The Zen disciple sits for long hours silent and motionless. Presently he enters a state of impassivity, free from all ideas and all thoughts. He departs from the self and enters the realm of nothingness. This is not the nothingness or the emptiness of the West. It is rather the reverse, a universe of the spirit in which everything communicates freely with everything, transcending bounds, limitless. There are of course masters of Zen, and the disciple is brought toward enlightenment by exchanging questions and answers with his master, and he studies the scriptures. The disciple must, however, always be lord of his own thoughts, and must attain enlightenment through his own efforts. And the emphasis is less upon reason and argument than upon intuition, immediate feeling. Enlightenment comes not from teaching but through the eye awakened inwardly. Truth is in the discarding of words, it lies outside words.
Yasunari Kawabata, courtesy of Whiskey River.
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Reflejos: Excerpt from Awaken to Superconsciousness, by J. Donald Walters

Meditation is not so much a process of stilling the mind as of perceiving realities that exist beyond the mind. There is an inner world that can be perceived only when the attention has been turned away from material involvement and redirected toward the divine source within. “Listening” entails much more than listening with the ears. It means, among other things, the stillness of expectation, and complete mental absorption in whatever inspirations come. It means receiving as opposed to generating uplifting thoughts with the mind.

Thus, “listening” clarifies a misconception people frequently have who imagine that yoga teaches self-effort, but scorns the need for divine grace. Divine grace is forever impersonal. It is not, like the human will, dependent on personal choices or inclinations. It has no favorites. Like the sunlight, it shines impartially everywhere. What keeps sunlight from arriving equally everywhere is the presence of obstructions: clouds, buildings, the curtains covering a window. What keeps grace from reaching us is obstructions in our consciousness.

We may not be able to do much about obstructions to grace that are put there by Nature or by other people — illness, for example, or negative thought forms — but we can draw back the curtains that cover the windows of our minds. These obstructions are our mental restlessness and worldly desires.

This, then, is the benefit of practice: It draws back our mental curtains; it helps us to listen more intently to the divine call within. It is like turning the chalice of thought and feeling right-side up, that the wine of grace may fill it. If, instead, the chalice is turned upside down, grace, which (unlike the sunlight) is superconscious, will simply be withheld. Why should it spill uselessly to the floor?

–J. Donald Walters

Thank you, veareflejos:

But no one captures the profound and paradoxical nature of silence better than silent Buddhist retreat leader Gene Lushtak. Prochnik recounts a story Lushtak told him about Ajahn Chah, the most prominent leader of 20th-century Buddhism: “A young monk came to live in the monastery where Ajahn Chah was practicing. The people who lived in the town outside the monastery were holding a series of festivals in which they sang and danced all night long. When the monks would rise at three thirty in the morning to begin their meditation, the parties from the night before would still be going strong. At last, one morning the young monk cried out to Ajahn Chah, ‘Venerable One, the noise is interrupting my practice — I can’t meditate with all this noise!; ‘The noise isn’t bothering you, ‘ Ajahn responded. ‘You are bothering the noise.’ As Lushtak put it to me, ‘Silence is not a function of what we think of as silence. It’s when my reaction is quiet. What’s silent is my protest against the way things are.’” Courtesy of Brain Pickings. For more on this story, please see the extraordinary tumblr: sharanam.

But no one captures the profound and paradoxical nature of silence better than silent Buddhist retreat leader Gene Lushtak. Prochnik recounts a story Lushtak told him about Ajahn Chah, the most prominent leader of 20th-century Buddhism:

“A young monk came to live in the monastery where Ajahn Chah was practicing. The people who lived in the town outside the monastery were holding a series of festivals in which they sang and danced all night long. When the monks would rise at three thirty in the morning to begin their meditation, the parties from the night before would still be going strong. At last, one morning the young monk cried out to Ajahn Chah, ‘Venerable One, the noise is interrupting my practice — I can’t meditate with all this noise!; ‘The noise isn’t bothering you, ‘ Ajahn responded. ‘You are bothering the noise.’ As Lushtak put it to me, ‘Silence is not a function of what we think of as silence. It’s when my reaction is quiet. What’s silent is my protest against the way things are.’”

Courtesy of Brain Pickings.

For more on this story, please see the extraordinary tumblr: sharanam.

Meditation does not involve discontinuing one’s relationship with oneself and looking for a better person or searching for possibilities of reforming oneself and becoming a better person. The practice of meditation is a way of continuing one’s confusion, chaos, aggression, and passion—but working with it, seeing it from the enlightened point of view. That is the basic purpose of meditation practice as far as this approach is concerned.
Chögyam Trungpa from Laura Dunn’s post Satsang: Learning to See.

Leonard Cohen on Meditation

“You run through your top ten erotic fantasies, ambition fantasies, revenge fantasies, global ratification fantasies. You run through them all until you bore yourself to death, basically, and the faculty that produces opinions and snap judgments and unrealistic scenarios for your own prominence, after you run through them for a number of years, they cease to have charge. They bore themselves into non-existence. You see them as diversions from another kind of intimacy that you become more interested in–and that is what Socrates said: Know Thyself.”

—from Sarah Hampson’s interview with Leonard Cohen in Shambhala Sun.

As you walk, cultivate a sense of ease. There’s no hurry to get anywhere, no destination to reach. You’re just walking. This is a good instruction: just walk. As you walk, as you let go of the desire to get somewhere, you begin to sense the joy in simply walking, in being in the present moment. You begin to comprehend the preciousness of each step. It’s an extraordinarily precious experience to walk on this earth.
Peter Doobinin, “Awakening, Step by Step“  (Thank you, tinytruths)
When one first begins to work with conscious attention one discovers that the subsystems of body, feelings, and mind function inefficiently and disharmoniously. Yet the simple awareness of misalignment may introduce an element capable of binding the disparate parts into an integrated whole. With sustained awareness comes a heightened sensitivity, openness, a quiet mind. Man’s structure becomes receptive to the advent of fresh, vivifying energies descending from a mysterious source. This creates a field, where higher energies can transform the lower.
William Segal on Meditation. With many thanks to reclusland. 
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Dropping the Head & Settling in the Heart

Inspired by this post from earlier today, I wrote an inquiry into this practice over at Intense City:

Usually my center of gravity is in my head, and often I am not even aware that I have a body below it. How does one move from a fragmented and self-centered point of view to a more encompassing and organic intelligence that is responsive to the subtle movements of feeling? In other words, how do you get your center of gravity down lower in the body?…

You will only grab hold of concepts if you follow the storyline. —Sayadaw U Tejaniya (Photo by Hor Tuck Loon, whose writing can be found at beyond the world.) And if you don’t already, please go follow dhammaeverywhere! Thank you, sharanam.

You will only grab hold of concepts if you follow the storyline.

—Sayadaw U Tejaniya

(Photo by Hor Tuck Loon, whose writing can be found at beyond the world.)

And if you don’t already, please go follow dhammaeverywhere!

Thank you, sharanam.

when I speak of “I,” I really mean “You.

This book is handwritten because, in its way, it is a love letter, and love letters should not be type—set by compositors or computers. It may be a little slower to read, but there is no hurry, for what I want to share with you took a long time to experience.

I write in the first-person singular, but when I speak of “I,” I really mean “You.”

“Deeply thinking about it,
I and other people,
There is no difference
As there is no mind
Beyond the Mind.”

—Ikkyu (fifteenth century)

—From the Foreward to Frederick Franck’s “The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation.”