Note the date on this posting: it has been five years since I last used this blog. A lot has happened since then: two other blogs in fact, two other attempts to find a better blogging solution. My last one here contained 2528 postings, and number that staggers me. I used to wonder what I would do with all my wonderful thoughts after I finished them. What would happen to them? Now I know: I will just let them go. I wrote them mainly for myself, and now it is time to move on.
An Internet friend of mine, Bill, who I have never met in person, was a student of Shinzen Young, my meditation teacher and also the teacher of many others. Shinzen got into distributing his talks by media early, recording them on cassettes. He had tons of them and sold them at his retreats. You could also order them by mail. This annoyed me, because most meditation teachers give away recordings of their talks for free, you can download them at dharmaseed.org, thousands of them. But Shinzen was still selling his. He next made CDs and sold them on Amazon. By then I had moved to Costa Rica and lost contact with Shinzen completely. I couldn't afford to fly back to the States to attend his retreats, which are held in retreat centers in lovely places—but rather expensive.
Recently, Shinzen has become enlightened—he has videos for free on YouTube. You can't get much more enlightened than that :) Check them out at expand/contract: http://www.youtube.com/user/expandcontract. This video was made during one of Shinzen's retreats, this is a dharma talk to this students.
If you haven't experienced Shinzen before, you have a treat waiting for you. Enjoy!
Hello, and thank you for your wonderful blog, and recent note of the updates. Please be careful how you use the word "enlightened". I know how you were kidding, but at first read I thought to myself, "didn't shinzen become inlightened years ago?". This is a fact which I actually only knew via his YOU TUBE talks.
Yes, a real treat indeed. Shinzen is as I believe you said yourself in an email to me months ago, "the real deal".
He is comprehensive, intricate, sensitive, sincere, appropriate, careful, searching, practiced, gentle, wise, well learned and a very very powerful integration of "everything" from the most scientific to the most personal, from the most universal and global, to the most minute, from the macro to the micro, from reality to fantasy, from bizarre to normal, from intense to calm, and all in a way which integrates his vast experience and knowledge with an incredibly human and day to day delivery that is both broad and specific, practical and magestic.
And, I mean it too.
It has taken me, though it flew by, about six years to go from "wow who is this guy" to "I want to follow this path for the rest of my life because I know it's right, I've experienced it working, and all the sticks and all the carrots lead me toward this as the best way to do anything and everything else I want to do.
For me, it simply has to be repeated.
Shinzen, I love you. Thank you for your dedication, delivery and persistence. I wish to practice, learn, apply and disceminate for the rest of my life, what you have confirmed, focused and expanded for me.
Dino.
Posted by: Dino Cardamone | August 21, 2009 at 02:20 AM