- April 23 rd, 2021. Consciousness and perception range from shallow to deep. As for profound perceptions, they are pure through the ages. They are the basis to influence and cultivate mind from the first generation of the aspiration for enlightenment until the achievement of buddhahood without falling back.
- 41,172 likes 58 talking about this. Health & Wellness Website.
- Contact shop owner. No reviews in the last year. Sort by: Recommended. Recommended Newest Anonymous on Dec 1, 2010 5 out of 5 stars. Thank you so much, this is the PERFECT gift for my dear friend. The best of luck to you with the new business!!! Balance Medium Roast Coffee Beans - 12 oz Bag.
“The modern world maintains its existence by deliberately fostered craving and fear. The “free world” has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of greed which cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire which cannot be satiated and hatred which has no outlet. They create populations of “preta” — hungry ghosts, with giant appetites and throats no bigger than needles. The soil, the forests and all animal life are being consumed by these cancerous collectivities; the air and water of the planet is being fouled by them.”
—Gary Snyder
Daily Zen Quote
Read writing from Charlie Ambler on Medium. Founder of @dailyzen and Strike Gently Co. Meditation, self-inquiry, and self-mastery. Every day, Charlie Ambler and thousands of other.
“Like vanishing dew,
a passing apparition
or the sudden flash
of lightning — already gone —
thus should one regard one’s self.”
― Ikkyu
Maraṇasati is a Buddhist practice encouraging meditation on death. It helps produce ‘right effort’, one of the Noble Eightfold Path’s facets, and brings us close to the heart of life. Life emerges from death and returns to it. Our human bodies emerge out of nature and dissolve back into it. Why are we so scared of this inevitable, immutable process?
Modern culture has thoroughly conditioned us to turn away from death. Modernity is the ideological heir to the Enlightenment, which reasserted the divine providence of rational, empirical man after the collapse of feudal piety. It’s why we’re obsessed with unquestioned scientific, economic and social progress— but at what cost? We have wealth, but infinite greed because we don’t know the value of things. We have time, but infinite boredom because we’re so easily distracted. Each generation of every modern people further sheds its vibrant and unique cultural identity, in favor of a bland globalized consumer culture. We should be grateful just to have a brief opportunity to experience the gifts of nature, family, honest work and simple pleasures, and yet we produce an endless output of greed, plasticity, waste and suffering.
The rational Western reaction to this is to phase out the suffering. Deny it or embrace it; the point is to eradicate it, right? That’s the same toxic framework that caused our problems. But what if we meditate on what we fear most? What if we remember our true nature? This is what Maranasati helps us do. In Theravada Buddhism (the tradition descended from Buddha’s direct teachings), there is part of a famous Sutta elaborating on this meditation on death. There are 9 contemplations:
A corpse that is “swollen, blue and festering.”
A corpse that is “being eaten by crows, hawks, vultures, dogs, jackals or by different kinds of worms.”
A corpse that is “reduced to a skeleton together with (some) flesh and blood held in by the tendons.”
Daily Zen App
A corpse that is “reduced to a blood-besmeared skeleton without flesh but held in by the tendons.”
Daily Zen Cards
A corpse that is “reduced to a skeleton held in by the tendons but without flesh and not besmeared with blood.”
A corpse that is “reduced to bones gone loose, scattered in all directions.”
A corpse that is “reduced to bones, white in color like a conch.”
A corpse that is “reduced to bones more than a year old, heaped together.”
A corpse that is “reduced to bones gone rotten and become dust.”
No folks, those aren’t death metal lyrics— those are guidelines from one of the oldest ancient guidelines to mindfulness meditation in existence. This except from the Satipatthana Sutta invites us to meditate on this conclusion: “This body of mine, too, is of the same nature as that body, is going to be like that body, and has not got past the condition of becoming like that body.”
You’re made of flesh. Flesh rots. You will die, and you will rot, like the billions and billions of others before you. There’s nothing separating you from the plants and the animals. You will transform back into the Earth, become one with it, return to your primordial roots. The painter Edvard Munch said, “From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity.” Sounds like the opposite of a squeaky-clean cubicle space, an Ikea house or a private suburban community. Most of our modern problems feel made-up and silly when we contemplate death in this mindful way.
We have a natural aversion to death, but that’s because we’re meant to be alive. In avoiding thinking about death, in forgetting about nature’s totality— the powerful all-encompassing womb from which we emerge— we squander life. We aren’t plopped into the world by a benevolent God; we emerge out of everything and back into everything. All of existence conspires to bring us in and out of life, the entire ecosystem supporting itself in perfect synchronicity. This is why people experience profound humility and gratitude after returning back to ‘regular life’ following war, disease, famine and near-death experiences.
Without the contemplation of death, we get too comfortable. We start doing things we don’t really respect or wish for ourselves. We get greedy. We get lustful. We start to thirst for the eternity of desire instead of appreciating the eternity of acceptance. This causes a great majority of the world’s problems.
Deer hunter 2005 torrent cracked. Aim for gratitude, not greed, less, not more, simplicity, not complexity, contentment, not mindless progress, acceptance, not growth. The progress and growth you do achieve come from the inner-strength you cultivate by embracing simplicity and self-control. Many modern spiritual traditions have sanitized and sterilized the ancient spiritual teachings the way modernity tends to turn everything we experience into grey mush. The original untainted teachings remain for us, though, if we search them out.
Luckily most of my work here is already done for me. In the Tibetan tradition, the teacher Atisha is said to have said to his students that if a person is unaware of death, their meditation will have little power. He wrote another series of 9 contemplations about death:
- Death is inevitable.
- Our life span is decreasing continuously.
- Death will come, whether or not we are prepared for it.
- Human life expectancy is uncertain.
- There are many causes of death.
- The human body is fragile and vulnerable.
- At the time of death, our material resources are not of use to us.
- Our loved ones cannot keep us from death.
- Our own body cannot help us at the time of our death.
Meditate on these today. Then maybe go listen to Slayer.
Zen Quotes Of The Day
Did you like this post? Support Charlie Ambler on Patreon:
Become a Patron!
How to be Intelligent
Dailyzen Quotes
Positive Daily Zen
“It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.” -Robert Anton Wilson
Recently I finished my undergraduate education. Back in high school, when I was nurturing a borderline-obsessive interest in stand-up comedy, I listened to an interview with Jerry Seinfeld. Speaking about his education, he said that college is where you “learn how to learn”. Now that I’ve gone through those motions, I agree. The most important part of learning is learning how to learn.
I figured this out after attending a liberal arts school in New York City and realizing that many of the smart people I spent my time with were susceptible to the same sort of thinking that they said they disliked. These self-proclaimed progressive and open-minded individuals expressed an often deep hatred towards those who disagreed with them, the same sort of hatred that made them disagree with those people in the first place.
This is a lifelong process, the narrowing of one’s reality to include only ideas that reinforce our beliefs and cater to our insecurities. It begins in childhood, with parents and television and continues as other influences creep in, like friends and even geographic location. Some people exit college with intelligence, but don’t know how to be intelligent. And without understanding how to be intelligent, wisdom and self-education after college get put on the back burner.
“What do you mean?” you ask. “How come you think, you’re some authority on who’s intelligent and who’s not?” Well, I’m not. I have plenty of my own intellectual flaws and shortcomings and I’m certainly not the type that finds himself at home in the world of academia. That said, I’ve tried to be mindful of my education and I’ve tried to keep a certain breadth to my learning. If we only expose ourselves to ideas that comfort us, we become closed-minded, no matter how compassionate or progressive we claim to be.
The way to build a healthy sense of intelligence is to expose yourself to things that make you uncomfortable. This is why people still read Hitler’s Mein Kampf or Mao’s Red Book. It’s why Marquis de Sade is still so popular alongside 50 Shades of Grey, and why Chaim Soutine’s paintings of animal carcasses or Francisco Goya’s paintings of executions still entrance museum-goers.
But being intelligent goes a step beyond what you read, look at, and consume. It relies on a compassion that transcends simple good-vs-evil dynamics. It relies on a compassion for what we find ourselves pitted against. If you make a list of all the qualities you deplore in people, and all the people and institutions you think are evil in the world, you’ll begin to get an idea of your personal bias. It’s not right or wrong, it’s just what you believe right now. Probe these things and try to pin down what it is that you dislike so much about them.
Whenever I do this, I find myself fascinated by the things I hold a position against. I think war and physical violence are appalling and primitive, but I enjoy learning more about the history of war and violence and how these human activities have impacted the world in a nuanced way. The biggest problem with disliking something is that you end up avoiding that thing, when you could be exposing yourself to it and building a fuller and more cohesive understanding of the world.
So, to be truly intelligent, expose yourself to a wide breadth of ideas. Read opposing columnists and newspapers. Study multiple religions at the same time, and experiment with their practices. Learn without discrimination, whether you’re a leftist or a rightist thinker. It can only open your mind and it can only make you a stronger thinker yourself.
The Daily Zen is written and maintained by a 20-something guy in NYC. Your support is much appreciated. Click here to donate.