I confess I could not stand anything to do with a monastery, be it Christian, Buddhist, orthodox you name it.
I was so happy receiving the "Four Ways" talk when I learnt that I didn't have to live in a monastery somewhere to walk the path back to God.
The catch is, the more one works on oneself the more one sees how much of a distraction life is.
One would progress in awakening and psychological work a lot more if one had big blocks of time at their disposal to use in meditation, prayer, contemplation on the consciousness etc. and a whole lot less to worry about like work, bills, food, house, car, people, internet, phone, family etc.
So one is in life, being tossed around by the forces of distraction and one is getting nowhere slowly.
The only resort is to make one's life a monastery. That is whatever one does, make it into a practice that will serve the improvement of awakening and the furthering of our psychological transformations.
Driving, typing, talking, walking, bus riding, cat feeding, meal preparation, fire lighting, eating, reading, texting... all have to become a practice. That way we begin to live in a monastery called life.
Of course the main idea of a monastery is isolation from life. So we have to create that isolation not with a physical building and community but within ourselves using practices done with our consciousness.
End (3734).
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