Plotting the arc
I brought a book, Mountain Record of Zen Talks, back from New Jersey that I had bought way back when I was in college. I forget if I read it all the way through, but I'm pretty sure that this book was one of the reasons why I had to get away from my Zen studies of the time, and wandered and reconnoitered down a "Sufi path" for a bit.

The frustration I was having with Zen was that you start coming across a set set of terms that, once you think about it, don't mean anything. There are catchwords and concepts that you have to intuit, but who knows and who is to say if your intuition is really getting it or just falling into granola-crunchy, New Age crap? The Sufi and Islamic readings I came across helped explain the mechanics of the metaphysical concepts that I was stuck on in Zen.

I kinda think of Sufism as being to Islam what Zen is to Buddhism. Mind you, I don't think any of these identifiers and terms mean anything, and I don't care what they "really" are. I don't wear Buddhism on my arm. I don't like saying, "I'm Buddhist" – that's meaningless. That has to do with ego and identity, relative to the outside world, but nothing to do with what I really am. I borrow ideas and concepts to add to my experience and vocabulary for what I believe, and to supplement and fill in the many blanks where appropriate.

Anyway, this book is fairly kicking my ass now. Nothing groundbreaking, nothing particularly new, but this book is really good with its explanations. I understand why I was frustrated with it ten years ago, and I'm thinking this book isn't for beginners. I needed elements of these past ten years to understand this, or read it without getting frustrated.

For me, I'd even say that I needed my recent monastic glimpse to get this material, and that it's more geared towards monks than lay practitioners. But I think that's just me, because of my own background, preferences, and leanings. I wish I could have been more focused and gotten back to this sooner.