Mahayana Buddhism

This reminds me of a favorite Zen saying, by Foyan: “Awakening is like meeting your father in a big city many years after having left your home town. You do not need to ask anyone whether or not it is your father.” . (adapted from T. Cleary, *Instant Zen: Waking Up in the Present,* p. 48)

something like... #meditation for me is about allowing the living truth that the way things are is meditation

1:12 Quick note on the word #religion. Listening to a history podcast while mowing the lawn just now, I heard the narrator, an educated fellow, introduce a section on the role of early Christian missionaries in the history of eastern and central Europe....

1/8 I hesitate to post this. For a couple reasons. One reason is it feels unsure — not fully comprehended. Like, perhaps I shouldn’t say it if I don’t fully understand it.

I've been at it long enough (52 years, 52 intensive retreats 🙏🙂) that part of me/ "this" knows how to usher me towards spaces which are more original than the painful twists in the world. But. Sometimes I cry. And I find that to be a part of practice, too.

1.2 In tonight's #meditation ... there was for a moment a sense that different attitudes are possible, different mood-framings, or tones of mind, can arise — receptive, open-hearted, determined, optimistic.

When my daughter was 4 we were driving down the road, she in her child seat. I asked her if she'd had any dreams that night. She said, "Yeah, they were weird." I asked, "Do you want to tell me about them?" And she said, "No, because I'm having one right now."

1\ A "p.s." to recent posts— I've not felt well today. But as I sat to meditate tonight an unbidden bliss came over me. A jhānic state, even tho I wasn't pursuing jhāna. And that has happened often enough I sense it's BECAUSE I've had a hard day the bliss came tonight.

1|7 When we bring ourselves to bear on the things of the world there’s delusion. When the things of the world bring themselves to bear on us—and our selves come to be realized as expressions of the way things are—there’s awakening. That’s my paraphrase of lines in Zen master Dōgen’s “Genjōkōan.”

Coming out of tonight's #meditation, there was a kind of sensed simple summary of the reflections I'd offered a little earlier tonight about the nature of karma: being natural is not karmic trying to be natural is

Prof. Bryce Huebner linked to this piece today, in considering varying approaches to understanding "karma." I made a comment to it, and was asked how I'd approach teaching about karma. I'll screenshot the comment and question, and repost the reply thread I offered. tif.ssrc.org/2025/08/27/t...

tonight's sunset, outside #Asheville NC

James Talarico, who is from Round Rock (outside Austin), is running for the U.S. Senate from Texas. He's an example of a smart, kind, and markedly progressive Christian. www.youtube.com/shorts/IpO0S...

The spirit of this reminds me, when I've given talks to psychology classes on meditation, I have them do some. I tell them, though, that if anyone doesn't wish to do the meditation, they can just sit there. But I note that if they really just sit there — they'll be doing the meditation. 🙂 🙏

1/2 #Meditation for me is often an exercise in being completely present and completely out of the way. The "present" quality for me tonight was a kind of vital, sober feeling of THIS IS ME. HERE I AM. ...

I remember seeing Thich Nhat Hanh in Berkeley years ago, a Buddhist monk who had seen utter horrors in his Vietnam homeland. And as he came onto the stage, he paused, and looked at us, and said... with a smile... "Some of you aren't smiling" 🙂 🙏 🌼 Sometimes finding beauty is our act of resistance.

I don't know about y'all, but I'm feelin' this song a lot again lately. #RiseUp www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNKu...

1=6 It’s a big topic, but I wanted to offer a note, an image, an analogy, pertaining to the Buddhist teaching of “not self.”

Like the earth, one side aglow and the other dark, I am illumined when facing a tree.

I've been reading Plotinus. And you remind me that when he uses terms having to do with acting and making and doing, the words he often uses are forms of the Greek *poein* — which means "to do" or "to make" or "to create" — and from which we get our modern word "poem." (Retsoor is a poetic fellow.)

In tonight's #meditation the sense was ... this is less about getting somewhere than about what is already happening.

A nice thread from "Altura." In translation:

1.3 This is fun. There’s a place the contemplative philosopher Plotinus is writing about the One or the Good—the living reality before all thoughts and words—where he says we shouldn’t add anything more to That conceptually. When it comes to the One, thoughts and words are superfluously additional.

from my front door the other day...

1|7 I’ve experienced meditating in dreamless sleep — evidenced, for example, by waking up in the middle of the absorptive states sequence of the Old School Buddhist jhānas. That tells me my typical waking-state sense of “me” isn't the starting point. It comes from somewhere. It’s produced.

From Nammalvar (8th c. Vaishnava saint and poet, translated in A.K. Ramanujan, *Nammalvar: Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu*). The Tamil has three pronoun forms — to indicate "this here," "that there," and "the in-between." And in the original the subject of the poem, "he," is its last word.

I'm outside #Asheville and came through Helene pretty ok. It still moves me, though, what we went through — and how so many here have been committed to honoring and restoring access to the beauty of this part of the world. ❤️ 🙏

Many-sided issue. But overall I find it useful to consider metaphysical models as like stories. If looked at poetically they can put us in touch with things. If looked at literally they can estrange us for our lives. And, for all his Platonic other-worldliness, Plotinus also adopted children. ❤️