22/7
There was a post on the Gaza holocaust and genocide where an exhausted old man finally makes it to the front of the line to receive his food from GHF, and then dies before our very eyes. My body jerked at that moment as the chi came off the screen and into me. While the pathos is overwhelming while thinking about his terrible plight—the injustice and cruelty of the entire situation—experiencing chi instead of rage against the Israelis was a positive sign, perhaps for us both. His release unto ‘Allah,’ in this case, an apparent absence of pain within a tortured being, and mine, into an experience of lightening quick clear light, both transcended the Zionist lies fueling the Gaza genocide.
19/7
‘Hell is other people.’ That was Sartre’s conclusion in his play, No Exit. Others, are just misery until you learn the whole point to them is that their misery is yours. A problem left unsolved. Tell them, “Misery is wasted on the miserable,” as Charles Grodin tells Louis CK in ‘the TV series Louie,’ to promote his true feelings. This is because feelings are no other than oneself, as much as there’s any real self having them. So why review them? Why not just accept and ‘be’ them as much as ‘being’ anything else? It’s like any job. When you first see a person, place, or thing that needs help or improvement, your instinct may might be to avoid it. Call it laziness. But, if one has moral disciple and diligence, the challenge of the necessity to take up the work instantly ignites motivation.
21/7
The container and the contained are the same. They are both form and emptiness at the same time. They both exist and do not exist at the same time. We see this in a series of dreams. They’re mostly covered or happening indoors even if outside. There’s an artificial seeming atmosphere. Within that is a building. Within that are rooms. Within these rooms are often things we want to do but they’re either thwarted or wholly accessible. We are multiple people at the same time granted wish fulfilling scenarios covered or murky in their nature. Clarity is at a premium and doesn’t dawn until the dream changes into a vision. Or we wake but remain, to some degree, unconscious. What’s characteristic is mostly there’s no pure witness to machination. Little or no awareness to what is deemed ‘intelligence.’ To awake within or without this awareness however is what’s called meditation. Awakening should be all of our main concern. But we live in a universe of sleepy heads, all of whom need a better alarm clock, as famously pronounced by the Fourth Way Master, PD Ouspensky.
Similarly, the internet is also a cover, a virtual reality within frames, even as the great expanse of a natural habitat is offered. These often gorgeous vistaramas of places few people have seen are boxed, ultimately, within our own intelligence. Because this so-called intelligence, or information is memories of aggregated sense experience, arising with little or no awareness that that’s all it is, it’s obviously bounded. This purview of an alleged ‘reality’ is a step backward from the awakening to which we should all aspire. A conventional experiencing of nature, through aggregated sense consciousness, is a superior place the awareness of our mentation can occur as it’s less virtual or dreamlike. In terms of meditation, one needs to eat the sky and not simply drool over it.
22/7
I had a dream where a bunch of school kids, and I was one of them, had taken a field trip to this ice mountain and were then forced to swim in this bone chilly water in a pool at the top. It was like a mild cold hell and I became chilled in my bed. I struggled to wake up and pull the covers over me. Then finally realized what I really needed to do was pee.
This came after getting emotionally involved in a song by Benny Mardones, called Into the Night, written in 1980. I heard the song, and then remembered it deeply, from a post showing a midlife Trump kissing a young girl. It made me reflect upon the fact I have a girlfriend who is fifty-years younger. Yet, it doesn’t seem so. She’s strong and very smart. She even has some grey hairs. Most of the time she behaves much wiser than most people much older than her. Her eyes are like no one else’s as the irises are indistinguishable from her pupils.
Perhaps her unique qualities come from being born and raised in Bodhgaya, India, not too far from the Mahabodhi Temple where there’s a crossed vajra deep below the ground. This is where Siddhartha, Gautama Buddha, at the end of six years of resolute practice, sat beneath the Bodhi Tree and meditated for 49 days to become fully enlightened. Just before his unique attainment, Mara, who embodied all complacency and self-clinging, tried his best to discourage young Siddhartha. Then Mara, manifested his own children as many young maidens and seductresses. But then unlike the singer in the popular ‘80’s video featuring Mardones’ song, he ‘left these young girls alone’, and accomplished his goal of complete and total Enlightenment.
Back to my dream, that cold water was very sobering and disciplining. No match, of course, to sitting in Mahakala’s cave for six weeks without eating, prior to being fed back to life by Princess Sugata with a bowl of rice pudding. That I experienced extreme chilling, instead of the usual physical discomfort from having to urinate while sleeping, had to do with the delusive spell cast by Mardones’ lyrics. Which elevated my emotionality, turning the relationship with an inspired, and inspiring, friend into romantic mush. So much so that I almost texted her the lyrics! But as one of my teachers said, tantric practitioners don’t often say romantic things like, ‘Oh I really love you!’ One is reminded of another set of globally popular lyrics, a few years earlier than Mardones’, that warns: “Then I go ahead and say something stupid like I love you.”
27/7
On the way to Sakya College I was thinking about the new version of black holes being like a hard drive, etched with two dimensional data, with their event horizon a holographic projector by which we experience our imaginary three dimensional reality. This advanced materialistic view, reminded me that most of us experience this conventional reality quite abstractly. As it’s filtered through the sense aggregates into manas, or ego consciousness, and experienced in a reduced version of three dimensions, except when the aggregates are transcended, and we actually ‘feel’ something else. A yogic ‘warmth,’ perhaps.
30/7
Autobiographically, concerning my ‘going back to teaching’ after fifty years, I needed to connect the first part of my life with the last part, after having been galvanized by the middle part.
1/8
Here’s a poem tying a Tibetan Lama’s superb directing efforts to a traditional teaching that analogizes a student’s attentive mind to a ‘cup.’ The movie, ’The Cup, directed by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, is a 1999 film about young Tibetan monks in India obsessed with the 1998 World Cup. Bent on watching the final match between Brazil and France, they must overcome many obstacles in organizing a viewing for the entire monastery.
Poem Written on a shedra Whiteboard
The real cup
of who wins or loses
is neither
upside down,
cracked nor dirty.
Upright, it's continuously
washed in rains
of dharma,
holding peace
for its winner.
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