11/25/2023 0 Comments Best zen koansIt’s based on Jun Po Kelly Roshi’s breakthrough insights into how to distill and dramatically accelerate the koan practice of Zen-and thus dramatically accelerate the Awakening process in consciousness. “This is one of the most important works on spiritual realization to be written in years. About The Heart of Zen by Jun Po Roshi and Keith Martin-Smith He is sitting in the heart of the integral impulse, reconciling the ceaseless throb of evolution with the empty clarity behind this and every moment-the gentle but explosive sound of an unstoppable force meeting an unmovable subject. Pushing the essence of the Rinzai Zen tradition through the Integral framework, Jun Po is reinterpreting and reformatting ancient wisdom for today’s world while retaining the fierce intensity and urgency of his Samurai precursors. He asks you to meditate on both the question and the answer simultaneously, until both finally dissolve into the cloud of unknowing, the seamless absurdity of nondual recognition, and all that remains is the gentle weight of the sunlight pressing through your skin. So Jun Po’s approach is to give you the homework, the cheat sheet, and the teacher’s manual all at once. Repeating the signifiers does nothing to prove any genuine understanding of the signified: you can memorize a thousand names for God and never actually experience for yourself the infinitely vast, silent, and imperturbable presence behind all things. Ultimately, the words we use to answer the koans are far less important than being able to demonstrate the direct interior understanding these words represent. How could he do this? Doesn’t this undercut the true power of the practice? Aren’t we supposed to not actually know the answer until the insight arrives? And isn’t pointing to this radical not knowing sort of the point of the koan practice in the first place?īut these are new koans for a new era-an information-driven era in which the “answers” to the classic koans are just a Google search away. Secondly, and even more boldly, Jun Po actually tells you the answers to these koans up front. Whereas traditional koans are often too rooted in agrarian Japanese culture to be useful to today’s Western practitioners, the koans found in Mondo Zen are crafted with a renewed emphasis on simplicity, accessibility, and cultural compatibility. It has been an important part of the Zen tradition for nearly a thousand years, and remains a central pillar in Jun Po Kelly Roshi’s Mondo Zen training, though he has made some significant updates to the practice in order to make it more suitable for the modern and postmodern world.įor one, Jun Po has formulated an entirely new set of koans. Koan practice is a powerful methodology for transmitting transcendent states of consciousness, as well as for gauging an individual’s familiarity with these states. The student brings that answer back to the teacher, who then either rejects or confirms the response depending on whether it comes from a clever intellect or from a truly embodied understanding of nondual wisdom. Traditionally the teacher offers the student one koan at a time, and the student then meditates on the koan for weeks, months, or even years until a suitable answer finally arrives. In the Zen tradition, koans are questions or statements offered by teachers to students to guide meditation practice-contemplative riddles that often employ paradox and contradiction to seize up the gearworks of the rational mind, opening the student to trans-rational illumination and invoking a deeper experience of the nonduality of subject and object. Journal of Integral Theory and Practice.Free Intro Course - Build Your Integral Life.AQAL Topology: An Introduction to Integral Geography and Spatiality Brian Eddy.What Is a Man (And Why Does It Matter?) Keith Martin-Smith.The Art and Science of the Intentional Love Affair Dr. Building a Just World: How Our Laws Express Our Collective Values Mark Fischler, John Dupuy, Roger Walsh.Sex, Identity, Gender: Beyond Wokism and Trumpism Corey deVos, Keith Martin-Smith.Is Metamodernism Integral? Is Integral Metamodern? Brendan Graham Dempsey.The Essence of Awakening: Who Are We Really? Lama Surya Das, Roger Walsh, John Dupuy.
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