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Vajra Diaries: Raw Feed 8, When Atiśa Came To America

8/6/27 Dreamed I was dead last night and standing next to my lifeless form. A voice was telling me to get back into that form so I could really die. This because my conscious form still contained all the necessary elements for a real death to occur. This sounded odd to me because I was outside my body observing only that which could die but was being told by an omniscient voice that it was precisely that consciousness of death that needed to be inside the lifeless form to lose what was most important about the dying process. So I got back into my dead body and waited to lose that same consciousness in order for it to become real. Given I’d just been reading and researching Aryadeva’s 400 Verses, what does it say about his teachings and my understanding of them?  20/6 Thoughts about the harmful effects of early marijuana usage came to mind during puja this morning. A voice said, ‘it isolates the sweetness from memory.’ I later interpreted this as ‘one becomes less inclined to rememb...
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Vajra Comment: The Ever Coming ‘Crisis’ And The ‘Unraveling’ That Truly Liberates Us

In Generations (1991), the archetypes are identified as Idealist, Reactive, Civic, and Adaptive. In The Fourth Turning (1997), the terminology shifted to Prophet, Nomad, Hero, and Artist. Steve Bannon’s high-profile promotion of The Fourth Turning brought renewed attention to the whole framework — especially around the topic of Crisis. Crisis, analysed from a reformist position far to the left of Bannon’s, Klein’s Shock Doctrine argument, stripped to its mechanism, is this: crisis — whether natural disaster, financial collapse, or war — creates a window of political unconsciousness in the affected population. People are disoriented, institutional memory is disrupted, normal democratic resistance is suspended. Into that window, prepared actors move with pre-written legislation, pre-positioned contracts, pre-selected beneficiaries. The crisis doesn’t have to be manufactured to be exploited — but manufacturing it is simply the logical refinement of the technique. Her examples: Pinochet’s ...

Vajra Diaries: Raw Feed 7

13/4 Practice cultivating bodhicitta—love of all beings including oneself—until the sky opens up as a parachute for everyone. But one that hasn’t a single shape or color and is omnidirectional. It is seemingly everything already and yet because it’s completely in the ‘now’ it’s thought to be    ephemeral and nothing at all. It is us and not us, both that and not that, as well. Why then ask what color is your parachute? Better to have it open on its own and be surprised at its color. But what then if it never opens? Try to imagine that…hitting the ground from a great height. It’s OK. I’ve imaged that and didn’t physically die. This is similar to focusing on one’s being that is not a being nor a nonbeing. Then, gathering it all—one’s ontology—into a sum of experiences and stuffing it back into its parachute pack, imagining it as one’s primordial safety net. A security blanket your baby self has now outgrown. Consider this, has it been worth it? The pain versus the pleasure? Did ...