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bodhidave.bsky.social
bodhidave
@bodhidave.bsky.social
2K followers 320 following 4.5K posts
humanistic psychodynamic Buddhist deconstructionist ... and all-round sweet guy

interested in cross-cultural parallels in contemplative practice

.

https://utexas.academia.edu/DavidCollins

[header is the rock garden at Ryōan-ji; avatar is an enso]
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bodhidave.bsky.social
bodhidave @bodhidave.bsky.social · Nov 21
1:2

The numbers of followers for this account increased this week. I'll re-post an essay I have online which reflects on the present-day "mindfulness" movement.

In that piece, about half-way through, I mention the experience of practicing the jhānas ... and ...

thesideview.co/journal/deco...
Deconstructing Mindfulness
There’s been a marked increase in studies of mindfulness and meditation in recent years.
thesideview.co
bodhidave.bsky.social
1/4

from writing I'm doing on Plotinus, regarding some of the ways he portrays and gestures towards contemplative experience that's more immediate than thoughts and words (and is, hence, effectively "selfless," given how our concept of self is a generated thing)
Plotinus has told us that the experience of the One is something which is simpler and more fundamental than words. It’s an experience that’s before thoughts, so it’s going to be hard to describe. There aren’t any words there. There isn’t any “reasoned knowledge” there. But he gives us indications of what that experience is like, nonetheless. The next several quotations are examples of the kinds of descriptions he offers: when it [the soul] sees that god [the One] it at once lets everything go; it is as if someone went into a house richly decorated and so beautiful, and within it contemplated each and every one of the decorations and admired them before seeing the master of the house, but when they see that master with delight, who is not of the nature of the images, but worthy of genuine contemplation, they dismiss those other things and thereafter look at him alone, and then, as they look and do not take their eyes away, by the continuity of their contemplation they no longer see a sight, but mingle their seeing with what they contemplate, so that what was seen before has now become sight in them and they forget all other objects of contemplation....
January 30, 2026 at 3:43 PM
bodhidave.bsky.social
In tonight’s meditation there was a sense for how phrases like “awakening is through the body” and “awakening is realized in suchness” can get too conceptual and wedded to ideas.

Here “body” and “suchness” are terms for “honesty”—an honesty more immediate, wonderful, and matter-of-fact than words.
January 30, 2026 at 4:26 AM
bodhidave.bsky.social
People may be seeing, Bruce's "Streets of Minneapolis" has a video now. It's heart-breakingly well done.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDaP...
Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Lyric Video)
YouTube video by Bruce Springsteen
www.youtube.com
January 29, 2026 at 10:11 PM
bodhidave.bsky.social
tonight's sunset, outside Asheville
grey skies and clouds above orange and yellow skies, atop a wintery hillside with some leafless trees and a couple small houses and part of a roadway
January 29, 2026 at 12:14 AM
bodhidave.bsky.social
from some writing I'm doing on the contemplative philosopher Plotinus ... his stuff is 3d century Platonism, he wrote in long complicated sentences, with poor eyesight, which his student Porphyry had to transcribe ... and it's pretty wonderful
... Plotinus is telling us that to experience the One isn’t a matter of being “side-by-side” with it. It isn’t a situation which involves a “conscious awareness of.” It is, instead, a kind of embrace. It is “an activity prior to awareness.” It is a unific and “gathered” realization. It’s a participation in, and a selfless realization of, That. And it’s a realization as That. It is, in other words, an appreciation of how we, and all that exists, are its dance: All life ... is activity ... a movement which is not random.... The activity of life is an artistic activity, like the way in which one who is dancing [orchoumenos] is moved....1 “One who is dancing” is the Greek word orchoumenos. And it’s related to our words “orchestrate” and “orchestra.” In the ancient Greek plays a singing chorus was sometimes located in an orchestra—the “place,” -tra, “to dance,” orkheisthai. Our living being is where the dance is. __________ 1 3.2.16.18-26, Armstrong trans., LCL 442, p. 95, 97. “Activity” here is energeia; “movement” is kinesis; and “artistic activity” is technike.
January 27, 2026 at 2:55 AM
bodhidave.bsky.social
In reply to a post about resilience training for activists (for addressing the potential for burnout):
bodhidave.bsky.social bodhidave @bodhidave.bsky.social · 3d
When mentioning to a supervisor back when I was a practicum psychotherapist that the work, while meaningful, was exhausting, she said (partly for effect?):

"Oh no — you must get energy from this work!"

That perspective has been a help.
January 27, 2026 at 12:04 AM
bodhidave.bsky.social
sunset here outside Asheville moments ago
a large wintery tree with a horizon of dark hills above whicl are darkening grey-blue skies and a number of smallish puffy pink-orange clouds
January 26, 2026 at 11:00 PM
bodhidave.bsky.social
The New England Patriots win the AFC championship game, and will now be going to the Super Bowl. I'm pleased.

I don't follow a lot of football — but Drake May (true) is my brother's wife's daughter's ex-boyfriend's brother ...

So it's a family thing. 🙂
January 25, 2026 at 11:06 PM
bodhidave.bsky.social
(1'2)
...In the last two quotations we’ve looked at how Plotinus spoke of experiencing the One as if it were a kind of going out of one’s mind and as an ecstasy. In these next lines he uses a different, opposite metaphor—here he suggests that it’s like becoming sane again: A child ... who is outside himself in madness [mania] will not know his father; but he who has learnt to know himself will know from whence he comes. This time it’s *not* knowing our parent—not knowing our Source—that is being compared to a kind of madness.
January 25, 2026 at 5:48 PM
bodhidave.bsky.social
The sense of tonight’s meditation was that it was about what was going on before there was an idea of what it was or what it meant,

before it being about whether it was right or wrong,

before there was a judgement or an evaluation.

The sense of tonight’s meditation was about what was going on.
January 25, 2026 at 4:35 AM
bodhidave.bsky.social
Checking the Greek for “drunk” in a Plotinus passage I see it's *methystheis,* and learned that amethyst gets its name as a purported cure for drunkenness — etymonline[.]com suggests that that might be out of a kind of sympathetic magic idea, given that the color of amethyst is similar to wine.
January 25, 2026 at 2:56 AM
bodhidave.bsky.social
There is no name, or feeling or awareness more, or as much, in keeping with eternity, which is God, as is that which can be had and seen and experienced in the blind and loving awareness of this word IS…. And so be as blind in the loving awareness of the being of God as in the naked awareness of the being of yourself, without any curious seeking through your senses to examine any characteristic that belongs to his being or to yours. But all analysis let go of and put far away, worship your God with your substance, all that you are that you are to all him that he is as he is, which by himself, without anything else, is the blessed being of both himself and of you. And in this way you will knittingly, and in a manner that’s wonderful, worship God with himself; for that you are you have from him and he is it. ~ The Book of Privy Counseling (by the author of The Cloud of Unknowing)
January 24, 2026 at 4:27 PM
bodhidave.bsky.social
don't tell anyone ... but this is me at 18
yours truly, with a mustache, in cut off jeans on a lifeguard stand, with three young women in bathing suits with me there (posing for our small town newspaper photographer)
January 24, 2026 at 3:56 PM
bodhidave.bsky.social
took a picture with my brother's corgi, Midge, just now ... but she told me she wasn't ready, so I had to take another
face of a corgi in profile looking off screen on a green couch beside part of a smiling bearded yours truly face of Midge the corgi with wide open wild looking eyes and open mouth with her tongue out to the side
January 24, 2026 at 3:30 PM
bodhidave.bsky.social
#Asheville area WEATHER FORECAST — it has changed significantly in the lead-up to this weekend, but the current expectation is for 12+ hours of "freezing rain", beginning around 5pm Saturday. I've only been in that condition a few times. It can be a serious mess, taking down trees and power lines.
Map of the general Asheville area showing it under threat of a likely freezing rain event, with text reading: An Ice Storm Warning means severe winter weather conditions are expected or occurring. Significant amounts of ice accumulations will make travel dangerous or impossible. Travel is strongly discouraged. Commerce will likely be severely impacted. If you must travel, keep a flashlight, food, and water in your vehicle in case of an emergency. Ice accumulations and winds will likely lead to snapped power lines and falling tree branches that add to the danger. Prepare for possible power outages. The latest road conditions for the state you are calling from can be obtained by calling 5 1 1.
January 24, 2026 at 4:55 AM
bodhidave.bsky.social
1:6

first draft of some writing I'm doing tonight on unific, non-dual experiencing as it's portrayed by Plotinus
Here’s another passage where Plotinus emphasizes how the pinnacle of the contemplative experience, of and as the One, is more a matter of immediate presence than it is something that involves words or thoughts: one who speaks precisely should not say “that” or “is”; but we run round it outside, in a way, and want to explain our own experiences of it, sometimes near it and sometimes falling away in our perplexities [aporias] about it. The perplexity arises especially because our awareness of that One is not by way of reasoned knowledge or of intellectual perception, as with other intelligible things, but by way of a presence superior to knowledge. The soul experiences its falling away from being one and is not altogether one when it has reasoned knowledge of anything; for reasoned knowledge is a rational process [logos], and a rational process is many.... One must therefore run up above knowledge and in no way depart from being one, but one must depart from knowledge and things known, and from every other, even beautiful, object of vision. Collected sobriety. Naked presence. Rest. And, as he goes on to say, “true life”: There the soul [psyche] takes its rest and its true life is there.... When it comes to be there it becomes itself....
January 24, 2026 at 1:20 AM
bodhidave.bsky.social
tonight's sunset, outside #Asheville
darkening blue sky with some whispy white clouds over a yellow horizon atop a wintery hillside and a large, leafless tree
January 23, 2026 at 11:08 PM
bodhidave.bsky.social
I've received a couple "likes" and comments on a post from earlier today regarding the too-simple-and-too-immediate-for-words nature of the core of contemplative experience. So I'll share what I'm working on today, about Plotinus and things he says about such wonder and "wordlessness." (1\3)
At the end of the treatise that I mentioned in the last section which has the long name—“On the Fact That That Which Is Beyond Being Does Not Think...” (5.6)—Plotinus writes: Thinking [noien] ... is many and not one. That, then, which is not like this [in other words, that which is not “many”] cannot be thinking.... What is “beyond being” must be beyond thinking.... It gives other things something better and greater than knowing It.... It allows them to be in the same place with It and to lay hold on It.... (5.6.6.23-36) In these lines Plotinus is making a series of distinctions. He distinguishes between “many” and “one.” He distinguishes between “thinking” and “beyond thinking.” And he distinguishes between knowing and “something better and greater than knowing.”
January 22, 2026 at 10:42 PM
bodhidave.bsky.social
In what he tags as "Just some Spinoza-posting to remember what matters," Pierrick reminds me of a footnote for some writing of mine about how so much of religious language is best engaged with as a kind of poetry — artistic & performative gestures regarding truths that are more immediate than words.
In many cultures which use the word “God” to mark the miracle of existence, you’ll often find suggestions or commandments that that word not be used in a presumptuous way. A famous example is in Exodus 20:7 in the Hebrew Bible. It occurs there twice, actually, once literally and once “performatively.” In the King James English version, the verse reads, “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain.” That means that we’re not to employ the name of God frivolously, or—put somewhat more literally—that we’re not to represent God emptily. And where the words “the LORD” appear in that text, that’s an example of the scribes and readers of the Hebrew Bible not even wanting to speak God’s name out loud. The name of God was originally written “YHWH” in Hebrew, which is usually pronounced “Yahweh.” (Sometimes in the English King James Version of the Bible it was rendered as “Jehovah.”) But over time Hebrew speakers wouldn’t say that name aloud; they would instead substitute another word, “adonai,” which means “lord.” So when you see places in the Bible where LORD is written in all caps, that’s an example of not saying God’s name—it’s kind of a performance of the understanding that the word “God” denotes something that’s unspeakable and “un-wordable.” “YHWH” originally meant “the one that causes to be” or “the one that is” or “the existing.” The Hebrews understood that That was something always worth appreciating as sacred. No word or name could ever be That. You sometimes see people today reflecting that understanding by writing “God” as “G d.”
January 22, 2026 at 1:01 PM
bodhidave.bsky.social
from my kitchen window just now ... female (upper left) and male cardinals
female cardinal, muted beige and light red coloration, perched on a branch upper left, and a male cardinal, bright red with some black around his beak, on the branch lower and to the right, in front of a bank of winter dried weeds and leaves
January 21, 2026 at 10:38 PM
bodhidave.bsky.social
Reminds me how matter-of-factly subtle are mechanisms of our not seeing things as they are. Neuropsych suggests our brain is designed to model the world & predict what's coming. When we forget it's a model (avidya) & get caught up in our predictions (tanha), relationship w/ life is "unsatisfactory."
dualnondual.bsky.social Tashi @dualnondual.bsky.social · 15d
"...three approaches to ultimate reality are implicit in all phenomena. They are known as the Three Doors of Perfect Liberation and are:

(1) emptiness
(2) absence of (truly existing) attributes
(3) absence of expectancy"

Yönten Gyamtso
Treasury of Precious Qualities
January 19, 2026 at 2:41 PM
Reposted by bodhidave
belmontzen.bsky.social
January 19, 2026 at 12:54 PM
bodhidave.bsky.social
I've been meditating some 50 years now. Mostly Zen, some Vipassana and jhānas (synesthetic altered state absorptions), and in college I did mantra TM.

And the more I do it, the more basic I find it to be. Like tonight, where the sense was simply—

what is happening is what does the meditation.
January 19, 2026 at 4:30 AM
bodhidave.bsky.social
just came across this in Plotinus:

"All life...is activity {energeia}...a movement {kinesis} which is not random...the activity of life is an artistic activity {technike}, like the way in which one who is dancing {orchoumenos} is moved"

*orchoumenos* is related to "orchestra," lit. "dance place"
January 18, 2026 at 8:35 PM
bodhidave.bsky.social
A monk asked, “What is the essential meaning of Buddhism?”
Zen teacher Mazu said, “What is the meaning of this moment?”

.
(in Andrew Ferguson, *Zen's Chinese Heritage*)
thisness.one Thisness @thisness.one · 13d
Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there.

— Aldous Huxley
January 17, 2026 at 6:53 PM