Comment by Michael Grove on January 31, 2012 at 15:24

Meditation Is Training for Life

Meditation is training for life. If we want to be free, it is important to learn how to directly experience the unbroken chaos and impersonal confusion of our own minds without being disturbed by any of it. Only if we can bear it will we be able to take responsibility for it. If we cannot calmly endure our own minds, others will inevitably suffer the consequences. If we cannot handle our own thoughts and emotions while we are simply being still and paying attention, then how are we ever going to be able to make the appropriate choices when we are walking, talking, and engaging with others? Meditation is training for life.

                                                                                                                             ~ Andrew Cohen

Comment by Michael Grove on January 31, 2012 at 15:25

The Paradox of Meditation

The meditation experience is interesting because on one hand it is about completely letting go of everything, and on the other hand, it is about paying more attention. It's a paradox.

  
Let go of everything and have the courage and faith and conviction to keep letting go, fearlessly, no matter what arises. But don't let go of consciousness, don't let go of attention, don't     let go of awareness. Meditation is the paradox between those two positions.

                                                                                                           

                                            —Andrew Cohen

Comment by Michael Grove on January 31, 2012 at 15:27

Meditation

Be still. Let yourself relax. You don't need to make any effort. Just allow yourself to be deeply at ease. Then take the risk to release your attention to expand and flow free, detaching from any form of conceptual engagement with the mind. Allow your attention to become vast, wide, open, and clear. In that wide-open space, all kinds of things may come and go—thoughts, emotions, physical sensations—but don't focus your attention on any of them. Let your awareness expand in all directions, until it becomes so vast that you're paying attention to everything at the same time while not focusing on anything in particular. Keep letting your attention expand until awareness itself becomes the object of your attention. Keep letting your attention expand to infinity, until all the structures of the created universe begin to crumble and you start seeing through everything. Finally, when everything falls away, you will awaken, in your own experience, to the unborn, unmanifest Ground of Being, the empty void out of which the whole manifest world sprang into existence. In this place, nothing has ever happened. The universe has not yet emerged; you have not been born; even time itself has not yet begun. When you find this limitless no-place, then your deepest sense of yourself and of life itself will change from one of imprisonment and limitation to one of unqualified freedom.

~ Andrew Cohen

Comment by Michael Grove on January 26, 2013 at 16:31

Taijiquan is the exercise -  

Taiji is the goal ...

The philosophy of Taijiquan is among the oldest in the world. The symbols of Yin and Yang, and what the Chinese call Taiji, have influenced Chinese thinking within living memory. Notations about the relationship between Yin and its counterpart Yang have existed ever since we are able to retrace the sources.

All the classical books of China such as the Yijing (I-Ching), the Doadejing (Tao Te Ching), the books of Dshuang Dsi or Confucius - everywhere the theory of Yin and Yang is found. This philosophy is thousands of years old.

 

                                                      Master Jan Silberstorff

Add a Comment