Thinking With Your Magnanimus Mind

This is a wonderful description of why meditation is so important for everyone to practice daily. The author is extremely well-credentialed as: Humanistic Psychologist, a counselor in Applied Meditation Therapy®, a Buddhist Priest, a Soto Zen meditation master, and a mentor of Faith Body. He is also an internationally published author and teacher, a Japanese brushwork calligrapher, a webmaster, a Zen gardener, and a Zen Temple home maker. He holds memberships in the American Psychological Association, the International Association for Humanistic Psychology, and the Association for Transpersonal Psychology. I have linked this blog to his Meditation & Spiritual Life Practice Community, a social website where I am now a member. I suggest that anyone interested in learning more about Dr. Bonnici, his teachings and counseling, and his community, to click on this link. I am honored to present some of his writing here and hope that everyone else appreciates it as well.

Namaste'




THINKING WITH YOUR MAGNANIMOUS MIND
Magnanimous is courageously noble and open in heart, mind and spirit



An important part of our meditation life practice is to nourish an intimate, honest, and wondrous Way of observing things as they are. Then we are completely free to think about things with a curious, spacious and magnanimous mind.

Our Way is to observe and think about things without reinforcing prejudice, stagnation or rigidity. This means that we practice having a magnanimous mind that is soft and always open enough to see things as they are and to understand things as IT is.

When our mind is magnanimous, soft, and open it can also be called immovable mind because it does not stick to any thing that arises or close off to any use of language or any given direction of understanding through thinking or non-thinking. The embodied practice of this kind of magnanimous and immovable mind liberates us to think with sincerity, clarity, flexibility, integrity and creativity.

In our Way of meditation life practice, we say that our faculty of magnanimous mind and our spacious way of not-knowing are both stable and grounded. They are stable and grounded because they are soft and responsive to all things as they arise while being passionately curious and open to all directions of experiencing, languaging, thinking and non-thinking.

Just to see and to be ready to see things with a magnanimous mind is our practice of living meditation. If we are prepared to see and understand with magnanimity, there is no need to make any extra effort in directing our thinking.

Extra effort means to manipulate or direct our thinking in order to validate a one-sided position, a prejudice or prejudgment, a biased perception, a rationalization or an exclusive belief. When our ego-self attaches to an exclusive belief, our way of thinking becomes bound or restricted by that belief. This means that our thinking is directed more by the belief rather than our open and free magnanimous mind.

We must remember that it is the openness and readiness of our magnanimous mind that is bright wisdoming itself. This openness and readiness becomes the process of wisdoming in our thinking. By wisdoming, I do not mean our usual ego-self thinking, accumulated knowledge or something learned by reading and studying. Wisdoming is the effortless and grace-full thinking that naturally arises from our practice of resting in non-thinking, arousing bright wakefulness and alertness, and nourishing our passionate readiness to see beings and things with a spacious and magnanimous mind.

Our Way of witnessing, observing, and thinking with a magnanimous mind is grounded in our daily practice of being in the Core of our Only Moment Body. The point of our daily practice in relationship to our thinking faculty is to rest in our Moment Body Core, to be ready to intimately observe or witness things as they arise, and to freely and openly think about things with a magnanimous and spacious Way of Mind. This can be called thinking with our Big Mind or thinking with the Innate Wisdom of our Only Moment Body.

~ with blessings and encouragement, Dr. Bonnici
Andrew Shugyo Daijo Bonnici, Ph.D.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Zen Gardening (backyardgardeningtips.com)
• Scientists explore how Zen meditation reduces pain perception (cbc.ca)