Contemplating Zen
So this is the life I'm considering leading for a month:
Have I utterly lost my mind? And then, every other week, the rise time switches to 3AM! There is something that calls me to this place. Some kind of longing for a way by which you carve your awareness out of a piece of stone. My attraction to it reminds me of the way I stared down Grad School before it started. That one first semester was the only semester I have ever in my entire life received straight As.
In some ways it is exactly the same. Physicists do not have a great appreciation for doing something for the sake of being transformed by it. They are always concerned with results. But the process you go through is so much more valuable then any piece of text, or fame or fortune one gets from the time. I do not think many of my professors understood this.
- 4:00
a.m. Rise - 4:15
Chanting, Zazen (meditation) - 6:30
Breakfast - 8:15
Samu (work practice) - 12:00
pm Lunch - 2:00
Samu - 4:30
Hot Pools or Showers - 5:15
Dinner - 6:30
Zazen - 8:30
pm Kaichin (end of day)
Have I utterly lost my mind? And then, every other week, the rise time switches to 3AM! There is something that calls me to this place. Some kind of longing for a way by which you carve your awareness out of a piece of stone. My attraction to it reminds me of the way I stared down Grad School before it started. That one first semester was the only semester I have ever in my entire life received straight As.
In some ways it is exactly the same. Physicists do not have a great appreciation for doing something for the sake of being transformed by it. They are always concerned with results. But the process you go through is so much more valuable then any piece of text, or fame or fortune one gets from the time. I do not think many of my professors understood this.