EastWest Works offers original group programs and individual sessions in distinct practice areas. We work-play with people to develop personal awareness, insight and perception, emphasizing discovery and reliance upon abilities natural to all. Our works grow through structured trainings and explorations in gatherings, labs, classes, workshops, etc.
In service to community, we operate as a low-profit organization.
At times we charitably collaborate through arrangements with other entities, and have no endowment or sponsor. Additionally we provide complementary, custom and outsourced services for other enterprises.
Our evolution stems from undulation. This meme signifies and represents the importance of understanding frequency, oscillation, waves and an idea of east-west/ lateral/ sideways movement, ripple effect, cyclicity, yin yang.
Going more deeply into this affords, or brings up a property/ quality of remembrance.
Our works also suggest that of going in, movement from inside and inward, and returning, respiration. Formerly our org employed the Japanese suffix "-in", referring to a subtemple of a larger complex. So EastWest Works, represents a subtemple of life, not from some formal faith or organization, but as a memory within each of us, beginning with your very own, innermost center.
A note on an angle of repose: the Pali and Sanskrit derived Bodhi, stands for the understanding of a Buddha (a realized person). Bodhi simply means the path of realization, awakening, and therefore falls into a directional rather than a personality based word.
By de-emphasizing the personages and employing the groundwork term Bodhism, we continue the work of Zen and pay respect to the teachings of all buddhas and sages that gave and give root to the variety of sects that now make up certain faiths.
This emphasis returns the focus to the original psychosocial and therapeutic aspects of this particular information trove and its practices. Let us sit under the bodhi tree, and bring ourselves to bodhimanda, the seat of centrality and realization.
Our earthly habitat thrives in diversity. Each being, a child of this Earth, belongs. Every type of person, animal, plant, natural object, element, creation and happening belongs, and is suffused with animate force.
The nauseous plunder of our earth and its noxious consequences endow fanatic monocultures that result in parsimonious accumulation and use of resources, uneven distribution of such, and senseless violence due to the resultant fear of lack and belief in false equity, or inequity.
Surely these problems must point to a more relevant way. What way is that? In what way can we redirect our attentions, so as to establish coherent sustenance?
Moving and living in harmony with respect of nature can lead us further, and root our shared humanity. Recognizing and reasserting biodiversity, and heartfelt essentials; designing and including them into our reality will bring dignity, rightfelt treatment and proper alignment to our situations.
When humankind decides to live in pluralistic cooperation with holistic sharing, then causes of human and earthly injustice will also reduce, and imbue our species with a more peaceful countenance . . .
To care for the Earth means to care for one another. Think globally, act locally.
Downplay it! De-emphasize and de-dramatize the intensity of about what you're going to do with, and maybe to, others. It isn't worth it. Save your heightened emotion for a right time, otherwise you and others will tire of it awfully fast. Stop making absurd and useless claims. Slow down your internal tempo and tune into a deeper vibration.
When you downplay it, you take a moment not to escalate tension, to keep it cool, to move freely.
When you downplay it, be careful not to diminish and discount yourself or others, just decrease what's out of proportion. Usually the need to downplay is in response to something that's been created due to artificial, rather than genuine reasons. Do it within yourself, ask why something is so important to you.
If it's important does it really call for the type and amount of energy your putting into it at this moment?
Downplaying itself isn't really a way to bypass the importance of anything, be deceitful or dismissive. Rather, it's a skill you can develop to accomplish balanced communication with new avenues of depth and observation.
Are you constantly playing things up, giving too much oxygen to situations? Now you can play down: reduce the hype.
Everybody lives in emergent reality. That reality is a continual growth that erodes preconceptions and is seeded by the application and consummation of knowledge, plus the inevitable nature of change, foreseen and unforeseen, explicable and inexplicable.
Sometimes what emerges is gross, large and surprising. At other times it could show up as small and nuanced.
Emergent reality takes the shape of new ideas that better fit the zeitgeist. New species, tools and technology that must infer and create new networks and systems, new relationships that begin to, and do frame our experience and perception in novel ways. What emerges is not novel for novelty's sake, but harbored by extant reality, and sometimes squelched by it. Yet, it's unstoppable; and by failing to reshape ourselves, we can make it monstrous.
What does your emergent reality present to you, personally and en masse? You have agency, you have interconnectedness. Nothing is separate, yet we live in a manifest reality of precipitates.
You emerge, you're emerging, every moment, every day. This emergence, is not an emergency. Tune into it!
Flux not only connotes a concept, but our ability to do it. How do you do flux? You change, adapt, flow. You adjust to change, and/ or you implement change.
Your ability to flux means that you're aware that the base state of everything is always changing. Some change is geological, and imperceptibly slow, and other change is immediate.
Some change is impossible to force, while other change happens without our intent. We can change with hesitation, as the situation might reek like stale putrid water in a Summer bog, while we might also welcome it like a refreshing scent of spring on the breeze.
People are always changing, they just sometimes think they're not. It's much healthier to realize that we're in a changing environment, and that we're changing creatures.
Impermanence can be seen as the negative aspect of the principle of flux. We don't act impermanently, yet realize the impermanent nature of all things.
To resist this impermanence, more or less equals pain, and even extinction. Some say we're born to die, or that we're meant to burn. Flux is life itself, so don't cut it short. Roll with the punches, and change to change!
What and/ or who is Inyo? Well, if you've been to an Inspired Voices or Inyo Dialog gathering, you'd know that Inyo is an information stream that colludes and speaks through Inoshi as a trance voice.
Pronounced: een-yoh, this voice also falls into the primordial, immortal, cosmic and channeled realms of intelligence.
Besides engaging participants at our monthly circles, people may schedule private sessions with Inyo. Inyo commonly gives essence names to those who request one.
What are isms? In materials science they are properties of elements, such as magnetism. In arts they're movements and styles. In people, they're idea complexes that we subscribe to that we usually think are harmless; belief systems and their territories. They're also the background for things we're into that we don't know we're into, that we often impose upon others without awareness and consent.
Activism, anarchism, capitalism, communism, environmentalism, humanism, Marxism, narcissism, pacifism, racism, radicalism, realism, religionism, socialism, utilitarianism, etc.
For example, you might wonder how a religious ism (a faith) could cause problems for people. No doubt they do, when adherents to a religious ideology cling to it with absolute inflexibility, zealotry, forced conversion and even violence. Then faith becomes a form of extremism, fanaticism and radicalism.
Fanaticism is an all consuming and all encompassing ism that masquerades as other isms. If one's faith calls one to be so exclusive as to disparage others that have good intentions and honestly walk in peace, it's a fanaticism mimicing religion.
There are so many isms it'd ruin this article if we were able to post a complete list!
Why not become more aware of your particular ism network? This can be done through thoughtful contemplation, meditation and naming and studying the notions that you hold. Maybe you'll see more clearly what motivates you, what frames of references you and others have been socialized into.
Our point is that it's a helpful exercise to look into what isms a person has wittingly, and unwittingly subscribed to and involved themselves with. Kudos to you for having read this far, for looking, and for laying down some isms that you've tried on and have found aren't supportive!
What's this "no rank" business? Elsewhere in these pages we mention that Inoshi acts as a no rank Zen guide; so let's unpack that.
No rank means; no rank, no hierarchy, no level, and no status. In Zen practice, this no rank non-status is a kind of prized way of being. It's seems paradoxixcal, but that's Zen.
The typical phrase is "a true man of no rank". Let's change that to "a real person of no rank", since a man is not a woman, and vice versa. And, for "true", well, we'll leave that alone for now.
In Rinzai Zen (known as Linji Chan in Chinese) there exists a koan attributed to the personage of Rinzai on this topic. However, rather than work up an interpretation of this koan, we're simply going to lift it, and use it.
When instructing Zen, EastWest Works and its teacher/s proclaim no rank. We do not focus on lineage, being a dharma heir, obtaining a dharma seal (inka), or a transmission from the Zen ages.
Instead, we encourage vigilance and do our best not to be manipulated by certain groups and some religious organizations that mask themselves in benevolence, make false claims, promise transformation, instill fear and use their power to control our bodies and lives for the worst.
When groups vet a spokesperson it's understandable that they have need to employ a system of checks and balances. While that may be the case, we question their methodology. Who's fit to determine another's qualification (rank), and who can tell who has Buddha (awakened) nature?
Why not keep it chill and no rank it.
Zen simply means meditation. It generally does not produce a lot of excitement. In fact, for those excitable types and others, zen may help produce calm, sober in the moment attention.
The word zen comes from the Sanskrit word dhyana, which after migrating to China became channa, or chan, then thien in Vietnam, seon in Korea, and zen in Japan.
Meditation practice is something we do in the body, and can bring to all our ways of life. In monastic environments meditation is a kind of work, and work a kind of meditation.
There's a zen saying that captures the gist of this, that goes: Before bodhi: chop wood, carry water. After bodhi: chop wood, carry water. Bodhi can mean awakening, enlightenment, realization.
Zazen means sitting meditation. First one learns to sit in a quiet setting and practice, to manage the body, then deal with its contents. Finally it might be spoken about, and when it is, it's often instructive, “Have a cup of tea.”, rather than descriptive.
Whereas various forms of Buddhism have built up volumes of religious doctrine, high pageantry and philosophy, Zen emerged as a line with a frank disdain for language. Language is seen as sticky, limiting, and unable to transmit or transfer the fundamental(s) of reality itself. It doesn’t mean that we can’t find words useful, but that they are not the end all and be all of experience and phenomena.
Could it maybe be that language conditions our very thoughts and deeds? If so, what does that bring forward for you?
Words fail, and words pale. Or rather, when words can't seem to capture the moment, the awesomeness, the exquisiteness, then maybe, just maybe the sublime has become apparent. The sublime is that which remains unvoicable, inmanifest, unexplainable and inexplicable. Some prefer to think of it as the vast subconscious, in which case though we're unlimited in our potential, the sublime makes up most everything.
Science's recent focus on the domain of dark matter evidences this. Even when dark matter becomes satisfactorily explained, there will be more, sublime.
We can not rid ourselves of the sublime, however it seems that we often do not acknoweledge it, its neccesity and the helpfulness of admitting as a species, though you've come a long way baby, humanity still has much to learn, and bring into language.
Why get in touch with the sublime, and how? Why, so you have one word to speak about it, if you wish, when you experience it. Yes, you can experience not mentally knowing, and sensing the grandeur of existence, the ineffable. You don't have to be a poet or inebriated on drugs to do so either.
At EastWest Works we invite you to find and appreciate the sublime, through meditation, inquiry, self study and practice. It's not hard to do, it just often gets ignored. After all, why let the sublime touch you when you can be distracted by a device, or a thought? How do you talk or share about something that expresses itself outside of words?
Take a moment, even now, it doesn't have to be monumental, but intimate, close, present.
We permute first a vein of zen in the body. One needs to learn, to work on, and know how to sit, to meditate.
Rest in the fundamentals: and instead of zen mind beginner's mind, have zen body beginner's body. The practice of zazen (sitting meditation), being in the meditative body, brings us into the right space to consider zen teachings and the so called "mind".
To that end, for those wishing to explore concepts of zen rooted faith and philosophy. we've created another page, with some essentials. Don't worry, it's not the numerous and exhaustive Buddha's Lists.
However, and to reiterate, before you subscribe to any ideas therein, we suggest that you learn zazen, you cultivate a practice.
That means some regular dedicated time to sitting meditation. To do that, you'll need to find a teacher; not just a video, or a book.
Learning to sit requires tactile adjustment, and instruction on what to do with yourself, thoughts and emotions. Contact us to get started or improve your practice, whether already in the zone or not, you're welcome to meditate with us. We're here, for you.