The action of love is the right action. It's as simple as shaking hands with someone who trips or picks up a child who has fallen to the ground. We take these actions as a natural event, direct every day, in our lives. Each one is simply the best possible response to the situation of the moment, says Bernie Glassman. By Koncha Pin s-Pey for MIMIND Space.
The action of love is the right action. It's as simple as shaking hands with someone who trips or picks up a child who has fallen to the ground. We take these actions as a natural event, direct every day, in our lives. Each one is simply the best possible response to the situation of the moment, says Bernie Glassman. By Koncha Pin s-Pey for MIMIND Space. Zen master Bernie Glassman is a world-renowned pioneer in the American Zen movement. He is also a spiritual leader, a renowned author, with great academic success, with a doctorate in applied mathematics. He is the founder of the Zen Peace Makers.
After having spent decades teaching Zen and working in socially engaged Buddhism, since the 1970s, he is now serving on socially engaged projects around the world. Its international agenda includes intensive workshops, conferences and visits. But the highlights are the field trips, to serve as a pacifying agent in all the hot spots on the planet.
In his last book shared with the Oscar-winning Jeff Bridges, Doubt and the Zen Master, Roshi Bernie Glassman offers an intimate portrait of the relationship between a student and a teacher, a sort of compendium between spiritual life and philosophical. Buddhist Doubt and the Zen Master captures the vital dialogue among those who are determined to achieve enlightenment, reflecting the importance of giving appropriate visions in a difficult world. I have read this book during my flights this summer, and I must tell you that I find it impressive. I think it's a book that truly changes your life.
In the first chapters of the book Bernie says: Thinking is not the problem, but waiting for a certain result, because we want life to be perfect. We can become so obsessed that we no longer do anything without an object We are stuck in expectations, in the attached files that commit us to a final result .
It is a book that talks about two people who live a good life with compassion and happiness and, most importantly, with a lot of sense of humor. No need to have seen the Great Lembowski to enjoy. Jeff Bridges explains his fascinating career as an actor and how detachment is used in Hollywood. Some days of my career have been good, others very good and others not so good and it is not necessary to pay attention to whether the day is good or bad, you just have to act ”. Jeff explains how to start the mind of non-attachment, and how the autopilot makes us get into things and end up in places where we don't want to go.
Conversations between friends
It is not a book of pretended self-help, that is no longer fashionable in the United States, nor does it intend to sell you Zen. Those visions are wrong. It is simply a book full of observations and conversations between two friends that tell us how their life has been and how they have perceived things since impermanence. Accepting things as they come to us, without expectations, is better than being frustrated.
When Glassman was asked why he had decided to make a book with Bridges, he said that “because it's normal, he's not someone who wants to be special. He is already famous. It's funny, open and many people will listen to you. He is a liberal type, without having to be allegedly Zen, or in favor of the Tibetan cause. ” Bridges felt challenged by a Zen master who had no expectations and was nothing formal.
Before being a Zen master, Glassman was a mathematician and engineer and worked in the aerospace industry, until he made the leap to Zen. Because he basically observed that everything in life was Zen. Everything we do, everything we call action, is the intention of living in the world without suffering and without causing harm to others, pretending to relieve our own pain without creating more suffering.
Glassman trained with the legendary Zen master Maexumi Roshi, who brought Zen to the West. Bridges tells us that when you meditate, adjustments are simply made to return to the space of “being” and that is the same as an actor does. You have to make a scene, then another, and another, and each time you make adjustments until you reach the space of the present moment.
Bernie Glassman and Jeff Bridges: Doubt and the Zen Master
