as with Alice - words mean nothing much.
i add: the context does.
the doing and the meeting ground does.
there are many words at first hearing causing irritation, mostly from experience.
when i was a boy my neighbour's wife had breast cancer, they went for miracle cures to the Philipines. my home was filled with japanese, korean and chinese people at all times. my head was filled with theosophy, karma, hierarchic orders and the voice of silence in the mid of the confusion of adolecence.
as a student friends had to travel via afghanistan to india with their hopes set high on adventure, self finding and a romantic idea on meditation and gurus as spiritual healers. at the same time neo-esoteric cults started and pseudo-scientific derivates with them, drawing seekers and lost souls and poorly doing students.
at a time when i read suzuki and alan watts i had known for long on meditation,
and i am quite used to the work since childhood.
talking about meditation can trigger off quite personal associations and ways and for some all is deeply connected to buddhism. to find a common context for talking on it is pre-condition for communication. i am neither a buddhist nor not a buddhist, i am no -ist.
for me it is to pay attention to what is there, disturbing or not disturbing, situation, perspective, experience,emotion, feeling in soul,mind and body without dwelling on one.
a often hard exercise. often i do it imagining towards the end when all has settled :if i die now, will it be good? am i in flow with life and death?and then i try to find inside this me who can find joy and compassion, the me who is part of all without definition. and when i cannot find it, i must accept my imperfection for this moment and just walk on.
it is hard and personal work, and it must be without another aim than just listening
even when listening is hard. it can be very humiliating to listen at first to the cloud of ego and go on walking through it.
and the name does not matter, buddhist, meditation, zen, nobody can sell or buy it.
it is on the art of living not of surviving.
