Big Mind Big Heart: Finding Your Way
by Dennis Genpo Merzel
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Book Reviews of Big Mind Big Heart: Finding Your Way
Book Review: Embracing Our True Nature
Summary: 5 Stars
Western culture teaches us to focus on the good. This can offer merit. When we see the good in ourselves and others, we can create feelings of well-being. Yet, always lurking in the shadows are darker sides of our human nature. Seeing our shadow sides can create feelings of guilt and shame - a sense that we're not o.k. So we run and hide from them. When our shadows are particularly scary or deeply embedded, we may not even see them. When we repress the darker aspects of our nature, we carry a weight that limits our growth. Our shadows still emerge, but in covert ways that can damage our self and others. Conversely, allowing ourselves to embrace all aspects of our true nature can be immensely liberating. For it is only by bringing all aspects of ourselves into consciousnesss that we can truly awaken.
In Big Mind, Big Heart, Genpo Roshi offers us a wonderful gift. By knitting together the ancient wisdom of Zen with the more recent wisdom of Western psychology, he has created a technology accessible to anyone ready to face the challenges of inner work.
As a Research Director for one of the world's largest professional services firms, I find Genpo's work to be among the most important I have encountered across a wide terrain of material on learning and growth. I find it incredibly useful as I continue to develop my own self-awareness. I believe his work carries tremendous possibility for organizations, too - particularly in the domain of leadership development, where a shift in consciousness is of dire need.
We are at an inflection point in society and organizations where "how" we learn is every bit as important as "what" we learn. By seeing our dualistic nature (on the longer path of non-dualism) we can release our clinging to conditioned patterns, limiting ideas, and damaging behaviors - and open to new ways of being, multiple perspectives, and wise action. Thank you, Genpo, for offering us your wise and compassionate guidance for that journey.
Book Review: Experience a Shift in Perception
Summary: 5 Stars
The Big Mind process can be engaged and practiced successfully by anyone, almost regardless of their spiritual disposition. Genpo Roshi's Big Mind is the nearly official practice of Ken Wilber's Integral Institute.
The CD is an excellent dimension. It is more likely you will experience a shift in perception by using the CD.
From the book and CD you will pretty easily "get" nonduality in both its strictly Absolute and its human, everyday expression. If the process is pursued, you will be "building character, consciousness, and awareness so that our functioning is truly coming from wisdom and compassion." Also you will be aiding "in the effort to raise the level of consciousness on this planet at a time in history when it is so desperately needed."
Is Big Mind process about enlightenment or is it about a worthwhile way to live? Or both? What happens if at any instant in the Big Mind process you stop and ask yourself, "Who's doing all this?" The process absorbs pause and inquiry by isolating it, naming it as a voice, and filing it in the drawer of a triangle concept.
No matter what you do, Big Mind process has got you covered. No wonder corporate and government leaders endorse Big Mind. It's a structure that's gotcha.
One other thing that's not totally separate from what I just was talking about: For me, the CD holder unbalances the book, and its stiffness makes the paperback unfoldable. Removal of the holder will mutilate the page it's glued to. However, since electronic devices travel as easily as books, some readers will welcome the handiness of the CD.
Big Mind Big Heart is highly recommended for people who enjoy a structured life, align with Wilber's Integral teaching, and who desire nonduality.
Jerry Katz
Book Review: Nice, Very Nice
Summary: 5 Stars
The hope here is that readers will be aided by this response to other poor or mediocre reviews. One of these begins by informing us of the bonified (and great) expertise of the reviewer (no ego there!), and then criticizes the author, calling his work "superficial...pablum". The reviewer does this in part by disparaging the author's astrological sign! Talk about pablum! (Evidence presented by Dr. Roger Walsh at the University of California strongly suggests lack of validity in any astrological system; Walsh used measures developed by 300 astrologists themselves before being tested! All 300 astrologers went on to fail the very tests they had devised).
Even more ironic are reviewers' claims to expertise, which clearly weaken their arguements (particularly regarding Zen) by pointing to a classic Zen teaching story. A "learned man" approaches a Zen master in attempt to procure additional knowledge. He proceeds to lecture, blathering on and on about how much he knows. There happen to be a full pot of tea and two tea cups on the table, and as the professor talks, the Zen master begins pouring him some tea. As the professor goes on, the master fills his cup to overflowing, and continues to pour as the tea overflows the cup.
Exclaiming in surprise, the professor asks the master why he is continuing to pour.
The master responds, "Just as the tea overflows the cup, how can I teach you anything when your mind is full to overflowing?"
Some critical reviewers may very well know a lot ABOUT the enlightened mind; it seems likely that they do not know it experientially. In order to do this, we need to identify (via Big Mind Big Heart) with the enlightened (big) mind; we need to be "it". We are it (if we can just stop thinking and claiming expertise).
Book Review: truly profound wisdom
Summary: 5 Stars
While I don't think that the book can do justice to actually doing Big Mind with Genpo Roshi in a live setting, it does a great job at introducing people to an amazing process which extracts the fundamental wisdom from Zen and allows people, regardless of the amount of background to experience this wisdom with much less struggle.
Some of the critism of this book is that it doesn't do a good job at explaining Zen or Buddhism, but I don't think the book is meant to do that. It is written by a Zen master, but the book's function is to explain how the big mind process works and how to apply it in your life and fit it in with the rest of your Zen practice.
I think that anyone that reads that book and truly makes an effort to go into these voices and really become them will see the value in the process and the potential that it has. I also believe that once you can break that initial barrier in yourself and go into some of the darker, more uncomfortable voices and then practice this regularly with a real desire to change, it can profoundly change your life beyond ways that you could have ever imagined.
The book does a great job at explaining the process to you and although it doesn't have much to do with Zen tradition, it is extremely powerful at pointing you towards realizing the true wisdom of Zen, which I believe is to see that the self is not a solid entity and is just a series of constantly changing energies, patterns and conditionings, and the process helps us directly experience this and become comfortable with our new identity.
Book Review: Zen in the Market Place
Summary: 5 Stars
This book sets out in clear and elegant prose, a deeply wise and compassionate pathway. Free from the spiritual jargon and superior tone that can be so damn tedious and holier-than-thou in a great deal of spiritual writing, the book teases out steps along a pathway on which we can begin to own, embody, and awaken our dualistic and non-dualistic selves.
The process, which elegantly and powerfully synthesises Zen practice with western psychotherapy, encourages us to experience the self not as `I' but as `It.' And as we begin to loosen up and let go off our sense of the `ego-self,' we can also start the process of letting go of attachment to our non-dualistic self as well.
Having identified key aspects of our Small Self and Big Self, Genpo's Big Mind process goes beyond both to include and transcend them in an act of deep integration. By integrating what is `Human' in us, and what is `Being' in us, we may at last begin to glimpse what it really means to be a `Human Being.'
This is a book that makes the mystery of enlightenment accessible and available to all. And not just in a personal context, but in a professional and corporate context too. This is enlightenment for the market place - illumination for everyday life.
For those stuck in ego, read this book.
For those stuck in enlightenment, read this book.
It offers a pathway not only of deep liberation but of liberating laughter at our own ridiculous delusions too.