Do you believe this?

We, ourselves, are made of many individual cells, yet we are individual. These little beings move in such connected harmony, that we take ourselves to be individual. Get it? Maybe this video that I found on Cliff Pickover’s very weird site will help you understand.

I heard something on the radio about jazz musicians. Jazz musicians heads turn off when they play - the analysis/thinky part virtually turns off and they just sort of flow out with music. Have you noticed that jazz musicians close their eyes a lot? Eyes are very judgmental things - you know. Covering the eye-balls with the eye-lids I betcha works out pretty well for opening up with some sort of flow.

I have paintings on my desk and on my wall. My on-the-wall the painting is a group of rabbits huddled around a crouching kid who is focused on touching a rabbit group-member who is wearing sunglasses. He has to crouch so as not to be emblazoned by the dragon breath of another hopper who is hopping through a hula-hoop suspended from some unseen ceiling by a bow-tied string. With unshakable determination he focuses on the success of touching the weird one. I’m not being cryptic - that is the title of the painting - “I want to touch the weird one”. In a world where the status-quo is rabbits constantly blowing fire and jumping through hoops, a rabbit with sunglasses stands out as something finally worth getting interested in.

The painting on my desk, the off the wall painting, so to speak, is a of jazz musician gazing out of his world with tired and respectful eyes. I’m guessing at all this by the way. I guess that he is a jazz musician because of the patterns flowing through the air around him - even though there aren’t any instruments. There seems to be the movement of jazz there.

Jazz ain’t dead

I am working hard these days writing web applications. You do know that I am a programmer, right? Maybe you don’t know that it is not my tendency to work hard. You’ll see that so far there is not much reference of computers and programming and web applications on this blog. I am now immersed in all things Internet. I didn’t grow up in this world - I was 17 when I first used what was then a fairly obscure Internet. So I’m kind of an old man in this particular technology world. The whole day is busy with work now. As a result, I’m not day-dreaming so much - I seem to be more practical than before. Indeed immersing myself into work is very down to earth, actually. Many good spiritual teachers have said that work can be a very good practice - not necessarily something to avoid. Why do I say, ‘Not necessarily’? This reveals some old attitude of mine: Sometimes work can become the whole game - progressing, increasing, creating. You can live for work - let it define who you think you are. I have felt a lick of that living-working myself now that I have actually spent a day or a few days focused and creating. But I’ll tell you - its not necessary to live for anything - living just happens all the time. Haven’t you noticed?

That’s an important point. Living happens spontaneously. Not understanding that Living happens leads to some of us not wanting to retire because of an idea that retirees become complacent and and lose all their reason for for living. One is sure that one will just fall apart. So, here, a person “lives to work”. Or it might be better to shove this horse under the cart - and say he “works to live”.

But living just happens - there is no work. When we live to work, something is really being ignored - some basic quality of breathing and communicating and adapting. Hearts beat, suns set, pain increases and decreases. You and me - we are in this world and it is just happening like that, haven’t you noticed?

But life accommodates all of this. Everything is like this - art, science, spirituality, work, wives, children, the good, the bad and the ugly. All of these things are life spontaneously. They are each a grain of sand in life.

Life is jazz.

Typing on a keyboard. First a letter, then a word, sentence, paragraph web post. It goes like this:
Big Bang, Immaculate Creation (your choice), hydrogen, helium, etc, suns, nitrogen, planets, life, humans, Americans, Chris Young, Beesucker, typing on a keyboard, a letter, a word, a sentence. I hope you enjoyed it.

“Yellow Hatted Salute” by Claudia

“I Want to Touch the Weird one” by Stephen J. Yazzi

Rinpoche said today: “Those who say they are in the Mahayana group, are not Mahayana.”

We are not Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Atheists or anything else. We are, all of us, simply human beings trying to connect with ourselves - these labels are just ego-decoration.

What do you think? Leave a comment already!

We didn’t pick just any wolves for this project. We picked the ones that could help us and get along with us. Dogs are dumber than monkeys and other mammals in many ways, but they excel at one thing: interpreting human behavior. Three years ago, scientists tested this talent in wolves, adult dogs, puppies raised in households, and puppies raised in kennels. The wolves couldn’t read humans well, but the puppies could—even the puppies raised in kennels. Through selection, we’ve hardwired human compatibility into dogs. We’ve made a species in our image.

Link to Article

I’m a big fan of optical illusions. This is a new one to me. Go here, stare at the black dot for 30 seconds and then move your mouse over the image. You will see a blue sky and green grass for as long as you keep your eyes still. Does anyone out there still believe everything they see?

What is suprising to me isn’t that my eyes are fooled in the first place. It is due to a phenomenon called ‘after-image‘. What is remarkable is that the illusion remains for as long as your eyes are still - the initial mistaken perception remains until it is corrected by new information (scanning with the eyes).

Link to Optical Illusion

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More Posts about Illusions

The fact that man produces a concept “I” besides the totality of his mental and emotional experiences or perceptions does not prove that there must be any specific existence behind such a concept. We are succumbing to illusions produced by our self-created language, without reaching a better understanding of anything. Most of so-called philosophy is due to this kind of fallacy. - Albert Einstein

Buddha said that we are living in Samsara. A way to think of Samsara is that all of our pleasures are temporary and impermanent. By grasping at pleasures we necessarily suffer because those things will go away. Then we will feel bad - then in some time we will feel better, setting ourselves to feel bad again. We go up and down and around in circles chasing temporary happiness that is dependent on outside and impermanent things. That’s Samsara and that’s how most of live.

Now a lot of time I use the word, ‘we’ when I discuss these things. We means ‘me and you’. I should say ‘most of us’, perhaps, because there could be a high level Bodhisattva or Buddha reading these things. Of course they know I’m not including them in that ‘we’. So is it totally presumptuous for me to say that this is how the majority of us live our lives? Well, in order to find out some analysis is needed. Here’s an interesting insight. There is a website called ‘we feel fine‘. They go out and search blogs, thousands of blogs for any sentence with “I feel” in it. Then it grabs those sentences and aggregates them into reports, so at least from the blogging community you can see a running list of people’s feelings. It’s really quite a strange thing to read all the feelings. So take a look, go to the site, start the app and then click ‘mounds’. If everything is going as usual, you will see that the most common feeling is ‘better’, then right after that is, ‘bad’. I see this as circular - better, bad, better, bad, better, bad. Like that. The reason it goes like that is because people are depending on outside things for their happiness!! It’s true. Those things we have no control over and they change. Our relationships change, our cars get old, our bodies oxidize! So if we rely on things like this we will necessarily go from good at the start, to bad as they change and then good again as we find a new object to depend on.

So what’s the alternative? I’ll tell you about a person I met at a Zen sitting once. His name was Creed and he had had a tough life - had problems with drinking. I asked him how he came to Zen. Hew was in the military and one day he was in a hammock on the Mediterranean Sea with his unit. They had eaten very well - delicious seafood. His stomach was full and he had this really wonderful view of the sky and as he watched, the sun began to set. He watched the sky for maybe like a half an hour and he became just full of bliss. He lost himself into the sunset, going with the clouds and changing with the colors. He was really blissed out - a rare experience but one that many of us can relate to. Then the show ended, the sun went down and it was beginning to get dark. He came back to himself and then suddenly he realized that bliss did not come from the sunset - from out there. The sky didn’t reach out and penetrate him and put bliss in him. That bliss lay inside of him always as a potential, it was his, but he didn’t have control, he didn’t own it. He didn’t like the idea that he was dependent on these outside things and so he started to search for a way to connect with that bliss in a complete, non-dependent way. He eventually found himself in Scottsdale sitting Zazen with us. I didn’t see him again after that time, but I really enjoyed his company and his story inspired me. This is a story of renunciation and true seeking, it is very beautiful. To understand this and to attain this is to be free from Samsara forever.

So I really hope that all those people out there feeling bad, better, bad, better, can connect with their deepest potential and soon become happy without reliance. Then I hope that they help others to reach the same state.

Take care everyone!

Oh, and thanks, danimator, for the link!

Link to We Feel Fine

Related Article
This too Shall Pass

Hi everyone! I listened to “Everything is in its right place” by Radio Head on the way to work this morning. Where else could everything be?

I spent part of Sunday at Emaho learning about Patience. Now you may be wondering why I would be interested in this topic considering that I am not a doctor.

Wa Wa Wa

Reminds me of part of a skit on the TV show MASH where Alan Alda played Groucho Marx:

Groucho: “Nurse, Nurse, come here!”
Nurse: “You called me, doctor?”
G: “Why would I call you doctor? I’m the physician!”

Patience, from a Buddhist perspective means not getting angry. Ultimately the way to not get angry is to really connect with the realization that everything is in its right place. That means that when something is going on that is troublesome, you can see it in terms of its interdependency with everything else - its natural position in the scheme of things - it is in its right place. Patience is enhanced with three types of understanding: The understanding that there is suffering, the understanding of the truth of Dharma, and the understanding that accepts difficult people. The understanding that there is suffering clears away the wrong view of escaping difficulties. With this understanding, if difficulties come your mind won’t get caught up in wishing that everything was smooth all the time. That’s actually the source of a lot of suffering, especially for us ’spiritual practitioners’. Personally, I got into Buddhism because I figured if I could get enlightened then I wouldn’t have to go to work any more. I would be free from that type of situation where anything is required. Everything is struggling on some level - basically we are surviving. We are struggling to survive. What is the sound of struggle? Listen to your own heart beat. Maybe it would like to take a rest - maybe your heart feels tired. But as soon as it rests its responsibility becomes clear. Bump. Bump. Bump. Even after Shakyamuni became enlightened he still had to eat. He would take breaks from teaching because his back hurt. But we don’t want to accept trouble. We ache and cry whenever it comes - we want to never have problems. This causes extra problems! Do you see that? Actually, the most painful suffering comes from ideas that grow out of mere suffering. When I had my hernia operation I was very depressed. I felt broken. I had a cut on my groin and I wanted to be put away in a mental hospital or something. My mind went crazy and that’s because I hated the idea of being so sick. I had no patience. I wouldn’t accept my suffering. So that’s the first type of acceptance - accepting suffering.

Then there is accepting the truth of dharma. Notice that dharma here has a small ‘d’. Small ‘d’ dharma means everything is changing. Everything that is a thing is called dharma in Sanskrit. This means that it has come together and it will change. Everything that you have now, even your body, will decay. That’s true! Maybe it seems morbid to think about that, that your mind is sitting on a decaying pile of temporary pleasures and pains, but there is something valuable in being realistic. When we ignore these things we will eventually have to face them and then we will become angry, we will lose our patience - many people die in a furious state because they feel gypped. Like they did everything right and now here they are, falling to pieces. It’s as if they didn’t believe that it would happen to them - maybe they feel like they had a special deal. Very few people accept that everything is impermanent and changing. Things are decaying right now. It is not the case that everything is very solid and then, just at the end, it falls apart. Everything that exists will go away. This is true. Accepting this leads to patience when things change.

Then the third type of acceptance is . . . . .. .

I don’t remember right now.

Oh, yes I do. It is accepting difficult people - both people outside of you and yourself. Actually, you are the most difficult person to yourself. Maybe you call yourself bad names in your head because you screwed up in this and that situation. This is also a lack of patience, a lack of acceptance that people are difficult.

See, patience leads to happy states, anger leads to suffering. That is true. When you are patient, anger cannot arise - the mind can not be angry and patient at the same time. By not experiencing anger your body won’t experience all kinds of very heavy duty bad chemicals - it won’t oxidize as quickly - you will have a smile instead of a frown. You can enjoy patience. In fact if you are not enjoying it, then it is not quite there. Maybe you are just begrudgingly tolerating something - waiting anxiously for the moment when it is over - acting like a good boy or girl.

Rinpoche told this story about a meditator coming out of retreat. He didn’t tell it exactly like I am going to - but that’s okay, its just a story.

This yogi had been meditating a long time and had gotten some genuine spiritual experience. He decided it was time for him to go back into the town down the hill for a visit. As he was walking he came across a very rude man. The man said all kinds of nasty things, it seemed he didn’t like meditators. “How can you be so selfish” “Your body stinks and you look awful” “You are a coward running from society.” He said stuff like that - things that meditators get crap for all the time. The yogi just listened patiently - his expression didn’t change. After some time the rude man became a bit distraught. Its hard to go on with insults if you don’t get any response. Finally he said, ‘What is wrong with you!? I am insulting you here, don’t you have any honor, why won’t you fight back? Normal people would get so angry.’

The yogi said, “I have a question for you. If you give someone a present and they don’t want it - if they can’t use it and so they don’t accept it, who, then does the present belong to?”

The rude man said, ‘well, the person who is trying to give it away’

The yogi said, ‘well, I don’t need your angry words, so you get to keep them, they belong to you.’

So dealing with difficult people is like this. Rinpoche says it is as simple as just not taking what others think personally. That goes really deep, actually.

Someone raised their hand at this point (remember, this all comes from a teaching) and asked, “Rinpoche, is there some sort of mantra a person can say to help to deal with someone who is acting like that, who is being so rude?”

Rinpoche thought for a moment - just a moment, and then he said, ‘yes there is a mantra - “OM NOT A BIG DEAL HUM”. Everyone laughed very hard. I bet everyone in the room laughed. Then he said, “I’m kind of kidding but really not.” He went on to explain that mantra does not have to be in Sanskrit. He said the purpose of mantra is to invoke memory of something meaningful (I think there are other purposes as well), so mantra can be in English. So that’s a really good mantra, he said.

Okay, so I hope you are all having a wonderful day and that you will all learn to deepen your patience through acceptance of the truths of struggle, impermanence, and difficult people.

Related Articles:
The Dart of Painful Feeling
The Essence of Buddha’s Teachings

Sometimes we feel that we need to destroy our negativity, to wipe it out of our mindstreams completely. And with that feeling comes all kinds of possibilities of anxiety and fear. We might lose our ground - extreme emotions are very intense and remove the ground from underneath our feet. So anxiety serves as a way of staying solid, of not losing ground - of being a ‘good person’. This is the way that Ngak’chang Rinpoche puts it. To let go of our anxiety is to jump into totally unreferential space - we open ourselves to great energy.

From the Article:

Q: The hell I often visit is anxiety – what actually is that Rinpoche?

R: It is what keeps you safe. It is a bargain. If you are anxious, you will be alright – you will not be a risk. Not being anxious means putting yourself at risk, so one needs to hold onto anxiety in order to feel safe. Anxiety does not make you feel safe, but it makes you feel safer than not being anxious. It’s circular.

Link to Article

There are many images of Buddhas with consorts embracing in sexual union - what is the meaning of this? How are we to take it?

Tantric Imagery is very symbolic. In fact, Rinpoche said that if you don’t understand this then you will miss the meaning of Buddhism all together - and further, everything that exists as a symbol. When the mind labels and ‘understands’ an object, it is actually only understanding an abstract concept - the mind’s projection. The reality itself is not touched through concept. Concept can point us to the truth. If we understand this then we won’t get off track and attached to our thinking.

For instance, we talk in Mahayana Buddhism about emptiness. Emptiness is expounded on in the Prajna Paramita Sutra like this:

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. That which is form is emptiness, that which is emptiness form.

So everything is empty, but that thing that you would call emptiness is actually form, just a concept - so where are we? The words themselves can not ultimately help. We must come to understand emptiness through non-cognitive meditation - we must experience it directly. A symbol for emptiness can be a diamond. It is clear, relatively indestructible, very rare, very valuable. So the experience of emptiness can be looked at like this. A diamond though is not the same as emptiness, it points us to some aspects - but because emptiness is free of aspects, it necessarily falls short of the experience - which would have ‘no diamond’.

So in Tantra - we use joy as a path. We connect with our own bliss energy in a completely non-dual way. It is not that we seek out things to bring us joy - we identify the innate joy that exists in the mind. That joyful mind is very subtle and able to more easily experience emptiness directly - a clear, open, infinite awareness with no boundaries - no center, no edges. In that reality there is no differentiation, no form. It is unknowable and un-teachable - it must be experienced directly. But how to point people in the right direction? We have to use symbols. Many consider sexual union to be the highest bliss - the greatest happiness comes at that time. So the Buddhas in union are a symbol for some high bliss - something we can relate to as ordinary people still on the path. But ordinary sexual union is not what is going on there. Our ordinary sexual union becomes a symbol for the incredible bliss of enlightenment. The union is like the union of opposites - when two become one. Black can not exist without white - so we have Black/White. Male can not exist without female, so we have male/female. From that perspective, male and female are not two different things. So when you see a Buddha in union, it can bring to mind the union of two things - bliss and emptiness. That is transcendental bliss. Bliss for its own sake, one can become bliss iteslf.

I do not have a deep or proper understanding of these teachings, I am only just beginning, so please don’t take this as authorative and I welcome any corrections or refinements.

May all beings have love, compassion, bliss and equanimity.

Burn water as fuel?

Will we ever see this? According to the video the system is already in production with the US Military. It’s a patented system, but what if we figured out how to do it ourselves?

Burn water - who woulda thunk?

Link to article

Here’s a blog about Individualism and Mindfullnes. Ayn Rand meets the Buddha. Icecrown met Joshua on a retreat last year and introduced him to me. What do you think of his blog?

Link to blog

Be sure to check out Joshua’s insights on the post Meditating with Chronic Pain as well.

Is a schoolbus a schoolbus on it’s own side? Does it actually exist as a schoolbus? Is it saying, ‘here I am, I’m a schoolbus?’ What if you throw it in the ocean and coral starts to grow all over it? Is it still a schoolbus? Is it a Coral Reef? What is it? Without any ideas about a thing, what is it?

If you throw a chair into the ocean it becomes driftwood, if you sit on driftwood it becomes a chair. Everything is open!

What about you? Who are you? What was your name before your parents were born?

Peel the onion

Here’s a great article on a Buddhist approach to psychotherapy.

“From a traditional Western standpoint, you can’t get off the couch until you feel better,” said Gregg Krech, executive director of the ToDo Institute, which offers certification in Morita and Naikan. “With Morita, you can actually get off the couch while you’re depressed.”

Link to article