Brad Warner (born March 5, 1964) is an American Sōtō Zen monk, author, blogger, documentarian and punk rock bass guitarist.
I remember writing the post but not what I said specifically, so I'll either repeat myself or say something completely different and baffle everybody.
I think the understanding of oneness and interconnectivity of the whole Universe is something we have innately, something we're born with. We are however very skillful at ignoring and pretending we don't have or know it.
I'm not sure that Eastern culture does either, but I've never lived in India etc so I couldn't tell you. I can say we definitely don't. So people will sometimes come in contact with something strange and think, "Oh, it must be like this" and have a lot of fantasies about it, and somebody who sort of looks like our fantasy version of what enlightenment is can be very convincing in seeming like they've got something and then play that role.
Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were.
Faith keeps you going, but doubt keeps you from going off the deep end.
I think it's part of my personality, to find sex really interesting. Not just in the puerile way of, "Oh I want to go and have some sex". It's fascinating, there's an entire realm of human activity that's important and literally vital to our survival and yet we've vilified it. That's one of the reasons that religious station is so fascinating to me.
For a very long time science and philosophy were considered part of the same continuum and it was only within the last few hundred years they've been considered different areas of inquiry, and now we're starting to go back to the idea that maybe they aren't two separate realms of inquiry.
But people do the same thing with the Bible. They memorize all the fictional characters, the parameters and the rules of the game and think it's important, but I can't get excited about that myself.
Jesus was probably a guy who thought, "This thing that I've discovered can save the world and everybody is miserable without it. " So he was probably a very kind and giving person and thought he had to give it to people, even if it killed him. He had to make sure they got the message, and he paid the ultimate price as they say due to his insistence.
I was living in Japan at the time, Shoko Asahara was an important figure and you could say his name and people would immediately know who you were talking about but since being back in America I've realized most people don't know who he is, which I find odd because he was far worse than Charles Manson. He killed many more people than Manson and was actually trying to kill thousands but wasn't careful enough in his process.
The trick to not thinking is not adding energy to the equation in an effort to forcibly stop thinking from happening. It’s more a matter of subtracting energy from the equation in order not to barf the thoughts up and start chewing them over again.
People will come and give you sandwiches every six hours but you're really of no use. A lot of people get excited about guys like that but I can't get too excited about it because I think he's sorta useless. He's just sitting there in India under a blanket looking beautiful, so what.
The state of ambiguity - that messy, greasy, mixed-up, confused, and awful situation you're living through right now - is enlightenment itself.
Buddhism is all about finding your own way, not imitating the ways of others or even the ways of Buddha himself.
So I'm skeptical and cynical about the whole thing and it's only if something seems to be genuine that I would pursue it. That's why I've stuck with Zen for so long and not gone on to some other path with it.
There's also an aspect which I tried to express yesterday by saying the same "something" that looks out through Curlys eyes is also the same exact thing which looks out of Moe's eyes, and that's harder for people to grasp. So the thing is, you have to find a way to ultimately embrace both sides or else you can't function. If you only embrace the side of pure oneness then you end up sort of spacing out and sitting under a blanket.
When I first started watching Godzilla, I was a kid and a big dinosaur freak and was like, "Oh my gosh, there's a big dinosaur. " So I immediately got into Godzilla. What I like about it are some of the things people often think are negative aspects.
Zen practice is about not getting high on anything and in so doing getting high on absolutely everything. We then find that everything we encounter - bliss or nonbliss - possesses a tremendous depth and beauty that we usually miss.
So it's a dangerous thing and conversely, the other thing I mentioned in that post was that people see guys who are kind of in touch with that and become famous for it and then think maybe they can get in on it. Maybe they're not quite as cynical as that and there's some sincerity about them, but they don't really get it so they just imitate what they've seen from people who've done it before and of course you can make big money that way.
we ourselves are not something apart from our circumstances. What we are and where we are are one and the same.