Comments on: What’s wrong with Zen? https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2014/04/05/whats-wrong-with-zen/ NoMoreFakeNews.com Sat, 26 Apr 2014 12:13:36 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2.10 By: sansome2012 https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2014/04/05/whats-wrong-with-zen/#comment-8401 Sat, 26 Apr 2014 12:13:36 +0000 http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/?p=6043#comment-8401 Very true.

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By: g https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2014/04/05/whats-wrong-with-zen/#comment-8400 Tue, 15 Apr 2014 01:07:55 +0000 http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/?p=6043#comment-8400 Thank you for this article.

I’ve had an idea…let’s get out of passivity and form an army. An army made of ordinary people who just want to defend and protect life. There is no leader, but what happens is this….

Let’s say you have an idea-such as wanting to have more herbalists in your area, or allowing your local natural lake to allow public swimming, or have more reflexologists available in yourclocal health centre for free etc….these things are maybe too big for one person. What you do in this ‘army of ideas’ is to put your idea forward and then allow for local people to join forces with you. Basically you don’t need to wait for authority or someone up high to arrange any of this. You just go ahead and do it. As a group of even 2 or 3 a lot can be achieved. Even if your project is something that needs to go through the courts, you can read about the law through online resources and just get on with it. You don’t need to wait for ‘experts’ to tell you about common sense and what your local area needs, do you? You or your team may even end with experts in your team, experts who are disallusioned with how things are. So you could end up, for example with a group of public health doctors who are fed up and want to challenge something in public health. Let’s face it, if you stay in your field and don’t go freelance like this, those big things that maybe you have always wanted to change but couldn’t because your line manager and their line manager just wasn’t interested, may never change….
Lets say you are a researcher interested in music and health but just couldn’t get anywhere at your university, because there was no such department….why not just do it yourself? Why wait for a command from above or a job description in a newspaper? Make up your new job based on your existing skills, expertise and the task that you really really want to do. The task that would give you a lot of satisfaction. Put it out there and I am sure that people will join you. The only common thread in this army is that it is for defending and protecting life, within a world where this not taking place.

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By: Franz Metcalf https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2014/04/05/whats-wrong-with-zen/#comment-8399 Sat, 12 Apr 2014 05:41:50 +0000 http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/?p=6043#comment-8399 Jon, I respect your past work, but you clearly didn’t do much investigation before publishing this piece. You laud a false past of mythologized Zen teachers and teachings. And you fail to see the genuine engaged focus of the vast majority of contemporary Zen practice in America. You are simply wrong on the facts about Zen. You write with intelligence and, as I say, you’ve done good work. Not here, though. Not with respect to Zen.

Note that this is not to deny the self-centered and self-congratulatory pursuit of no-self that does happen in the American practice of Asian religious traditions. I can’t stand that, either. But please get your facts straight before you malign one of those traditions that actually tries to get it right.

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By: Tryptoogene https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2014/04/05/whats-wrong-with-zen/#comment-8398 Fri, 11 Apr 2014 15:08:02 +0000 http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/?p=6043#comment-8398 Dead rice

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By: Genie https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2014/04/05/whats-wrong-with-zen/#comment-8397 Thu, 10 Apr 2014 17:17:09 +0000 http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/?p=6043#comment-8397 Jon, it’s what you know *after* you know everything about Zen that really counts.

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By: vicfedorov https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2014/04/05/whats-wrong-with-zen/#comment-8396 Wed, 09 Apr 2014 13:35:06 +0000 http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/?p=6043#comment-8396 There is a zen between your reader, me, and you. There is a zen to you and your audience, to your brand; the meditation reveals the meditator as the being; this is more important and how you change civilization. Zen is a study of relations, or realizes we emerge from, or are occluded by, a vortex of relations. The point is, if the world does stop, and the change is now, who will go along most freely? The meditators and buddist types, the lower class, the people who didnt invest in prestige, and susceptible to communication, zen decreases the distance between operatives, and understands the collusion to the general good.

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By: Skylar https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2014/04/05/whats-wrong-with-zen/#comment-8395 Wed, 09 Apr 2014 03:43:23 +0000 http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/?p=6043#comment-8395 the purpose of meditation is not ‘no action’, the purpose is ‘right action’. one example given is a monkey running wild, lots of action, but not much going right compared to a hen sitting on and incubating an egg, not much activity, but a new chick is in the making. crude examples, but i think you get it.

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By: Space Lord https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2014/04/05/whats-wrong-with-zen/#comment-8394 Wed, 09 Apr 2014 02:26:45 +0000 http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/?p=6043#comment-8394 Buddha resides on a mountain built for him by others. Searchers construct crooked paths tiled in words to see him. I am the mud he trod, the cloud his eye rests upon.

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By: Trinogen https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2014/04/05/whats-wrong-with-zen/#comment-8393 Wed, 09 Apr 2014 00:29:10 +0000 http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/?p=6043#comment-8393 Hi,
Don’t you guys fall for what this politician talks about Zen, he is not a Zen adept for sure.
Zen is a very diluted form of Buddhism brought to Japan from Chinese Taoism (which is at its turn a diluted form of Buddhism). The real Buddhism (which was diluted several times from Buddha’s time) is based on the principle of tapas or god provide and total seclusion, having nothing to do with politics and fight. And Buddha’s Nirvana is not by any means the Heavens, Buddha being an atheist. What Buddha has discovered cannot be told, because it doesn’t pertain to this world, that’s why the Chinese and the Japanese invented the huans/koans in order to make some sense from Buddha’s teachings and orient the mind in a direction or another and not turn paranoid. Those “minders” have no value whatsoever, the same way Yoga’s mantras have no value. The only value in the world is your heart, which is assaulted to a great extend today by the religio-scientific freaks and the social apparatus as a whole. Please get out the sensorial trance of man!
And if you are brave enough, try my website as http://www.tachyyoga.org and give your Self a chance to withdraw from human mold into something better. Don’t you cling to terrestrial being!
Sarva mangalam
Trinogen

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By: Sam https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2014/04/05/whats-wrong-with-zen/#comment-8392 Tue, 08 Apr 2014 19:50:17 +0000 http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/?p=6043#comment-8392 One balmy summer night many years ago, I was at a party where an ordained Zen sensei was trying to fix an electric lamp for the garden. I sat beside him, marvelling at his endless good-natured patience as he tried over and over again for more than an hour to get the old lamp to work. Just as I was contemplating the profound lessons in patient one-pointed focus I was gratefully soaking up, the Rolling Stones’ Honky Tonk Woman came blaring out of the house.

“F*** that!”, the sensei cried as he laid the lamp down on the floor, jumped up and rushed inside shouting, “I’m dancing!!!”

It always seemed to me since to be the best Zen teaching ever 😉

On another note re: the West’s usurpation and bastardization of Eastern spiritual practices, I expect you’ll be aware of the way mindfulness meditation has been co-opted for use by mental health services?

I’m not a Buddhist but I am angry at the way these trick-cyclists, their own remedies proving threadbare and even dangerous, have lifted this genuinely wonderful ancient practice from its context, stripped it of all its spiritual meaning and are now flogging this vanilla hodge-podge to their patients in an effort to help them to cope with the West’s insanity and the madness of their doctors.

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