spiritual

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F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way by John C. Parkin

To say F**k It feels good. To stop struggling and finally do what you wish . . . to ignore what everyone is telling you and just go your own way . . . feels really great.

In this inspiring and humorous book, John C. Parkin suggests that saying F**k It is the perfect Western expression of the Eastern spiritual concept of letting go, giving up, and finding real freedom by realizing that things don’t matter so much (if at all). It’s a spiritual way that doesn’t require chanting, meditating, or wearing sandals. And it’s the very power of this modern-day profanity that makes it perfect for shaking us Westerners out of the stress and anxiety that dominate our daily lives.

So, find out how to say F**k It to all your problems and concerns. Say F**k It to all the “shoulds” in your life, and finally do what you want
no matter what other people think!

At Amazon: F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way by John C. Parkin
More here http://www.thefuckitway.com/

Buddha Wild Monk in a Hut.

27 Dec, '09 in World

Buddha Wild Monk in a Hut by Anna Wilding

Buddhist monks aren’t usually described as wild(at least not in our urban dictionary), but director Anna Wilding’s intriguing feature documentary debut stirs up the meditation room a bit. Buddha Wild explores what really goes on behind the monastery doors, touching on hot-button issues like the roles of women, racism, and celibacy in a monk’s daily life. Buddha Wild is a refreshing synthesis of Eastern and Western politics and culture, without a nibble of Hollywood cheese.

“The religion of the future should transcend a personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both natural and spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description… If ever there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.” – Einstein.

Buddha Wild provides viewers with a well-judged glimpse into the monastery world of the Buddhist Monk and the real world of those who follow the precepts and principals of Buddhism. The documentary centers on the life of the Buddhist monks. They are a kind lot of warm hearted and enlightened men. Buddha Wild is a journey of discovery.

The monks were clearly enamored by Ms. Wilding and their generosity of information from taboo subjects exhibits this fact. A well judged mix of seriousness and humor. “Anna Wilding was compelled to make this upbeat film to counteract racism she witnessed in a region”. (Excerpt from cultureunplugged.com)

View this movie at cultureunplugged.com

The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world?

8 Nov, '09 in Life, World

The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world? A new debate, presented from London by Zeinab Badawi
(Aired November 7, 2009 on BBC World)

It stands up for the oppressed and offers spiritual succour to billions say the Church’s supporters. But what about the Church’s teachings on condoms, gay sex and women priests, ask the detractors. Speaking for the motion, Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Anne Widdecombe MP. Speaking against the motion, Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry.

(play all 5 videos )

Now reading: Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped…….

3 Mar, '09 in Books, Zen

Now reading: Brad Warner “Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate: A Trip
Through Death, Sex, Divorce, and Spiritual Celebrity in Search of the
True Dharma”.

Zen teacher and punk bassist Brad Warner had a tough year: He lost his dream job, his mother died, his grandmother died, and his marriage fell apart. In “Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate”, Brad follows the form of his first two books, mixing his real-life adventures with Buddhist philosophy and pop culture examples. He applies the Buddha’s teachings to his own real-life suffering, deconstructing the popular image of the Buddhist Master.
How does a “real” Zen Master deal with death, divorce, job loss, and personal discord? How does he perform the work of trying to help others get over their tough times while going through some pretty heavy pain of his own? How do you sit and meditate while your world crumbles all around you? Warner also explores whether real Buddhism exists in the West, travelling around North America in search of authentic Buddhist practice. ‘While I’ve found shining examples of the Buddha’s way in prisons and at heavy metal shows‘, he writes, ‘I’ve also seen sad perversions of Buddhism in temples and among those supposedly propagating the Way in America. Authentic Buddhism doesn’t always come packaged the way we imagine it should’. This isn’t another esoteric book about the ancient, venerable, and exotic philosophy of Buddhism. It’s a book about what it means to live your life as a real human being. According to Warner, although Zen does not offer the kind of pie-in-the-sky ‘ultimate solutions’ many religions and cults promise, it does provide a real and exceptionally practical way to deal with what life dishes out to all of us. In fact, he says, Zen practice and philosophy provides the only truly rational and realistic way to live a balanced and happy life.

The bassist for the punk band Zero Defects, Brad Warner is a Zen priest, filmmaker, and Japanese monster-movie marketer living in Los Angeles. The author of Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, & the Truth about Reality: Punk Rock Monster Movies & the Truth About Reality and Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, and Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye, he is also is also the director and producer of Cleveland’s Screaming, a documentary about the Ohio punk scene. He teaches Zen in Santa Monica and writes a monthly column for Suicidegirls.com.

Available at Amazon Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate: A Trip Through Death, Sex, Divorce, and Spiritual Celebrity in Search of the True Dharma. You can read an excerpt here.

Now Reading: Zen Mind, Beginners Mind

2 Sep, '08 in Books, Zen

- Shunryu Suzuki
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is a book of teachings by the late Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, a compilation of talks given to his satellite Zen center in Los Altos, California. Published in 1970 by Weatherhill, the book does not get caught up in academic idolatry. These are frank and direct transcriptions of Suzukis’ talks recorded by his student Marian Derby. Trudy Dixon and Richard Baker (Baker was Suzuki’s successor) edited the talks by choosing those most relevant, arranging them into chapters. This book has become a spiritual classic, helping readers to steer clear from the trappings of intellectualism.

@Wikipedia
@Amazon

God damn it,

12 May, '08 in Quotes

God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

Fightclub

Now reading:

5 Apr, '08 in Books

Verhalen – Jef Geeraerts
The Dharma of Star Wars – Matthew Bortolin:

“If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice.”

The Dharma of Star Wars brings together the phenomenon of Star Wars with humanity’s profound hunger for the spiritual. Parade magazine recently declared “Jedi Knight” to be the “Best New Religion” and the UK Times reported, “It is George Lucas, rather than St. Luke, who taught today’s twentysomethings much of what they first learnt about right and wrong.” (And perhaps more famously: in a UK census, some 390,000 British citizens declared “Jedi” to be their official religion. Similarly, a census report in in Australia tallied 70,000 as followers of the Star Wars “faith.”) For many, Star Wars was their first taste of religious thought without the dogma and restrictions of organized religion. It awoke in them a certain spirituality that Buddhism, with its emphasis on personal inquiry and self-realization, so fluidly speaks to. The Dharma of Star Wars uses Buddhism and George Lucas’ powerful mythos to illuminate each other in a way that speaks directly to the heart.

More @ google books
@ Amazon

Peeling potatoes

3 Mar, '08 in Zen

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

– Alan Watts

Now Reading: The Teachers of Gurdjieff

25 Sep, '07 in Books

- by Rafael Lefort.
Book Description
When The Teachers of Gurdjieff was first published some 25 years ago, it made a very considerable stir. George Gurdjieff was one of the most famous mystics before the war, a teaching master who had many fashionable and influential pupils. He had a striking appearance and manner of teaching, one that was to prove influential. The meaning of his teaching and the sources of it were a puzzle. How did he come by his knowledge? What was to become of it? These were questions that engaged many seekers.
Yet, with the rapidly changing focus of our era in all things, not least spiritual, this is in some real part a book of another time. From the time of Gurdjieff’s operations to the early ’70s, many in the West were discovering, for the first time, the older religious and spiritual traditions of the East. After his death, Gurdjieff’s followers were running groups in “the fourth way”; travelers set out to India, Tibet, Japan, Turkey and other parts east to find their Buddhists, Tibetan Buddhists, Sonoran Shamen, and the rest. Schools began, seekers sought and found, sought again, found again.

Today, everything is available and exposed on the table, and anybody can connect with any technique at any time. And the possibilities are endless, highly intellectual, highly emotional, highly sensual. How many different forms of yoga, zen philosophy are there, and is a lifetime enough to find a proper combination, or is the answer closer at home.

This book offers, among the adventures of the search and the souks of Baghdad and Aleppo, striking and timeless advice to those interested in finding spirituality. Its appeal is far beyond that of one seeker in one era, but offers us information, today, on how to evaluate different forms of teaching, how to study, and even some tantalizing information on the role of Jesus.

Excerpted:
You are scrabbling about in the sand, attracted by pieces of mica to knit together and make a window, not realising that the sand itself is capable of being transformed into the purest glass.–

From The Teachers of Gurdjieff
At Amazon: The Teachers of Gurdjief

Now Reading: Against the Stream:

6 Aug, '07 in Books

A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries – by Noah Levine

Foucault’s Pendulum and The Name of the Rose – by Umberto Eco.

Two traveling monks

4 Dec, '06 in Life, Zen

Two traveling monks reached a river where they met a young woman. Wary of the current, she asked if they could carry her across. One of the monks hesitated, but the other quickly picked her up onto his shoulders, transported her across the water, and put her down on the other bank. She thanked him and departed.

As the monks continued on their way, the one was brooding and preoccupied. Unable to hold his silence, he spoke out. “Brother, our spiritual training teaches us to avoid any contact with women, but you picked that one up on your shoulders and carried her!”

“Brother,” the second monk replied, “I set her down on the other side, while you are still carrying her.“

Quotes for today:

30 Nov, '06 in Life, Quotes

By imputing concepts of nastiness, dirt, shamefulnes, guilt, indecency, and
obscenity to the entire sexual process, it has poisoned the life force at it”s
source

(JW Parsons)

O read new meanings into old forms: “I must create a system, or be enslav’d by
another man’s. I will not reason & compare: my business is to create”

(W Blake)

The mysteries were organized for the purpose of assisting the
struggling creature to re awaken the spiritual powers which, surrounded by the
flaming ring of lust and degeneracy, lay asleep within the soul

(MP Hall)

Now Reading: Solipsist

24 Aug, '06 in Books

by Henry Rollins. Now this is a true hardcore Zen / Tao / Dharma whatever book. I recommend every seeker on the path to get this book and read it ! Then do a re interpretation of your boring fucked up life and get on clear terms with yourself and stop acting yourself but become you. Every single Paragraf is a kick in the guts, a smack on the face and a spiritual vision.
It is sit down , shut up and read time !

People spend to much time trying to make themselves happy. They never know what its like to feel the sheer, silent weight of existence. They’re too busy running from something that they havent even dealt with. How can they be the master of their own lives without this knowledge
(page 29)

Some info on the side:
Solipsism is first recorded with the Greek presocratic sophist Gorgias (c. 483–375 BC) who is quoted by the Roman sceptic Sextus Empiricus as having stated:

Nothing exists
Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it, and
Even if something could be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
Amazon: Henry Rollins: Solipsist

Dharma-Punk

10 Aug, '06 in Books, Life

Several weeks ago I digged into Dharma-Punk, the book from Noah Levine . And what sounds like and is a great idea for a book and also for an educated mindtrip appears an ego ridden book.
Mister Levine should load the script in a texteditor and do a word count for the word “I” or “My”. Or do a “cat /home/noah/documents/mybook | grep “I” | wc -l ” when he is using some kind of unix.

(Excerpt from an interview with Noah Levine) “Over the years I’ve come to see the intention or foundation of both punk rock and Buddhism as so similar, as being this energy of dissatisfaction. The Buddha was dissatisfied with the ordinary suffering of life and wanted to find freedom from that suffering. I think that the punk movement is founded on that same dissatisfaction—that all of this oppression and inequality and political corruption sucks!

So the first part of my life was focused on rebelling outwardly. As I’ve gotten involved in spiritual principles it feels very much like this inner rebellion—that outward dissatisfaction is a core dissatisfaction that’s in me—is turning that energy inward, to purifying the greed and hatred and delusion within myself, and doing what I can to alleviate it in the world and help others…”.

Buddhism is more then calling the yourself an “spiritual revolutionary,” Sure he has “wisdom” and “compassion” tattooed on his hands and images of Buddha and Krishna on his arms, but is that what counts ?

They sell the book at Amazon: Noah Levine – Dharma-Punk

Now reading: Zen: The Path of Paradox

6 Aug, '06 in Books

It took me 2 Days to read this nice Zen related book from Osho. In Zen: The Path of Paradox, Osho suggests Zen as a possible bridge between East and West, and between the scientific and the spiritual. “Without science,” Osho said, “the East has lost much; without meditation, the West has lost much. I am trying to bring together East and West, because together they will create the whole.” Osho encourages the reader to throw off the accumulated “knowing” of a lifetime–to let go of physical, mental, and emotional tensions, to relax into the flow of an extraordinary discourse and become receptive to the present moment and the potential within.