Guilt 24/8/19

Integrity note - I have included short papers Zandtaomed has written as part of the meditation advice interaction. These papers contain nothing personal, do not discuss anything personal arising from diaries, and the student concerned has checked that the content is not personal.

This began as an examination of solitude in my life intially inspired by Stephen Batchelor's "Art of Solitude". Developing that understanding of solitude I looked at Bob Kull's "Solitude" - his investigation into spending a year on an island in Patagonia. Through my study of Bob's book and recognising the importance of solitude to me I began to examine my own quest whilst considering Bob's quest. This led me into an understanding of the importance of faith where Sharon Salzberg's "Faith - Trusting your own Deepest Experience" helped me with that understanding. In the final section which is about following the path, I began by examining Eckhart's "Awakening the Inner Light" discussed separately here.

A seeker could use the pathtivist trilogy as advice. The trilogy began with the Treatise, and was zandtaomed’s first attempt at examining his path. It focussed on the 3 tenets throughout leading to an integration on the path; without realising the Treatise was based on the structure of the 4 Foundations of Mindfulness or the 4 tetrads of Buddhadasa’s MwB. It was the first part of zandtaomed’s journey, and the seeker might recognise patterns and behaviours that could benefit them.

In the 2nd part of the trilogy – the Manual, zandtaomed began looking at activism and how the path could benefit activists. This led to a recognition of destructive actions of activists, and then became a Manual in the 2nd section. In the end zandtaomed realised that the best emphasis for activism is path activism – as nature intended. We follow our paths, and nature has provided solutions – pathtivism. This is a focus change, a focus on the path first before activism; let the path guide activism. With this focus activism does not combust with egoic dissonance as we learn to struggle in harmony.

Key to the path and pathtivism is meditation as a means of going beyond conditioning. Zandtaomed began advising about meditation based on "Mindfulness with Breathing" by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, and with that advice developed understandings that for himself added to Buddhadasa’s MwB so he wrote the Companion (to MwB). So we have in the trilogy, a journey in daily life leading to an understanding of pathtivism and a meditation practice that can help achieve that activism – the pathtivist trilogy.

Using the understanding developed in the trilogy zandtao investigated solitude in Viveka-Zandtao that started his quest into the unknown. With the trilogy and this quest went hand-in-hand the Seeker Story releasing conditioning and this enabled zandtao to cross the threshold of autonomy – what zandtaomed now recognises as the objective of his advice – autonomy on the path.

With autonomy - the crossing of the threshold of autonomy - into zandtao's Prajna portal, zandtaomed's advice on practice is "kind of" complete. From there zandtao develops through his autonomy as does the seeker - with zandtaomed as kalyana mitta if the seeker wants.

At one stage zandtaomed began a short examination of the teachings of Eckhart Tolle from a Buddhist perspective. Whilst zandtaomed considered there was a strong theme of Buddhism in Eckhart's teachings he understood that Eckhart would prefer to be considered non-denominational. Noting this still allows zandtaomed to ask "Is Eckhart Tolle a Buddhist?", this is not a desire to "claim" him as Buddhist but just to compare teachings.

Previously I had included discussions on what the Buddha taught as part of my zandtao blog as

. Now such discussion will be noted in the zandtao blog as

, and included here in the Advice for Zandtaomed. Here are the older blogs from the

page:-

1) About Buddhism
2) Detachment
3) Bhavana on Faith


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