The Same Old Zen

I've always had a healthy respect for the power of words.  It started when I was a child, growing up with books as my only friends.  I loved sitting in my room for hours and letting the written word take me to places all over the universe. When I was younger, it was Ernest Hemingway's Old Man and The Sea  that taught me about manhood, and Jack London's Call of The Wild  that made me love the natural world. As I got older, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book  taught me about loyalty, and Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time  showed me the power of faith. I like to think of these books as my first Dharma teachers. In college, my love of words turned into a love of debate.  I joined my school's Parliamentary Debate team, and it was terrific fun!  If your opponent said something you disagreed with, you could loudly yell, "For shame!" and if you wanted to support your debate partner in their arguments, you could shout "Here, here

Tomorrow morning, I‘ll be inducted as a Buddhist Lay Minister in the Bright Dawn Center of Oneness Buddhism .   Given the weight of what’s about to happen it seems appropriate to reflect on how I got to this point. Perhaps these reflections will give me some guidance in how best to move forward in the upcoming chapter of my life.  I began my formal Buddhist training in 2014 as a member of the Kwan Um School of Zen. I practiced at the Indianapolis Zen Center with JDPSN Linc Rhodes. Linc studied directly with Zen Master Seugn Sahn, the founder of the Kwan Um School of Zen, and he assisted in the creation of numerous Zen centers all over the world before settling down in Indianapolis.  One of the requirements to take the precepts in the Kwan Um School of Zen is that one must sit a minimum of 4 one-day meditation retreats in the span of a single year along with being active in the center. Once that’s completed, you can petition to take part in the ceremony. I remember

I mostly started wearing glasses in the 8th grade.  I say "mostly" because I was very clumsy and forgetful in 8th grade, so I quickly fell into a routine of breaking/ losing them.   When I was older and out of the house, however, I got better about keeping track of my glasses; probably because I was the one paying for them.   That being said, my eyes are strange.  One is near-sighted and the other is far-sighted, which results in headaches and blurred vision if I try to stare at a computer screen or read a book for extended periods of time.  Coincidentally, both my job and my writing require me to spend long hours reading books and staring at computer screens. My glasses are a very important part of my life. As a result, I made them the focus of my gratitude meditation today, and pondered all of the people who made them possible.  Where would I be if not for the kind optometrist who figured out my prescription or the helpful receptionist who called me whe

The second noble truth tells us that suffering is caused by desire.  Some Buddhist authors like to soften that by changing desire to craving or clinging .  The implication being that some desire is okay as long as we don't take it too far. And while it's true that craving and clinging certainly accentuate our suffering, we can't ignore the fact that the root cause of our existential pain is desire. That is to say, that we suffer because we want things we don't have.  And we suffer because we want to keep things that inevitably go away.   One might argue that desire is a natural part of life, and it is.  But that's why the first noble truth states that suffering is also a natural part of life.  The two go together like peanut butter and jelly. The more I practice Buddhism, the more I'm fascinated with desire.   Early in life, I worked really hard to fulfill my desires.  I was convinced that if  just had a bit more money, a better education