Author: Magid, Barry
Call Number: 294.3927 M194N 2013
Book Description from amazon.com:
In this inspiring and incisive offering, Barry Magid uses the language of modern psychology and psychotherapy to illuminate one of Buddhism's most powerful and often mysterious technologies: the Zen koan. What's more, Magid also uses the koans to expand upon the insights of psychology (especially self psychology and relational psychotherapy) and open for the reader new perspectives on the functioning of the human mind and heart. Nothing Is Hidden explores many rich themes, including facing impermanence and the inevitability of change, working skillfully with desire and attachment, and discovering when "surrender and submission" can be liberating and when they shade into emotional bypassing. With a sophisticated view of the rituals and teachings of traditional Buddhism, Magid helps us see how we sometimes subvert meditation into just another "curative fantasy" or make compassion into a form of masochism.
My Read:
Page 15--Perfection and change aren't opposites; they turn out to be synonyms. Not only don't we have to change in order to become perfect, our perfection manifests moment after moment in change itself.
Page 16--It was also a revelation that nothing is hidden. Everyone was fully displaying who they were. There was nothing more "behind the scenes" to uncover or decipher, the way my usual psychoanalytic mindset would lead me to think. There was both clarity and acceptance of each person being just who he or she was....For the rest of us, realization is never once and for all, and old doubts and old habits will resurface to be dealt with over and over throughout our life. Yet doubts and old habits are part of how we twinkle like that star. As is sickness, old age, and death. And delusion and joy--the full spectrum of life as it is.
Page 17--The koans that follow can all help us see who really are, especially those parts of ourselves that we have, sadly, for one personal reason or another, tried to turn away from. We have all blinded our self to parts of life we reflexively have felt too painful to behold or face directly.
Like Shakyamuni, we must be able to look up and say, "That's me."
Page 23--You can't answer by somehow standing outside of life, examining it and offering your description. You yourself must become the answer..We have natural human desire to be understood, and feeling understood in itself gives us a kind of strength to face the difficulties life brings.
Page 126--Boundaries must be maintained, differences respected, turns taken, acknowledgements made that, at some very important levels, you are not me. That is one very important meaning of love.
Page 154--To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly. When you first seek Dharma, you imagine you are far away from its environs. At the moment when Dharma is correctly transmitted, you are immediately your original self.
Page 174--Acceptance can only happen with surrender.
Page 175--Acceptance feels like a starting point. Killing the ego can not be equivalent to crushing our spirit.
Page 176--True surrender has no goal. True surrender kills completely any expectation or gaining idea.
Page 178--Unless we are prepared to admit that our own good intentions may mask a deeper unconscious need to always be seen as good, as always right, as always clear, we will never be able to acknowledge the ways that we have inadvertently hurt the very people we are trying to help. "We have met our enemy, and he is us."
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