2024-11-07 Journal Entry

Went to the Tamanique Falls waterfalls today. It was a bit of a hike to get there, but the first (of two) waterfalls we went to was gorgeous. The water fell some thirty feet into a small pool, shallow enough at many points to stand or sit along the edge but deep in the center where the water struck. The vibrations extended out into the air even, out of the still pool through the mist. Huge stones, mosscovered, surrounded the narrow corridor.

I thought it the perfect home. I thought it beautiful and powerful, a providing force where one could grow. I thought if the yamabushi who meditate under waterfalls. I don’t know the significance for them, but I imagine it helps them absorb that power, to flow both hard and soft in one.

Waterfalls as dharma practice.

All the water here feels like a teacher. The ocean is such a terrifying teacher, awe-full and terrifying and placid. Zen monks often went from temple to temple, searching for teachers, when perhaps they really should have just gone to the shores, to the waterfalls, to the center of a monsoon, and to be blessed.

Writing, too, as dharma practice. Right now I sit here in the dark, in the warm tropical air with latin music coming through the area and a light drizzle tap-dancing on the awning. My mind has felt so quiet here, not with some penetrating insight but with a simple suppleness, a receptiveness equally to the waves and the the jackhammers in the morning, to the lightning and to the friendly goat that likes to sing in the afternoon.

Not much more to say about that, but writing is quite a bit of a salve at the moment. So I’m just going to keep gonig, letting the soft patter of the rain be a guiding spirit.

I’ve been sitting with the Mu koan quite a bit lately, and I really quite like it. Something about sitting with koans is really intriguing to me right now – I’ve noticed a lot of the overlaps that various forms of meditation have. For example, much of Zen meditation is very open-awareness-y (like shikantaza), but koans are much more akin to concentration meditation. But even open awareness is somewhat like concentration in a way – it requires you to still be attentive, where the object of your meditation really just becomes awareness itself. But it requires a certain “effort” to loop that awareness back onto itself.

I just reread this essay I published recently, and on the one hand I do think it’s accurate, and on the other I think it’s completely impenetrable to anyone else. It could probably do well with another five rounds of explanation and expansion and clarification, but perhaps that’s something to do over time. The concepts in there are rich, and trying to shove them all into one single blog post isn’t going to work. It may well be a whole fucking book, if I’m being honest. It’s a book that probably nobody else really wants to read, but it may be the book I feel I have to write. A book on compassion, and how to have it.

But I also don’t want it to strictly be a Buddhist book, despite much of it really coming from a Buddhist lens. But in a way it’s perhaps a really valuable clarification of the metamodern philosophical tradition – the embrace of nihilist realism and relighious faith, or openness for its own sake.

But I think for the average reader, that will take a lot of convincing. The nihilists were right, but so were the existentialists, and so were the Christians and the Buddhists and all the flavors of Buddhas that came before us.

In a way, it’s just an extension of Seeing that Frees, but for normies or something. The hardest part will likely be figuring out research, and writing a whole lot more along the way.

(Got sidetracked, rip)