C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

     Enlightenment is nothing more than lifting weights and drinking my protein shake.  Why?  Because life as it is  is utterly perfect.      You can approach life as a way of being , or you can approach life as a way of believing—and sometime your belief might be that "there are no beliefs."  Sorry, that's still a belief.      In an earlier post (see April's posts), I discussed the great Zen master Kosho Uchiyama, and what I called the 4th way.  (For more details, once again, read the post.)  Basically, Uchiyama said that there are three ways that most people live their lives: they search for some kind of philosophical "truth", they put their belief in a deity (what I refer to as "the mythic sky god") that they believe will take care of them like some kind of butler in the sky if they only do as He/She pleases, or they decide that life is meaningless, so why not go ahead and have all the fun you want (or why not go ahead and sleep with all the wom...

Just Bow Putting my right and left hands together as one, I just bow. Just bow to become one with Buddha and God. Just bow to become one with everything I encounter. Just bow to become one with all the myriad things. Just bow as life becomes life.      Kosho Uchiyama's final poem, completed on the day that he died.      Kosho Uchiyama has long been my favorite of the modern day Zen masters.  Trained in the Soto lineage of Zen (Soto is one of the two main branches of Zen in Japan; the other is the Rinzai tradition), he seemed to "get it" better than any of the other Zen masters of the late 20th century.  Often crude, earthy, and witty, his style was simply more down to earth than others I have read.      My favorite of his books is "Opening the Hand of Thought."  It contains in it one of the most profound explanations of what good religion should look like.  I call this way of approaching religion—and approaching life, for that matter—the 4th way.  By this, I mea...