#31 New Mexico

A DRUMBEAT TO HEAVEN:  

Tonight was really unique.  I did the livestream from the Upaya Zen Center of Santa Fe, founded by Joan Halifax.  Here was a live dialogue between Roshi Joan and Zenju Earthlyn Manuel Osho, primarily about Zenju's forthcoming book, The Shamanic Bones of Zen: Revealing the Ancestral Spirit and Mystical Heart of a Sacred Tradition. 

We began with 15 minutes of just sitting, then Joan introduced Zenju and asked her some questions about herself and her book.  Zenju was awesome, as was Joan; exploring the ritual within Zen, Buddhism in general, and in other traditions.   Zenju noted that without ritual, an engagement of the body, movement and sound, "I could feel that i could feel that even Buddhism itself was some just almost a blanket you know even though it came from Buddha but how it got transmitted it was a blanket with a lot of things underneath, and I like to dig below so the book is an exploration of this idea."  

And what is underneath?  Well, hell, or the dismemberment of the body, as Joan said Mircea Eliade's 'Psychomental Crisis.'  How to manage that?  First, to go deep, very deep, into this very body and mind. As Zenju put it: 'To be in the disruption as initiation rather than suffering.'   

As Joan puts it: "What's going on in our own experience you know internally is a kind of dismemberment of the ego the taking apart of um the sense of a small i and uh it's very for me an extremely intense experience more intense than you know the mountains i've climbed or the drugs i've consumed to actually to sit still in the midst of this experience of having the ego the small self deconstructed and to stay the course which i think is one of the really powerful things about the actual context of experience that you know and i often say this uh at the beginning of rohatso at a certain point the ego is just going to say get me out of here this is what am i doing and it's exactly at that point where awakening happens as you sit through that resistance and you meet um who you really are."

And from Zenju:  

I looked out at the tree this big

huge oak tree that was at my house 

I had

these big

windows where all the sun came in

and i realized that

the earth only existed because my eyes

were open

Watch the program here.