The idea with block meditation is to have a long continuous block sitting that is longer than your usual length of meditation. Sokuzan recommends a four-hour period, once a week or maybe once a month. Daily practice is good, but sometimes the only way to break into the iron box of ego is to sit there and just wait.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CzBvL_din8&t=121s

Meditation is about training yourself not to abandon anything, not to lock down or fixate on anything, and not to believe in or elaborate on or analyze anything. How do we do that? Here, Sokuzan gives a guided mediation as a way of instruction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IJnRFBuF4&t=3s

A continuation of the topic, Laminations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPuMbK5N7ik&t=19s

Watch the way something occurs and we name it and laminate our ideas and about it. It’s not about stopping it or controlling it, more spinning. If you just look at it the name will slide away and what it is will keep showing up and what keeps showing up is not separate from what it’s covering up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdYqAwVeYQ8&t=1s

Earth, water, fire, and air come together to form the body-mind and it is sustained by eating other living bodies. The elements, this time is borrowed. Who is it that is borrowing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeOJIiNhzlE&t=1s

Opinions surface, then we quickly conclude. We clamp down on the reference point to protect our discontinuous identity. The interval is what we fill up with something. The interval that we don’t fill up with something is clarity, and it’s not clarity about something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaROmtf_bHw&t=2s

Awareness is the path. It is something you do. It is bringing attention to the relative world without accepting, rejecting or looking away. Wisdom is not something you do, it is something you are. You can’t gather it up and store it. If you can locate it, then you probably don’t have it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu6sSoHChLI&t=61s

When anger gets so intense that it is already being expressed, you can’t manage that. The ship has already sailed. It already has its momentum. Take that opportunity as a dharma gate. Use the heat of the situation. Approaching it as actually materializing it and making it into something wrong and something that needs to be fixed or managed is a misunderstanding. In order to relate to anger fundamentally, directly and radically it seems to be necessary to go down into that with our awareness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdsnd9wv_o0

Look at our world today. How do you balance all of this? How do you correct it or fix it? How do you help it so it doesn’t implode or explode? When our warfare is internal, how do you lose the war?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_mmokKWTPE&t=102s

Any time you know something you ignore everything else. Don’t get in the way of conclusions, they may have relative accuracy, but they need to come out of your awareness rather than your completely circular thought process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qydrf6JhAp4&t=1091s