In my life, I have both studied and practiced a variety of “organized spiritualities” (i.e., religions or other tradition-based spiritual group practices). I grew up as a Roman Catholic, and while in my 30’s and 40’s I was involved with various Episcopalian and Quaker congregations. Over the past 4 years, however, I have committed myself to a local Zen sangha. So, I’ve tasted a bit of both the western and eastern approaches to spirituality. (I’ve tasted more western than eastern, admittedly; but nonetheless I do actually sit zazen at least once a week with a group; Zen has become more than a handful of interesting books or magazine articles for me).

But then again, a lot of other modern Americans have similarly jumped ship. A lot of zen sanghas, my group not excluded, are comprised mainly of “refugees” from Judaism and Christianity. A lot of people, especially Baby Boomers (given our narcissistic tendencies), want to keep some sort of group-based spiritual practice going in their life, but don’t want all the doctrines, rules and ultimate judgment and other such baggage that the western “Abrahamic” religions usually require. The natural place for such people to go is to an eastern practice, be it Zen, Vedantic yoga (I’m thinking about the more spiritually expansive version of yoga, not your common stretching routines), other Hindu ashrams, Nichiren Buddhism, Bahai, etc. More accurately, they wind up in an American adaptation of an eastern tradition, which is not exactly what the old-school eastern practices were really like. More on that in a second.

From what I can see, most people who leave the church, temple or even mosque for the eastern ways never look back. They warmly embrace their new tradition, study it in detail, learn its every little rubric, and  »  continue reading …

I was once a practicing Catholic who went to Mass every Sunday. However, it’s kind of difficult to be a modern, somewhat-well educated adult in the USA these days and still put up with the Big Catholic Church and all its quaint, antiquarian / medieval ways. So, for a while I became a practicing Episcopalian who attended Eucharist every Sunday. That was OK for a while, but at some point the whole idea of Christianity seemed . . . well, something of a mythologically-based approach to God, too heavily mythological.

For a while then I also tried being a practicing Quaker, one who went to the Meeting every Sunday. The Friends were OK, I liked the silent meditation . . . it was just that there wasn’t enough of it (people keep getting up to talk when you’re supposed to be sitting in silence). And there was something rather quaint about the whole Quaker set-up too, a bit stuck in the world of George Fox in 17th Century England and William Penn in 18th Century Philadelphia. Sometimes even pacifism can be a cop-out . . .

Thus, for quite a while, I just sat home on Sundays. But I didn’t feel right about that either. So now I’m a member of a Zen sangha that sits zazen every Sunday. Not that I find Zen to be without its own quaintness and mythology. We still pay homage and pay to the Buddha and his followers. But then again, I never heard anyone at the zendo say that we are Buddhists, and that we “believe” in Buddhism. That’s the nice thing about Zen; i.e., it rejects all “ism’s”, and all “ist” thinking. It is not an accident that there is no “Zenism”, and that we don’t call ourselves “Zenists”.

Nonetheless, most Zen leaders (we still have “teachers” and priests and leaders; Zen does not seem to overcome the needs of the ego) appear to  »  continue reading …