Virgin Listening

This evening, questions in my mind are keeping me awake :

Almost physically, I feel the conceptual activity clearly active in the top region of the skull, it gesticulates at the end of the line in a complete energetic chaos.

There was a time when I claimed the advantage of Buddhism over Christianity,
at least of Zen Buddhism over Roman Catholicism, was the lightness afforded by the absence of conceptual tinkering and entanglement.

This was clearly false and only reflected my projections on Zen as it is practiced in other places, other times, and by others. My ignorance flashed before my eyes as I observed others and myself: the conceptual density is equivalent and the energetic demand is similar in both traditions.

When in Zazen — silent sitting –, I find myself comparing my practice to that of others, the one that others claim to have, when I summon an armada of conceptual benchmarks to place them on the basis, then my modality of practice, my spiritual approach, is just as erroneous as when the postulates of Catholic theology swirled within me.

The observation does not call into question the high quality of the words of theologians, teachers, priests, academicians.

Simply sitting, listening to the sitting,
makes me see that all of this comes from the same phenomenon, from the same fabric that we unroll and in which we get our feet caught, again and again.

Let’s return to the simple breath of Virgin Listening.

©FJ Oct 2023
Recueils / Participation/ Groupe