Soh Wei Yu also mentioned his baseline experience as being similar to descriptions of Amitabha’s pure land in a recent post:

This is a world where nothing can ever sully and touch that purity and perfection, where the whole of universe/whole of mind is always experienced vividly as that very purity and perfection devoid of any kind of sense of self or perceiver whatsoever that is experiencing the world at a distance from a vantagepoint -- life without ‘self’ is a living paradise free of afflictive/painful emotions, where every color, sound, smell, taste, touch and detail of the world stands out as the very boundless field of pristine awareness, sparkling brilliance/radiance, colorful, high-saturation, HD, luminous, heightened intensity and shining wonderment and magicality, where the surrounding sights, sounds, scents, sensations, smells, thoughts are seen and experienced so clearly down to the tiniest details, vividly and naturally, not just in one sense door but all six, where the world is a fairy-tale like wonderland, revealed anew every moment in its fullest depths as if you are a new-born baby experiencing life for the first time, afresh and never seen before, where life is abundant with peace, joy and fearlessness even amidst the apparent chaos and troubles of life, and everything experienced through all the senses far surpasses any beauty previously experienced, as if the universe is like heaven made of glittering gold and jewels, experienced in complete gapless directness without separation, where life and the universe is experienced in its intense lucidity, clarity, aliveness and vivifying presence not only without intermediary and separation but without center and boundaries - infinitude as vast as an endless night sky is actualized every moment, an infinitude that is simply the vast universe appearing as an empty, distanceless, dimensionless and powerful presencing, where the mountains and stars on the horizon stands out no more distant than one’s breath, and shines forth as intimately as one’s heartbeat, where the cosmic scale of infinitude is actualized even in ordinary activities as the entirety of the universe is always participating as every ordinary activity including walking and breathing and one’s very body (without a trace of an ‘I’ or ‘mine’) is as much the universe/dependent origination in action and there is nothing outside of this boundless exertion/universe, where the purity and infinitude of the marvellous world experienced through being cleansed in all doors of perception is constant. (If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern. - William Blake)

You know all the Mahayana Sutras (e.g. Vimalakirti Sutra), old Zen talks about seeing this very earth as pure land and all the Vajrayana talks about the point of tantra as the pure vision of seeing this very world, body, speech and mind in its primordial unfabricated purity as the Buddha field, palace, mandala, mantra and deity? Now you truly get it, you realise everything is really just like that when experienced in its primordial purity and perfection, and that the old sages have not been exaggerating at all. It is as much a literal and precise description of the state of consciousness as it is a metaphor. As I told John Tan before, Amitabha Sutra’s description of pure land resembles my living experience here and now. “To me it just means anatta. When what’s seen, tasted, touched, smelled are in clean purity, everywhere is pure land.” - John Tan, 2019. "If one is free from background self, all manifestations appear in clean purity in taste. Impurities from what I know come from mental constructions." – John Tan, 2020

In addition to what I said above you have every right to pursue kensho with or without any one’s permission, be they Buddhist or not.

I have to say to assert that it is wrong or a waste of time to pursue kensho is not in line with what Buddha/Dogen/etc etc intended. Quite the opposite in my not so humble opinion. Take that as you will .

Also even if you procrastinate etc that does not preclude kensho . It’s more a matter of whether you are willing to inquire with sincerity (not about what anyone else tells you it’s important to inquire about, rather what is most fundamentally important to you), and what you are willing to let go of.

Infact I never talk about zen or anatta to my family members; contrary I encourage my parents to chant Amitabha and visualize pureland according to what their teachers taught them. It is a dedicated daily practice for my parents. These practices are much more skillfull, intuitive and beneficial for them imo. My dad has very fruitful experiences and he even has dreams of clarity of pureland and trigger many valuable insights, he just discussed with me one of his experience and insight yesterday.

I know many great zen teachers like Ban Zhan, Han Shan and Tien Tai Chih-I also encourage pureland practice. Even the late zen master Sheng Yen also spoke positively of pureland practices. In China, it is not uncommon to see chan and pureland dual practices 禅净双修 but Japan I m not sure, never heard of any.

I also don't buy their ideas. If there are no other temples near you, you can always look for online groups or create your own meditation group.

Also I had this cheeky thought: you are procrastinating your practice and now you found a place that procrastinates it till death (don't take this comment too seriously)

Yea, I'm not necessarily going to expect the same insightful conversations I can have around HERE, but I seem to have become stuck in a loop of thinking about insight and never really putting myself in any situation where I could really concentrate and progress; but I feel comfortable enough with my 'universalist' interpretation of the sutras to have quite a nice time doing it at the ceremonies. As long as I have a Sangha such as this one in here, I can also have some progress with theirs.

The way I do it is to stack it onto another habit that I do daily. In this case it's waking up. So every time I wake up I meditate. It could be brushing teeth as well. It's just important that you know that every time you do x you will do y.

I'd also start with something small like 10 or 15 min of guided meditation. It's more important to build the habit first before trying to increase the time.

And of course, check in with yourself what's really motivating you to do this. That can help to see how you can strengthen the motivation so you are more likely to follow through when things are a bit tough.

Traktung Rinpoche:

Between that death and this birth there was no fracture in the continuity of awareness. Between the two was a moment, a brief moment, spent at Tsog in the pure land of Zangdokpalri. Translucence and joy permeated everything and then Guru Rinpoche told me to return to this place, this time, this circumstance. I was not overjoyed (laughter) and what followed was the conversation which became the Dakini Night Poem.

In this life my first conscious feeling, for it was long before the brain had acquired language, was “How do I return to that realm of wonder?” This was like a thorn in my heart, a Fisher King Wound, that plagued me throughout my life and pushed me to discover the answer.

It was only in resolving the duality of awareness appearance into the singularity of AwarenessAppearance …. only in coming to live in the knowing that everything, moment by moment is embraced by and resolves in timeless awareness – the luminous divinity that is Zangdokpalri that this ache was removed.

That brief, all to brief, moment in Zangdokpalri was 100 years here and then suddenly, all to suddenly, with a whoosh and whirling this life with its encroaching veils of forgetting. Suddenly 9 pounds 14 ounces of flesh and hospital lights. This life has been a game of concealing revealing ….. the movement of a chess piece on the game board. To be a chess piece in the hand of Guru Rinpoche is the greatest of joys – though I did not think so at the moment of birth. – t.k., from A Moments Pause ...interviews forming a autobiography

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“Greg is a well-known innovator for having combined the ancient “direct-path” method of self-inquiry with modern electronic media. Nondual inquiry includes the powerful teachings of Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism. Greg studied Advaita Vedanta through the Chinmaya Mission, Sri Atmananda, Jean Klein, and Francis Lucille. He studied the Mahayana teachings of Pure Land Buddhism through Jodo-Shinshu, and studied Chinese Middle-Way Buddhism through the lineage of the pre-eminent scholar of Chinese Buddhism, Master Yin-Shun of Taiwan, P.R.C., author of The Way to Buddhahood.”

It's quite interesting to see this duality in the Mahayana teachings between the laypeople and the monks!

Buddhism's purpose, in the end, is to burn even the Buddha, is it not?

But the more I learn about and practice mantras the more vast a subject they seem! No wonder the ancient Indians felt it could be an entire science! And of course there are so many different practices involving mantras, so I imagine there is no one size fits all answer. I think Nafis Rahman posted some interesting resources about mantras a while back, I’ll see if I can dig them up when I get a chance.

I take an open stance about Nenbutsu. It is said one should 'abandon oneself in Amitabha', so I do it; the difference is that it seems most people surrender in faith/hope of a pure land that comes after death, and I focus on surrendering the feeling inside me that "there is something to be done". For me, that's a very honest way to still 'seek salvation', whilst nevertheless undestanding that the Pure Land is HERE AND NOW, and asking for Amitabha to 'save me' by allowing me to see and feel it, unfiltered.

Feels weird to say one should die first and then start worrying about the oxygen masks...