We are all trying to find a path back to the present moment. And good enough reason to just be happy here... Mindfulness meditation is just a trick for doing that. It's a trick for setting aside your to-do list, if only for a few moments, and actually locate a feeling of fulfilment in the present
For Kerouac, the embodiment of American Zen was Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buddhist poet and essayist, who he fictionalized as Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums. Snyder was a practicing Buddhist and a translator of classic Chinese texts before Kerouac met him. He was the Zen guru of the Beats at the same time that Alan Watts popularized Buddhism for middle-class Americans in best-selling books and magazine articles of the late 1950s. Snyder had studied with Watts for a while but thought him 'square.' 'He was cool in relation to the people around him,' Snyder once said, referring to 'middle class, needy' Americans, but he was 'never actually cool.' Then Snyder added with a wink, '[and] you know what I mean, as the Big Bopper says,' invoking the rock-and-roll classic 'Chantilly Lace' for those hip and in-the-know.
The Origins of Cool in Postwar America
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For Kerouac, the embodiment of American Zen was Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buddhist poet and essayist, who he fictionalized as Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums. Snyder was a practicing Buddhist and a translator of classic Chinese texts before Kerouac met him. He was the Zen guru of the Beats at the same time that Alan Watts popularized Buddhism for middle-class Americans in best-selling books and magazine articles of the late 1950s. Snyder had studied with Watts for a while but thought him 'square.' 'He was cool in relation to the people around him,' Snyder once said, referring to 'middle class, needy' Americans, but he was 'never actually cool.' Then Snyder added with a wink, '[and] you know what I mean, as the Big Bopper says,' invoking the rock-and-roll classic 'Chantilly Lace' for those hip and in-the-know.
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Consciousness is naturally shamanic.
We grow up to believe that we are supposed to somehow "become" who we are meant to be through the trial-by-fire that is life here on planet Earth.Reality is...there's no "becoming".It's actually all an "un-becoming", only to reunite with who you were born to be in the first place before society told you otherwise.
To speak conventionally - and I think it is easier for the general reader to see Zen thus presented - there are unknown recesses in our minds which lie beyond the threshold of the relatively constructed consciousness. To designate them as __ub-conciousness_ or __upra-consciousness_ is not correct. The word __eyond_ is used simply because it is a most convenient term to indicate their whereabouts. But as a matter of fact there is no __eyond_, no __nderneath_, no __pon_ in our consciousness. The mind is one indivisible whole and cannot be torn in pieces. The so-called terra incognita is the concession of Zen to our ordinary way of talking, because whatever field of consciousness that is known to us is generally filled with conceptual riffraff, and to get rid of them, which is absolutely necessary for maturing Zen experience, the Zen psychologist sometimes points to the presence of some inaccessible region in our minds. Though in actuality there is no such region apart from our everyday consciousness, we talk of it as generally more easily comprehensible by us.
Meditation brings Nirvana, and Nirvana brings Buddhahood.
Consider this:1. Would you ride in a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding "entheogenic" drug LSD?And here's a bonus question:2. Why does an "expanded consciousness" include the inability to operate a motor vehicle?