Author Archives: Steve Mays

The Other Side of Nothing

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(Amazon) “In the West, Zen Buddhism has a reputation for paradoxes that defy logic. In particular, the Buddhist concept of nonduality — the realization that everything in the universe forms a single, integrated whole — is especially difficult to grasp. In The Other Side of Nothing, Zen teacher Brad Warner untangles the mystery and explains nonduality in plain English. To Warner, this is not just a philosophical problem: nonduality forms the bedrock of Zen ethics, and once we comprehend it, many of the perplexing aspects of Zen suddenly make sense.”

We are not individual beings but components of an infinite reality that is just one single entity.

Zen Buddhists are Buddhists whose main thing is meditation. […] A way to learn to clearly see what reality actually is, beyond all dogmas and beliefs.

In everything in the world there exists nothing besides illusions. […] We can’t see the true nature of reality, but we can discover it. […] No explanation can ever match the reality it’s trying to describe.

In one sense, God created us. In another sense we are continuously creating God.

“Our life and our surroundings are part of a single continuum.” […] “Action and the place in which it occurs are indivisible.” — Nishijima Roshi

Mind and matter are two aspects of the same thing.

When we stop wanting things to be different from how they actually are, we stop suffering.

The truest thing you can ever say is, “I don’t know.”

The body exists within awareness rather than awareness being something that occurs inside the body or even inside the mind. The body is inside me rather than me being inside the body. […] The body is a manifestation of consciousness or of mind.

“Zazen is good for nothing!” — Kodo Sawaki

Whatever the particular thing is that you think is the worst thing in the world, it is part of you. Continue reading →

The Order of Time

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“The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but becoming. He says, “The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have limited duration.” He gives a rock as an example of a thing, as contrasted with an event. But, he says, “On closer inspection, in fact, even the things that are most ‘thinglike’ are nothing more than long events.” A rock isn’t a rock forever — even though it might seem like that to us humans. It starts off as a bunch of sand, gets compressed and melted, exists as a rock for a while, and eventually wears away into sand again. Even to say it started off as sand is wrong, because the sand wasn’t always sand either. The molecules that make up each grain of sand have their own complicated history. Therefore, any given rock’s existence as a rock is an event within the long, long history of its constituent, parts.”

— The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (quoted in The Other Side of Nothing by Brad Warner)

A great car needs a great video

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The handful of readers who followed my Land Rover adventure will recall Grayson Wolf was the young man who found the Series III Rover that has been my daily driver for the last few years.

Based in the Bay Area, Grayson works on high performance vehicles for the well-heeled and finds buyers and sellers for just about any thing on four wheels. He’s been working with a friend to produce videos used to show and sell. I was particularly impressed with the music in these videos, original compositions by Grayson’s buddy. [2000 Ferrari 360 Modena, 1967 Jaguar E-Type, 2001 BMW Z8 Roadster]

Pop Music

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“It crept into you like mist under an ill-fitting door, until words you didn’t know you knew had taken up residence–words like love, heartbreak, forever. People her age spent years having poetry hammered into them at school, and emerged without a couplet intact. But each and every one knew what followed “I’ll never dance with another.”

— The Last Voice You Hear (Mick Herron)

Room for more books

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I love books. Real, paper books. I love the feel of the paper, the weight on my chest, the smell… I purchase books to support the authors and so I can make notes in the margins and underline passages. I only keep the books I might read again and donate the others to local library.

With the recent discovery of some new (to me) authors (Robert Crais, Walter Mosley, Mick Herron, Don Winslow), I was out of room. Stacks of books everywhere. So time for more bookshelves. I can almost hear them sigh.