joe...
you talk of isolation..do you really think it is such a "mind blowing" activity?. .solitary confinement in a prison i find to be the most wretched that any man can impose on another no matter what the crime. .pure evil... all this living in isolation . ."easy peasy" perhaps..then one is not distracted eh?. .how much more difficult is it to attain Buddha-hood in the supermarket??????? surely the true test is when you live the full life in the real world??????. .merle Edgar, Of course I mean at a practice center, with a teacher and sangha. I gather you've done that, say, for lengthy retreats. My teacher did a 6-year solo retreat in a shack on a mountain in Taiwan, after his awakening. He grew a species of wild potatoes outside the hut, and lived on their (cooked) leaves, and someone brought him a bag of rice once per month, leaving it at an arranged place about a kilometer from the hut (so, my teacher Sheng Yen never saw another person for six years). The rice-bringer had to cross three rivers to get to the delivery stashing-place. It was isolated. Shakyamuni left the society of his family, and practiced. We don't have to do that, but we can still remove ourselves from the larger society and practice with the sangha in the traditional way, of sesshin. I assume you've done a share of this, or maybe a lot of it. --Joe > Edgar Owen <edgarowen@...> wrote: > > Well I have for extended periods of time at least partly, but it's very > difficult for human beings who as a species are so wimpy compared to wild > animals...
