chat

I've been dipping my toes - I recently got a copy of the Tao Te Ching and, given that it's poetry, has been joyous to read. I've also been learning how to meditate and practice mindfulness via some Buddhist content creators, as well as some literature from the late Thich Nhat Hanh, whose books, "The Miracle of Mindfulness", and "No Mud, No Lotus" affected me deeply.

The thing about meditation for me has been that it lets me step outside the storm of my own mind - I begin to step out of my thoughts, they become vivid hallucinations - the things that I experience as thoughts when I'm not meditating take on visual and auditory form - even hearing a fractional moment of it used to jar me out of my meditative trance, but lately i've been able to stay detached, and it becomes a window into my own internal processes.

I've been slowly reading from an English translation of the Quran, and at first i had a difficult time dealing with its accusatory tone and rampant misogyny, but I began to kind of understand the deeper points of its parables and the purpose of its structure, and it has begun to affect me as well.

I am not overly familiar with Shinto outside of a few bullet points on its cosmology, and the broadest overview of the belief structure and metaphysics. I feel pretty ignorant of the religious landscape of Japan more generally, and my understanding of 'eastern' religion outside of a narrow buddhist and taoist context is nil