Being Home Alone with Corona is turning us into Buddhist monks (if we want). Siddhartha (the Buddha to be) left his pleasure palace and discovered old age, sickness, and death, and he was shocked like we are shocked when we are told we have cancer. THIS SHOULD NOT BE! But what can I do about it? Then Siddhartha saw a renunciate, a monk, a yogi, and was told that he was seeking the cessation of old age, sickness, and death.
Now old age, sickness, and death are metaphors for mental suffering, the surfing of time. When old age, sickness, and death come, you are out of time. Corona is a metaphor for being out of time. Being home alone is being out of time, out of the future, out of a place to go, out of something to do, out of entertainment, our of our usual habits and expectations.
Being Home Alone we confront just being here with nothing to do. I must discover how to sit with myself, to be with myself as a monk in a monastery with nothing but a room, a bowl, and a cushion.
Who are you before time began? Who are you before the future was important? Who are you before you had something important to do. Who are you? When we are lost in time we avoid relationship with the present moment just as it is. When we are lost in time, we avoid our self.
Corona is making us contemplate time and thinking about time, and time’s suffering. The Buddha said his teaching simply two things: suffering and the cessation of suffering. The cessation of suffering, of time and thinking, come spontaneously when you discover your essential goodness of Being within. You need nothing, to go no place or learn anything to be better than you are right now. If you cannot get to the Buddha, the Buddha will come to you.
The movie Home Alone is about being Home Alone, with nothing but your basic intelligence and being invaded by negative thoughts, negative mental states. Your parents are gone. All your protective systems are gone. You are home alone left to your own resources. You have to become McGyver. You have to become creative.
Corona comes to make us become McGyver, to make us creative, to invent our way out of this fix, this invasion. The Government, apparently, (thank you Mr. Trump) won’t help up. We are on our own with the invader.
Hi Ed! Nice to finally get here. Your podcast here is very good. I think video, really, is your medium. Some random observations. “Some of us sits and thinks and some of us just sits.” ~told to photographer Ben Shawn while on assignment for the FSA in the 1930’s
Do you REALLY still have your Christmas tree up?
What monastic teachers have told me is that the 272 vows and the structured life as a monastic are to restrain us from physical actions which generate evil karma and result in lower rebirth, the solitary mediation (at least in Tibet) is as easy, if not easier, as a yogi, whose vows are minimal.
When they are not solitary and are socially in the monastery, equally important are good acts whose good karma is dedicated to the full enlightenment of all sentient beings without exception as the ongoing fulfilment of your Bodhisattva Vow.
Every thing we must do can effectively be so dedicated: on the toilet you can imagine that your feces and urine is transformed into nectar that the Pretas can eat to relieve their immediate suffering. If you dedicate them with the correct attitude the Pretas *can* consume them, which they normally couldn’t. The general dedication of all merit accumulated in the monastery is made repeatedly by all monks at every session of practice.
If there is one thing in Buddhism that must be taken on trust is the process of Karma, Cause, and Effect which usually occurs over longer time frames than our individual lives. This deliberate trust is important because accumulating and dedicating of merit is the most effective thing we can do in the long term as practitioners living a social life, even if we are monastics.
I’m Bipolar and I have been in self-isolation largely in one room for about 13 years. I do this because novel stimulation sends me symptomatic into a horrible tornado of uncontrollable racing thoughts. I take medication for the chronic condition, but the only other way than solitude and reduced stimulation is to medicate an acute episode by taking large doses of drugs like Seroquel or Vistiril that give you about 30 minutes of normalcy followed by 72 hours of Zombification leading to another 8 hours of hangover. Staying in your room is a lot more pleasant.
I’ll stop by again when I can.
I’m rediscovering my blog as I inadvertently got in Facebook Jail. In trying to delete a banned image (a woman in a bondage mask as I was writing ironically about the fear of the mask as bondage) I reposted what I was trying to delete, four times it seems, so I was sent to jail with no layer.
When we don’t go to Zen, Zen comes to us. I was stuck by your imposed monastic way of life that is not a choice: Did Zen come to you?
Did my forced renunciation of Facebook reveal my addiction? Who was it that kept trying to erase the image while reposting it? Who did that? Facebook didn’t do it. I did it, but not my conscious I who was afraid of making Facebook angry and punishing me. So I created what I feared. Why..Did Zen come to me? We are greater than what we think we are. We think we are an island of consciousness in a great unconscious ocean, but it was the ocean that created the island.