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b42e38e
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Coming at us like this--in waves, massed and unbreachable--knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment--becomes bad knowledge--so we deny it, riding its crest until it subsides from consciousness... "Ignorance." In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence... If we can't act on knowledge, then we ca..
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Ruth Ozeki |
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154edec
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INSTRUCTIONS FOR ZAZEN First of all, you have to sit down, which you're probably already doing. The traditional way is to sit on a zafu cushion on the floor with your legs crossed, but you can sit on a chair if you want to. The important thing is just to have good posture and not to slouch or lean on anything. Now you can put your hands in your lap and kind of stack them up, so that the back of your left hand is on the palm of your right ha..
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Ruth Ozeki |
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e4f81d3
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I'm pretty healthy and I don't mind the idea of dying, but I also don't want to get mowed down by some freaky high school kid in a trench coat who's high on Zoloft and has traded in his Xbox for a semiautomatic.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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aee2b5e
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Have you ever bullied a wave?
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Ruth Ozeki |
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fb5b8cb
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You never know who it's going to be, or what they'll bring, but whatever it is, it's always exactly what is needed.
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interesting
reflection
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Ruth Ozeki |
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838c0ce
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Jiko looked out accross the ocean to where the water met the sky. "A wave is born from the deep conditions of the ocean," she said. "A person is born form the deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and roll along like a wave. Until it's time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave."
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Ruth Ozeki |
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32be7d7
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No hits is the mark of how deeply unfamous you are, because true freedom comes from being unknown.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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46ff99f
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and my coffee is Blue Mountain and I drink it black, which is unusual for a teenage girl, but it's definitely the way good coffee should be drunk if you have any respect for the bitter beans.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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f18808c
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Few boys have been as fortunate as I, raised into manhood with only the gentlest of words and blandishments in my ears and the kindest of caresses upon my person, by a mother who sheltered us from everything that is harsh and ugly in this world. I was spoiled, utterly unprepared for cruelty, and perhaps this sounds like I'm complaining, but I'm not! You mustn't think I blame you. I'm afraid I must sound like the most ungrateful son in the w..
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Ruth Ozeki |
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5a06f34
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When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder.
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present
time
music
now
time-passing
present-moment
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Ruth Ozeki |
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9c3bd4e
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Ignorance." In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence."
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Ruth Ozeki |
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0672b33
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But shame is not a pleasant feeling, and some Japanese politicians are always trying to change our children's history textbooks so that these genocides and tortures are not taught to the next generation. By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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89742ae
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Nowadays, in modern technological culture, sometimes we hear people complain that nothing feels real anymore. Everything in the modern world is plastic or digital or virtual. But I say, that was always life! That is life itself! Plato discussed that things in this life are only shadows of forms. So this is what I mean by the changing and unreal feeling of life.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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985f42a
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To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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c3a1f57
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In Japan if you say "the war," people know you mean World War II, because that was the last one that Japan fought in. In America it's different. America is constantly fighting wars all over the place, so you have to be more specific."
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Ruth Ozeki |
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53cbb9f
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At one point in my life, I learned how to think. I used to know how to feel. In war, these are lessons best forgotten.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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bb766e6
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Truth is like the moon in the sky. Words are like a finger. A finger can point to the moon's location, but it is not the moon. To see the moon, you must look past the finger. To look for the truth in books, the Sixth Patriarch was saying, is like mistaking the finger for the moon. The moon and the finger are not the same thing. "Not same," old Jiko would have said. "Not different, either."
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books
ruth-ozeki
truths
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Ruth Ozeki |
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b0fb9a2
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Even the snap of a finger, he says, provides us with sixty-five opportunities to wake up and to choose actions that will produce beneficial karma and turn our lives around.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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31ed57f
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Do you have a cat and is she sitting on your lap? Does her forehead smell like cedar trees and fresh sweet air?
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Ruth Ozeki |
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b2df37e
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Everybody has fishes in their stomach so does Jiko. But the biggest fish of all belonged to Haruki#1 and it was more like a whale. After she has become a nun, she learned how to open up her heart so that the whale could swim away.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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708f17c
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Now that I think of it, maybe she loves him because all his problems give her so much to pray about, and when you're as old as she is , and your body is like enough already, you need some pretty powerful reasons to stay alive.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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e774bc2
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Time itself is being, he wrote, and all being is time . . . In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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757d18f
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Sometimes you don't need words to say what's in your heart.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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3c82cbc
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Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand "flying" as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being."
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Ruth Ozeki |
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a0d3887
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He hated the idea of killing people he could not hate.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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47447c0
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Spinoza writes, "A free man, that is to say, a man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone, is not led by fear of death, but directly desires the good, that is to say, desires to act, and to preserve his being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own profit. He thinks, therefore, of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life."
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Ruth Ozeki |
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c8b4928
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So then you ask her when her birthday is, and she says, "Hmm, I don't really remember being born"
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Ruth Ozeki |
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0cad471
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Over and over, I ran at the sea, beating it until I was so tired I could barely stand. And then the next time I fell down, I just lay there and let the waves wash over me, and I wondered what would happen if I stopped trying to get back up. Just let my body go. Would I be washed out to sea? The sharks would eat my limbs and organs. Little fish would feed on my fingertips. My beautiful white bones would fall to the bottom of the ocean, where..
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Ruth Ozeki |
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82802b5
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How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal father?
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trust
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Ruth Ozeki |
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d4e5b32
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Think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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db867d9
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We were soldiers, but even before we were showed how to kill our enemies, they taught us how to kill ourselves.
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war
soldier
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Ruth Ozeki |
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0088884
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If his medium had been words instead of war, he would have been a poet.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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f39e9d1
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and I could imagine myself searching for lost time under the tree ...
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Ruth Ozeki |
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efda37f
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One of her vows was to save all beings, which basically means that she agreed not to become enlightened until all the other beings in this world get enlightened first.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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5f1fd40
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Premonitions are coincidences waiting to happen.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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5170178
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I don't believe I exist, and soon I won't. I am a time being about to expire.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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a82e094
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Information about toxicity in food is widely available, but people don't want to hear it. Once in a while a story is spectacular enough to break through and attract media attention, but the swell quickly subsides into the general glut of bad news over which we, as citizens, have so little control. Coming at us like this -- in waves, massed and unbreachable--knowledge becomes symbolic of our disempowerment--becomes bad knowledge--so we deny..
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Ruth Ozeki |
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a4e9e09
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A free man, that is to say, a man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone, is not led by fear of death, but directly desires the good, that is to say, desires to act, and to preserve his being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own profit. He thinks, therefore, of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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6ae4471
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In the time it takes to say 'now,' now is already over. It's already 'then.' 'Then' is the opposite of 'now.' So saying 'now' obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn't.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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334c69c
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You got a choice, dude. We've all got choices. Lots of them. Every single second of the day we're making choices. You've just been making bad ones, is all.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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c8e72e2
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When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder. Jiko says that this is an example of the time being. Sound and no-sound. Thunder and silence.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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512cd19
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She can hear the crazy thoughts that are going through your mind before you can even find them.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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e6a62c6
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At the time I was feeling hopeful, which now seems kind of sad and brave.
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Ruth Ozeki |
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85a8f1d
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What is the half-life of information? Does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it? Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood. Letters carved in stone are more durable, although not so easily distributed, but inertia can be a good thing.
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Ruth Ozeki |