Mirror of Zen Blog

Wednesday Evening, Mun Su Am

Hanging out in the kitchen, in between projects. Just waiting for a call with someone to finish some editing on one of our upcoming videos. Have been handling taxes and billing and medical and planning all day.

It’s not fully clear yet what I’m getting myself into with all of this upcoming online presence, through the “online course” and app and all. It started quite lightly from a wish to leave something systematic and clear behind, on how to sit Zen properly according to my own style and experience. Having produced some teaching videos during the original lockdowns, replying to a question from here or a problem from there, I noticed there wasn’t some consistent presentation of the technology – – it was mostly stuff that might be useful for people who had already begun a practice. This bothered me, the randomness of subject-matter and overall presentation.

I want, in some way, to leave my juice behind in one super-clear presentation, maybe so I never have to go here and there so wastefully and climate-destroyingly to teach it to the umpteenth beginner. And yet now, due to demand for some marketing impact, all of this Internet false-presence is going to result. The intro video our Team has created is just astounding, and rule-bending. It may certainly disappoint people who expect some “idea” about teaching Zen.

But this “online course” is not the whole story. Some as-yet half-created meditation proto app is also slouching towards Regensburg to be born from these restless teaching hands, teaching-typing right now on my phone. There are these Instagram seedlings, which are meditated on quite a bit before posting, and how it might relate to the teaching that has come before, separated by a breath of black space. And live-streaming on the YouTube channel, it’s often a stressful adaptation, due to the novel softwares involved, in which none of us are trained. The livestream is always “live” save during both monks’ illness or handicap. Having all that already is enough. But what will this “Online Course” create out there for me, that burdens this quiet community, this family of pure practice?

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