Post Vajrayana in Kampuchea

     Though the time of death is uncertain for all but the omniscient, not to be properly prepared for death, anticipated or otherwise, indicates an overweening pride, a runaway self delusion, and an all-around poor spiritual education and training. In the last few years, I’ve been getting a particular feeling about untimely death. I can imagine falling off my motorcycle in front of an oncoming truck and all abruptly ending. It feels like an ultimately incongruous and terribly awkward moment. A kind of primal humiliation where life and being instantly become inert matter. The ultimate waste as a precious human life is loss to tragic, or even blackly ‘comic,’ circumstances.       Such unpreparedness of dying, especially as one gets older and privy to death’s degrading ‘striptease’, where all one’s youthful characteristics of physical strength and attractiveness are slowly removed, is cosmically shameful. As even ‘dumb’ animal appear to know how to do it...

      To all those, head in the cloud, caught up in all the bad news, m ight I suggest a deeply therapeutic trip to Cambodia, Kompong Kampot, and a visit to the ‘Rhinoceros Head Cave’? There, a Neolithic tribe, 3000 to 5000 years ago lived in a cave the interior of which could abstractly be compared to a Rhinoceros’s head. One can get lost in this cave, so do be careful. One can also be easily found, so be courageous. Primordial recourse awaits you there. Exquisite and fantastical accreted formations, stalactites, stalagmites, bats, and to our point, a ruined Hindu temples made of ancient brick, that the Khmer Rouge destroyed when they hid there in 1979.         There’s an allegory here (as there is with all caves) beyond ‘you can run, but you can’t hide.’ All tyrants and their sympathizers are eventually brought down, always, to recall some famous words of Gandi-Ji. Or, this old Eastern European and K’mai chestnut, first they came after my u...

     If one—figuratively speaking—‘masturbates’ in search of bliss, significance, and satisfaction, focusing on highly differentiated qualities and characteristics of desirable objects, one’s ego is reified by the creation of many expressed ‘selves’.  Deluded, sensualist individuals—their colorful palette of experiences likened to a collection of art, an oeuvre of expressed isolated aspects (‘pictures,’ if you will) of serial existences within this and other limitless disparate existences—suffer most from feelings of their own insignificance and uselessness infinitely more than the truly idle.       The inspired example of this not so happy dilemma comes from Martin Scorcesse’s,  Life Lessons entry to the anthology film, ‘New York Stories.’ In it, Nick Nolte, as a talented yet still unrealized painter, obsesses over each (to him) scintillating aspect of Rosanna Arquette’s discrete body parts emphatically shot in macro. As each discrimina...