User:Master Nomi

Over the last 30 years, Paul Harrison AIA, a Los Angeles architect, has researched, practiced, and experienced many of the mystical teachings of the ancient Zen masters. These secrets of "No Mind®" hold knowledge of enlightenment, peak performance, mysticism, and death. Now Harrison has given voice to an alter ego, Master Nomi, to finally share the teachings revealed by the enigmatic Ancient Stone and the old scrolls that contain the Ten Paradoxes.

Harrison modeled Master Nomi after the 14th century Zen master Ikkyu (ee-cue), one of the notable Zen rebels and radicals who became known as the Crazy Clouds. Ikkyu was an unrelenting advocate of enlightenment through sexuality—the Red Thread of Zen. Despite his reputation for mischief, he was known to be extremely smart, and is still revered in modern-day Japan as a folk hero.

Master Nomi translates the Ancient Stone into a metaphoric compass of enlightenment and peak performance—a step-by-step transformational journey to Total Mental Fitness® through two important books: the 794-page treatise The Ten Paradoxes and the popular Where's My Zen? parable. The outcome—experiencing enlightenment, living in the Now, and achieving peak performance—is more accessible than ever before.

Harrison lives with his daughters, Chelsea and Allix, and their little Boxer, Kokoa, in their Zen-inspired urban retreat.

If your interested on how it all started, read on:

The Legend of Master Nomi

I discovered the ancient stone in 1979 on small island off the coast of Japan, while working as a carpenter on the demolition of a very old Japanese Temple. It was hidden under the floorboards above a utility basement. Along with the ancient stone, I found other broken stone pieces and several scrolls with Japanese characters. Also wrapped around the scrolls were six equations and words scribbled on a piece of paper. So I gathered up everything and when I left the Temple, I had one complete stone, several broken stone pieces, eleven scrolls, and six equations. And most important, I also left with an intense desire to find the truth behind the stone which led me on a long journey into discovering “Where’s My Zen?”

Now remember this was back in 1979 and I couldn’t just Google or go on the Internet, I had to do the research the old fashion way and go to the library and read journals and books. First, I had the scrolls translated and they turned out to be all paradoxes I didn’t understand. One of the scrolls contained the message: “The Power of No Mind”… No Mind, I had no clue as to the meaning of that phrase. Being an architecture student at the time, when I got back to L.A., I took the stone to one of the engineering labs and we recreated a model of the stone which is what I brought in tonight. I also recruited other students to help me decipher the fading words on it.

After that, I went straight to UCLA Bio-Med Libraries and their Psych/Education library and literally spent over a thousand hours in research. I had to make hand written index cards for every reference I found and I ended up with hundreds of them. I searched everywhere for the answer to the ancient Stone. Therefore, my research became very diverse and included Hindu philosophy, Yogic philosophy, Sufi Mysticism, Hebrew Mysticism, Christian Mysticism, Taoist writings, Zen, psychology, gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, hypnosis, personality theories, electromagnetic field theory, behavior modification, and Quantum physics.

Also during this time I was attending seminars, speaking directly with modern masters, and meditating about two hours a day using a technique I had learned back in 1977 called Transcendental Meditation. But, that technique was never very effective for me, so I began to experiment with other techniques I learned through the research and my talks with masters that I had met over this period of time. And I kept piecing together the equations, but still I did not understand their meaning. What I didn’t realize at the time was that this “process” I was doing of research, meditation, and having this constant “doubt” of not knowing what I what I was looking for became the basis for the “Where’s My Zen?” program. The “process”—“this actual process” of what I was doing was in fact changing my perception and awareness through a mechanism called neuroplasticity. The brain can essentially alter its synaptical connections and form new ones. Interestingly, when we focus we change ourselves at the level of the synapse.

Two years later, at one point--I felt as if someone took a hundred puzzle pieces and threw them into a river and ask me to find them and put them back together again. It seemed to me that the answer to the ancient stone was drifting farther and farther away. It was incomprehensible to think that all of this research in such diverse fields would ever amount to anything that related to the ancient stone and the scrolls.

Then one afternoon I was sitting there at my desk extremely frustrated and exhausted looking at all the hundreds of index cards, stacks and stacks of copies of at least two thousand pages of research articles, books that were all over my room, the ancient stone, the scrolls and the equations which I pinned up on the wall in front of me. Then, my attention was suddenly taken by the lemon tree outside my window. I began staring at one of the lemons until I completely lost awareness of myself. I was so absorbed in that lemon that I lost awareness of time and my surroundings. Then in an instant! Literally in just one moment of time …there was a shift of perception and I experienced No Mind … …Then, everything that was so puzzling and paradoxical just the few minutes before — became utterly simple. It was an unshakable reality and truth that went deep into my bones.

I looked down again at my desk and smiled and then began to laugh out loud at the comedy of the mind. In one flash of insight, the scrolls became the Ten Paradoxes, the equations became the six factors of No Mind, the broken stone pieces became The Sequence of the Stone, the ancient Stone became the mandala of “Where’s My Zen?”, and the “entire process” became the 800 page book called The Ten Paradoxes which documents my long yet rewarding journey.