Coffee break

 Not that I drink coffee, but what the hell! 

Is Zen an idea? What is Zen? Is it a culture or a tool? Is it a way of life? It seems to me to be a way of life and a way of realizing the truth. Cool. What else is it? Zen. What is this way of looking at the world? Is it tied to certain practice? Does it require a particular constitution of self? Is it dependent on certain states of mind or outlooks? Is it also simply the truth? It's longer name is Zen Buddhism. It is a branch of Buddhism. When I have experiences that feel Zen to me, they seem to have a certain unique composition. It feels like I am participating in a particular culture of truth seeing with its own flavor.

 I get this same feeling with other traditions I am intimate with. They each have particular strengths that I enjoy. Strengths that point to very real dimensions of human experience and truth. Dimensions that in many ways can be difficult to integrate together. For example, how do we make sense of being both God in a completely personal sense and God in a completely objective sense? Is God both of these and God exists in many ways on a spectrum that seamlessly blends together? Or are our experiences of God as completely objective completely personal both two aspects of one undifferentiated whole that we fail to realize in our ignorance? *I just realized that when you force yourself to stay awake and it gets easier after awhile, it's because your body is pumping itself full of chemicals that keep you awake. Sweet. Go body. 
As I have become more awake, the two have become much more seamless, but not altogether one. In experiencing their non-divisiveness I have truer experiences of them as unique aspects of myself. Which give way to a greater sense of the non-duality of the universe. 

I think that personality and objectivity are ideas which have real aspects of truth in them, but are perhaps irreparably limited in scope because they are contrived. I have spent so much time trying to figure out how they are different and how they are the same. Perhaps now it would be helpful to try to fit them into the world and into eachother. As contrivances, perhaps it is impossible for them to fit together. It would seem that as long as there are two distinct words, the words will have different meanings, and this will obstruct one from seeing what is real if one is attempting to see reality through them. Perhaps we can drop them altogether, at least for the moment and look in a way that is not using what may be an innately limited tool which is the thinking and reasoning mind. *And yes, McDonalds is an Irish name, the McDonalds were two Irish immigrants. It's quite odd and funny saying, "McDonalds", the fast food franchise, with an Irish accent and imagining that the business is still somehow tied to its roots.  

The I AM  content that comes from alleged Ascended Masters may be for myself the closest culture to what what feels like Truth. I feel that they come closest to communicating and embodying universal truth and universal truths in distilled ways. I often feel that my destiny and the destiny of all human beings and all life comes from the heart that they illuminate. They seem to be at a heart of human destiny and Universal destiny that transcends culture and tradition, in a way that I find is partly obscured by any of the many wisdom traditions I have encountered. Perhaps this is simply because I have yet to delve deep enough into them. They seem like the many branches that extend from the Tree of Universal Wisdom. It seems like the Tree itself is embodied by the Ascended Masters. Personally I find identifying with one of it's branches to be a limiting imposition. Why call myself a Zen Buddhist when I am simply a human being? It just seems limited and kind of outdated honestly. Like, it would get in the way of the kind of integration I see humans coming to. Like it's a filter that is very good, but just isn't quite what is desired. It seems to me that Universal Love and Universal Wisdom alone are sufficient and will be sufficient for humanity. Not that these traditions don't serve a purpose. I just don't see them being as relevant as more and more human beings realize divinity and Universality in a very clear way. It seems like these wisdom traditions are the vessels which brought us to Truth and that once this truth is distilled the many paths will become more or less one way and their individuality will lose meaning and relevancy. So much of what gives these traditions their power and draw is how they give unique ways to reach God. We are attracted to them for their individual strengths. Once we have taken these strengths from many traditions we come to a synthesized or distilled Truth and the traditions seem to have less to offer. At least in the way in which we feel the need to be identified with them. At this point it seems like Universality becomes the dominant theme simply because it becomes who we are. We are someone and something that transcends the traditions. This things does not need the traditions to see. It sees with it's own faculties. Wisdom traditions help us see these, but they are not exclusively them. We are simply God, more so than we are Christians or Buddhists or whatever. These are ideas anyway and not real outside of the fact that they point to real and unique behaviors of human beings. Calling yourself one doesn't make you one outside of socially accepted beliefs. You can't be a Christian because you don't have a separate self. Sorry.