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Teacher and Student in Leipzig

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The Zen Center Regensburg community was very fortunate to have not one but two visits from Zen Master Jeong Bom Sunim, of Songgwang Sah Temple. I had sat something like five or six 90-day retreats together with him. We connected very, very deeply. He came to Regensburg and made a very deep impression on our community.

Here he is, walking with one of our founding members, Y., during a day trip to the War Memorial in Leipzig. I took this picture as they discussed issues in her practice. This picture, this moment touches me every single time I see it.

A Great Book for Those Who Study “Mind”

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I cannot recommend this book enough. I first heard about it in a talk by Andrew Huberman some months ago. It has been enormously helpful for understanding the movement of the human mind, from a scientific point of view. This is something that all meditation teachers should definitely read. It is already of enormous benefit to the several people to whom I have introduced it — they have all come back with great “Oh, WOW!”‘s about insights it has given into their own self-understanding.

An excerpt:

Gratitude Before Everything

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Thanks to meditation, I have nearly always lived, and therefore always taught, that if you can really say “thank you” to everything, and everyone, then you can really feel your freedom. In the feeling of gratitude is the antidote to the constantly-wanting mind; the absence of “craving” and evaluating the “good” or “bad” of what you are getting or not getting from an experience or an effort or a person, that space without craving is actually the space of new possibilities. The mind that checks and evaluates nearly always finds some deficiency. Right there, the trap snaps shut on our mind, even if only just a corner of it.

Regensburg These Days

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Interplanetary Samsara

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With all of this chatter in the news about Mars exploration and Elon Musk’s push to “seed” the Red Planet with human life because, well, he has (rightly) determined that we will eventually “delete” ourselves on this planet, several people have asked recently my views on the subject.

For whatever it’s worth, my views, in meme-form:

Developing better “outer-technology” is not the solution for the matter of human suffering; accessing the already-available “inner-technologies” is.

A fascinating article on the subject was recently published in Slate. (I found it thanks only to the ever-thoughtful intellectual-seeding of social media by the writer and theologian, Addison Hodges Hart.)

If the dream of space travel involves new horizons and feelings of unbound freedom—to explore, to discover, to spread humanity—a nightmare lurks just around the corner of consciousness. There will be no real “arrival” on this fantasy trip: It’s enclosures and pressurized chambers all the way down. When it comes to human space travel, the destination really is the journey. And the journey will be long, and claustrophobic. As far as “quarantine” goes, spacefaring may feel familiar to those who lived through the COVID pandemic—and certain survival tactics may crossover.

Musk wants to send humans to Mars (and beyond) because he believes that the species is doomed on Earth, sooner or later. This bleak assessment belies two haunting presuppositions: The miserable masses will wither on a climate-scorched and ecologically damaged planet back home; meanwhile, the spacefaring select will find themselves in a whole new purgatory of cramped isolation, en route and wherever they “land.”

The wish image of habitations on other planets is for simulated environments that feel as good as—if not better than—our home planet. The reality is bound to be precarious and highly contingent—no matter how awesome and intact space settlements might appear in artistic renderings. The motivation for spacefaring is, at least for Musk, premised on a desire to escape a planet in limbo; but the alternative is hardly a safe haven. This is the paradox of spacefaring: It’s a lose-lose proposition.

https://slate.com/technology/2021/05/spacex-starship-space-travel-paradox.html?fbclid=IwAR1GQBdiPvUWBB5M-1B0kY6nCW4TGY0LI0USunPFe25Z2SF3YkGjFI_ZanY

Enough said.