Methods of Contemplation

A koan is a short story, or vignette that Zen Buddhists use during meditation to help them unravel greater truths about the world and about themselves. Zen masters from the Rinzai school have been testing their students with these stories, questions, or phrases for centuries. Let's explore some together. After hearing the koan, rest in your meditation posture and contemplate the koan, or follow your breath.

Hello, and welcome to Methods – an exploration in guided prayer and meditation.

Today’s focus is the the dark night of the soul.

There’s often a misconception about this phrase – the dark night of the soul. You may have heard it increasingly over the past few years, with the exodus of white evangelicals from the evangelical church, and the growth of the post-christian deconstruction culture. But much like deconstruction is used differently than the way Jaques Derrida popularized it, the colloquial meaning of the phrase “dark night of the soul has become foreign to its original use as well. In its common usage, it has come to mean something like a particularly difficult time in life, or is often used in conjunction with the loss or transformation of someone’s faith. But the original meaning of the term had a more mystical context.

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A koan is a short story, or vignette that Zen Buddhists use during meditation to help them unravel greater truths about the world and about themselves. Zen masters from the Rinzai school have been testing their students with these stories, questions, or phrases for centuries. Let's explore some together. After hearing the koan, rest in your meditation posture and contemplate the koan, or follow your breath.

A koan is a short story, or vignette that Zen Buddhists use during meditation to help them unravel greater truths about the world and about themselves. Zen masters from the Rinzai school have been testing their students with these stories, questions, or phrases for centuries. Let's explore some together. After hearing the koan, rest in your meditation posture and contemplate the koan, or follow your breath.

A koan is a short story, or vignette that Zen Buddhists use during meditation to help them unravel greater truths about the world and about themselves. Zen masters from the Rinzai school have been testing their students with these stories, questions, or phrases for centuries. Let's explore some together. After hearing the koan, rest in your meditation posture and contemplate the koan, or follow your breath.

A koan is a short story, or vignette that Zen Buddhists use during meditation to help them unravel greater truths about the world and about themselves. Zen masters from the Rinzai school have been testing their students with these stories, questions, or phrases for centuries. Let's explore some together. After hearing the koan, rest in your meditation posture and contemplate the koan, or follow your breath.

A koan is a short story, or vignette that Zen Buddhists use during meditation to help them unravel greater truths about the world and about themselves. Zen masters from the Rinzai school have been testing their students with these stories, questions, or phrases for centuries. Let's explore some together. After hearing the koan, rest in your meditation posture and contemplate the koan, or follow your breath.

A koan is a short story, or vignette that Zen Buddhists use during meditation to help them unravel greater truths about the world and about themselves. Zen masters from the Rinzai school have been testing their students with these stories, questions, or phrases for centuries. Let's explore some together. After hearing the koan, rest in your meditation posture and contemplate the koan, or follow your breath.

Light is the very basis of Vision, the topic of our current season of meditations. It is a persistent metaphor used in many different spiritual and religious contexts from East to West to convey liberation, understanding, and the elan vital of the universe. Whether it's the Damascus light of St. Paul, the "interior light" of Gregory the Great, the "illuminations of St. Ignatius, the Flowing Light of Mechthild, or the "Living Light" of Hildegaard, the recurring motif is branded on our historical and cultural consciousness in a way that it becomes impossible to ignore. But this light isn't simply the opposite of a polarized darkness, because it can be described as John Ruusbroec calls a "dark luminosity", or a transcendent dialectic that includes the apophatic elements of darkness and the cataphatic elements of light. In this method, we'll explore the ways this metaphor can be used in our practice to let the discursive analysis of our visual faculties gradually dissolve into a non-dual mode of perception, where seer, seeing, and seen are one.

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A koan is a short story, or vignette that Zen Buddhists use during meditation to help them unravel greater truths about the world and about themselves. Zen masters from the Rinzai school have been testing their students with these stories, questions, or phrases for centuries. Let's explore some together. After hearing the koan, rest in your meditation posture and contemplate the koan, or follow your breath.