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Well nice to see you again my wingman. I post at Mujaku@twitter
Greetings, Zennist! I appreciate your visit. I must say, I am a follower of yours on Twitter, and I must admit, your content is truly remarkable!
So wonderful to see him here and still active online! I owe a lot to the Zennist
I a lot to Tozen, who set me on the lifelong path.
Encountering genuine jnanis online was what caused me to abandon “pop spirituality” and see glimpses of the Real
I’m also very indebted and grateful to Vajragoni, one thing he wrote once about how most advaitins are not really getting it, but that Nisargadatta Maharaj is one of the few good ones. That was very important for me to read early on. His words pierced me.
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It is very interesting how someone can forget what was told yesterday, but when it comes to words that pierce to the “essence”, they are perfectly remembered even after more than a decade. Things Tozen told me still resonate and echo to this day and have rescued me from many wrong turns. Another thing I vividly remember is once I got pulled into the whole Self/No-Self debate in Buddhism and you sternly reproached me saying something like, no, – I paraphrase – this True Self business is right at the core of everything. Those words protected me from being bombarded by all sides by nihilists, which are by far the majority online. –
I would also recommend everyone watch that video set to Vangelis, it has such a perfect “vibe” to it, for lack of a better word. When it says, “You are the Magician and the Bewitched.” – That sentence really encapsulates the essence of the spiritual path, struggle, and the ultimate joy in discovering one’s true power.
It is also good to not only make the path one of dry reading. The trap of intellectualism is extremely enticing for minds like mine — exploring and jumping from one conceptual construct to the next incessantly, as if “one of these mental constructs will finally be the correct one!” — and the Zen sword here helped to cut all that down, there will be no “correct construct”! They are merely provisional helpful pointers and so on. But I find that it is helpful if some of these pointers aren’t just dry text but also, like you did, are in the form of melody and heart-to-heart “media” — this is, I believe, why Indians have such a vast “repertoir”, puja, bhajan, kirtan, etc— while those things can be seen as non-essential appendages, and they can be that for sure, even obstacles— they can also help one immerse more throughout the day in the beatific rather than mundane. It depends on circumstance, temperament, and so on.
In the end, the one doing the puja and the object of the puja, are non-dual, identical; one bows to one’s own Self, in the divine play. And I find now that all of the texts and the other spiritual media were never made to be heard by the body-mind, who immediately distorts and transforms everything for egoic purposes, but that it was all addressed at the Invisible Listener, the Anonymous Rankless One, who truly heard and registered all of that while the body-mind was busy frolicking and monkeying around.
I bow again in gratitude, without those who show us path from Avidya to Vidya, we would be abandoned in this cage — and whether the cage is one of iron, or gold, it is still a cage.
Many thanks for the insightful share. The video you refer to is entitled “You” and can be found in the Bodhi-Pearl playlist at our Bodhichild Channel on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGVBEEYkRME&t=7s