Our western viewpoint is that of standing on a river bank watching the river of time flow by..watching the world over there change…and we try to get in sync with this moving treadmill, but we cannot as long as one foot stays on the riverbank so we can have an experience of being in sync […]
Here’s Don Rickles roasting Sinatra ironically…Rickles infers Sinatra is a member of the mafia by feigning that Sinatra is going to kill him while he says Sinatra is an honorable man… The irony is that Sinatra is a great man/a bad man…Both at the same time…The good and the bad are One in the joke, […]
The ego or SOS, sense of self, is a viewpoint created for the scientist at the end of the Middle Ages when the European man broke out of the thousand-year Holy Roman Catholic Church and its hermetically sealed mythology that has suppressed Greek ideas. Suddenly it’s a brave new world ripe for exploration from a […]
Zen story….When Emporer Wu asked Bodhidharma who he was, the sage said: I don’t know and walked off… Did that mean that he would know who he was given more time to meditate? Or is he saying I am unknowable? Western science is built on the belief that given enough time and computer power everything […]
Your song caresses the depth of loneliness, O high mountain bird (Basho) ____________________ Mountains are very lonely, so still, so silent, so immense, so full of presence and being. The poet is caressing his loneliness with his song. He is the high mountain bird that goes far above other birds to sing of solitude […]
Wet with morning dew and splotched with mud, the melon looks especially cool (Basho) __________________ What, did the melon just run a race through the mud? I like the way Basho makes objects subjective, giving them feeling and personhood. When you walk with Basho through his very simple world it comes alive. Nature is alive […]
But for the woodpecker tapping at a post, no sound at all in the house. (Basho) _________________ We all have heard the woodpecker tapping, tapping…and the house must be very quiet to hear that tapping outside. But what is the house here? No thoughts in the house either. Thought are sound. Sound is movement. Thoughts […]
Singing, planting rice, village songs more lovely than famous city poems (Basho) _______________________ Why are village songs more lovely than city poems? Why are country people different than city people? What is the ground of each? Is city life artificial? Is the village in the body while the city is in the mind? Are family […]
Lonely silence, a single cicada’s cry sinking into stone (Basho) __________________ How unusual to associate sound with stone. The poets creates an intermediate zone where sense data is mixed in unfathomed ways to come up with a new sense that no single sense can be conscious of. The poet plays with sense portals like a […]
“Thinking isolates a situation or event and calls it good or bad, as if it had a separate existence. Through excessive reliance on thinking, reality becomes fragmented. This fragmentation is an illusion, but seems very real while you are trapped in it.” Eckhart Tolle (from The Power of Now) ____________________ Is reality good or bad? […]
“Whatever you learn through psychoanalysis or self-observation is about you. It is not you. It is content, not essence. Going b beyond ego is stepping out of content.” Eckhart Tolle (from The Power of Now) _____________________ What you observe as something— thoughts, emotions, feeling, concepts, psychological theories—is the separation of you The One) into two. […]
“There is no such thing as “my life,” and I don’t HAVE a life. I AM life. I and life are one. It cannot be otherwise. So how could I lose my life? How could I lose something that I don’t have in the first place? How could I lose something that I AM? It […]
“If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are are, then what’s left is who you are—the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined. Give up defining yourself—to yourself and others. You won’t die. You will come to life.” Eckhart Tolle (from The […]
We cannot climb Mount Everest without a base camp where we move up the mountain as we climb, and my base camp is the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra…This picture is from a book of paintings by a Japanese artist (damnit, it gave the book away and forget his name) who spent his life painting the Heart […]
Non-dualists scream the universe is an illusion and so are you…Isn’t this nihilism? Or solipsism where everything is you? Basically, this is the old argument of Idealism versus realism…just with new words…Is reality Mind or Idea or is it matter and form? So then this upstart Zen comes in and says Idealism is realism, realism […]
A Meditation on the Bodhisattva Vows… I vow to liberate all sentient beings, Uproot all blind passions, penetrate all dharma gates, and attain th great way of Buddha….All impossible vows, impossible quests…so what’s up with this, I ask? “At the top of a 100-foot pole, an iron cow gives birth to a calf.” There are […]
The impermanence of Buddha is so profound and simple we cannot fathom it…I have prostate cancer and it was Impermanence slapping me…MU!….I recall the moment with I got the diagnosis and observed my Sense of Self being shocked out of its belief in immutability, in permanence…Why…I was going to live forever…Death would not touch me..Impermanence […]
