words of a master

"When your ability to care becomes boundless, 

this is noble strength.

Failure does not crush, 

we accept that nothing lasts.

The refusal to accept that all things pass, 

brings tremendous problems. 

Not only is all impermanent, 

all is an illusion. 

When we can face the facts of reality, 

we begin to accept all common need."

-Chokyi Ngima Rimppoche, 

Tibet House 7.15.09

The Four Noble Truths

From a teaching by Dr. Miles Neale, held at the ID Project, Monday, July 13th, 2009....

The Four Noble Truths, the first and fundamental teaching of the Buddha:

1. Suffering exists

2. This suffering has a cause

3. This suffering can be ended, ie, we can attain freedom

4. There is a path to end this suffering

The First Noble Truth: Suffering

-we mask and hide the realities of life in our society-old age, sickness, death, disease; we refuse to admit to ourselves that we will all get old, will all die

-the suffering of change tells us that all moments of happiness come to an end; they are never lasting, only ephemeral; everything is impermanent; in our modern society, the more buying power that we have achieved, the more we have realized that that the satisfaction wrought through giving into our selfish desires is completely non-lasting; the desire will simple be replaced

-the suffering of conditioning discusses the fight/flight tendency of humans; this has evolved over the millenia as an appropriate response to threat; however, this reactivity of the mind has also led to our downfall-it has been shown to atrophy the brain, and is slowly killing us-we must become conscious of the mind and its reactive nature, and stop living like zombies

The Second Noble Truth: The Cause of Suffering

Suffering is caused by attachment, aversion, and misperception

-Attachment: an exaggeration in the positive qualities of the object we seek; we magnify the positive qualities and filter out the negative qualities

-Aversion: an exaggeration of the negative qualities in the object we wish to repulse

-Misperception: not recognizing our innate quality of happiness; this already exists inside of us, as out Buddha Nature; we perceive, due to societal influences, that we do not contain the ability to be truly happy in this life by looking within

The Third Noble Truth: The Possibility of Freedom

We can control the fight/flight reactive nature of the mind. We have the ability to consciously override the habitual nature of the mind and gain awareness to override the the factors causing us suffering. This is a choice in the mind, to cultivate what causes happiness, and to be aware of the causes of suffering.

The Fourth Noble Truth: The Path

We can achieve freedom by following the classic Eightfold Path, simplified into The Three Educations by Nalanda: ethics, mental training, and wisdom.

-Ethics: right living; not harming ourselves and others

-Mental Training: to reverse the tendencies of our mind that cause great suffering takes great discipline; we have been inundated by our societal influences our entire lives; to reverse this takes a lot of hard work, to embrace the Dharma, to calm the mind, to make the mind receptive. 

-Wisdom: sitting is not enough; the mind needs substance and needs to know what this reality is for; we must feed our minds with reality instead of the garbage that society pushes at us. We need to learn to restrain the impulses in a society of excesses; this can be done through the learning of reading & listening, the learning of personal reflection, and the learning of practice. 

Hugo

"I met a man on the street,
a very poor man, who was in love.
His hat was old, his coat was out at the elbows,
the water passed through his shoes,
and the stars shone through his soul."
-Victor Hugo

sitting on the path

Sitting on the path,
a monk clad in red and orange robed passed.
I placed my hands together and bowed,
offering a simple "namaste."
His smiling radiance filled my heart with gladness.
His eyes permeated my chest, my mind.
And then he was gone.

sitting in the park

the tall, thick trees appear black
superimposed against the blazing midday sky.
the green leaves shine, shimmer, glow, catch the rays like living diamonds.
a simple breeze against my warm skin,
saving me the threat of the concrete's perspiration.

words from the forest

seeking permanence, 

the trees fall to earth, 

consumed into rebirth

and grey stone remains

the sun bringing day

on its cold, textured skin

until this, too, 

falls away

sun, earth, soil, stars.

Ryokon

So you must not be frightened
if a sadness rises up before you
larger than any you have ever seen
if a restiveness,
like light and cloud shadows,
passes over your hands,
and over all you do
you must think that life has not forgotten you
that it holds you in its hand
it will not let you fall
why do you want to shut out from your life
any goodness
any pain
any melancholy
why do you want to persecute yourself with the question
From where is this all coming?
And to where is it bound?

A clip from the article, False Idol of Unfettered Capitalism,
Chris Hedges.....well written piece.


The consumer goods we amass, the status we seek in titles and positions, the ruthlessness we employ to advance our careers, the personal causes we champion, the money we covet and the houses we build and the cars we drive become our pathetic statements of being. They are squalid little monuments to our selves. The more we strive to amass power and possessions the more intolerant and anxious we become. Impulses and emotions, not thoughts but mass feelings, propel us forward. These impulses, carefully manipulated by a consumer society, see us intoxicated with patriotic fervor and a lust for war, a desire to vote for candidates who appeal to us emotionally or to buy this car or that brand. Politicians, advertisers, social scientists, television evangelists, the news media and the entertainment industry have learned what makes us respond. It works. None of us are immune. But when we act in their interests we are rarely acting in our own. The moral philosophies we have ignored, once a staple of a liberal arts education, are a check on the deluge. They call us toward mutual respect and self-sacrifice. They force us to confront the broad, disturbing questions about meaning and existence. And our callous refusal to heed these questions as a society allowed us to believe that unfettered capitalism and the free market were a force of nature, a decree passed down from the divine, the only route to prosperity and power. It turned out to be an idol, and like all idols it has now demanded its human sacrifice.

More on Afghanistan...

We invaded Afghanistan more than seven years ago. We have not broken the back of Al Qaeda or the Taliban. We have not captured or killed Osama bin Laden. We don’t even have an escalation strategy, much less an exit strategy. An honest assessment of the situation, taking into account the woefully corrupt and ineffective Afghan government led by the hapless Hamid Karzai, would lead inexorably to such terms as fiasco and quagmire.
-Bob Herbert, NY Times


Herbert continues, adding that instead of pulling out, we are beginning to, "double down."
Can history act as a guide, for a President and staff who are self-professed students of times past?
Can the new sense of inclusiveness in government also include a realistic argument on our chances for success, and continued costs of failure, in this hostile land? Can it include a realistic snapshot of our men and women being shipped over by the planefull, without even a clear mandate or a clear set of directives? Can we have a realistic conversation with ourselves, as a country, and redefine our new priorities as a weakened nation hobbled by its own hubris? Can we begin to understand that alliances in Afghanistan shift like the sand dunes of Arabia; loyalty is given and taken away at the snap of a gunshot; and tribal loyalties will never lie with a Western force? This great shifting society is also a society of unbelievable resilience; resilience that we, as a nation, should have great envy for; the people of Afghanistan have endured, and are prepared to endure, such a higher level of misfortune than we, even sitting in an unemployment line, could ever imagine.

Again, only history can, and will, judge our actions.....

Another Unwinnable War

another great clip by Robert Greenwald, with his Brave New Films.


--As we become more embroiled in yet another endless, historically unwinnable quagmire of a foreign exercise in Afghanistan...we must ask, when will it end? When will the imperialistic pretenses of this nation be scaled back to something approaching both a proper, humane, and economically reasonable reality? 8 years after 9/11, Islamic Fundamentalism is surging, and our actions have done nothing but fan the flames of this wildfire of humanity...and we must ask ourselves, as a nation: have we learned nothing from our past mistakes, from our past imperialistic hubris and related casualities and destabilizing influences around the world? Is there not a more constructive use of 17,000 US soldiers, such as building schools, building clinics, winning hearts and minds, introducing understanding, instead of forcing our self-imposed change at the barrel of a gun?
I fear this will be Obama's, and all of our's, next Vietnam, if allowed to escalate in the manner that is currently proceeding. We cannot absorb either the cost in dollar terms or the cost in American influence, (soft power and hard power) at this most crucial of moments in American history. And thus, we toss 17,000 more American lives, each with its own web of relations, hopes, dreams, realities, into the raging fires of war, in a hostile land which will never be tamed by and outside hand...And history will be the judge....

and on this note, a fantastic book I read recently about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by Dexter Filkins, aptly named, The Forever War.