the one seat

"Just go into the room and put one chair in the center.
Take the one seat in the center of the room, open the
doors and the windows, and see who comes to visit.
You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors,
all kinds of temptations and stories,
everything imaginable.
Your only job is to stay in your seat.
You will see it all arise and pass,
and out of this,
wisdom and understanding will come."

-Achaan Chah

awake

"A story is told of the Buddha when he was wandering in India shortly after his enlightenment. He was encountered by several men who recognized something quite extraordinary about this handsome prince now robed as a monk. Stopping to inquire, they asked, 'Are you a god?' 'No,' he answered. 'Well, are you a deva or an angel?' 'No' he replied. 'Well, are you some kind of wizard or magician?' 'No.' They were perplexed. Finally they asked, 'Then what are you?' He replied simply, 'I am awake.'
The word Buddha means to awaken. How to awaken is all he taught.
-Jack Kornfield

beautiful pictures

"Hearts for Peace": International Day of Peace Movie

Journal 8.6.09 Inle Lake, Burma

I stand outside an old, broken down wooden monestary,
window panes half in tact, doors shuttered, stray dogs left
behind wandering aimlessly, approaching cautiously, then running
into the unknown;
chimes still ringing in the expectant breeze,
I breathe deeply, follow my breath in mindfullness,
aware of only the moment in which i am so wholly immersed.

Journal. 8.3.09 Inle Lake, Burma

A quiet dignity.
The lady, round straw hat, bright chin strap,
flowering blue dress,
rides sideways on the back of her family's battered old grey moped,
making its way up the pitted, dusty road.
Where are they going?
Where are they coming from?
Do they think the same questions of me?
The cool breeze from the lake blows in,
as i sit,
watching the verdent green hills,
listening to the rattles of old tractors,
thinking about the grey clouds drifting overhead like the thoughts in my mind,
and then they are gone.

Journal Outtake. 7.30.09, Bagan, Burma.

We stopped on the road last night, and
sang and played guitar under the moonlight,
sitting on the dusty ground,
with three young Burmese men,
surrounded by the stillness of rural life,
in a far away town,
in a far away country.
And it felt like home.

Journal Outtake. 7.28.09 Rangoon, Burma

The dogs howled ravenously last night, a cacophony of cries that startled me from a long overdue slumber. I find myself catching glimpses of the Pacific; the air, filled with mildew and humidity; the neglected buildings bring some strange, reminiscing draw to my consciousness.
My pace is beginning to slow. Appreciation of a strangers smile. A knowing glance; humanity proving that we are, indeed, all the same species, despite such superficial separations. Regardless of the transmissions of thought, it can still penetrate, can still radiate, silently.
There is a wonderful, gentle demeanor here, one that I have been searching for a long time. The maroon cloaked monks wander up to the facade with their alms bowls nestled in their arms, like a small child seeking safety.

The low, grey clouds float, dance, over the decaying colonial city.
The sounds of the laborers, metal on metal, fill the air;
unintelligible talk, what is probably the joys, laughter, tears, and sorrows,
that fill us all,
then nothing.

words

"I sought escape from a monochromatic world of monotony,
in the hope that I might find in a polychromatic world of diversity,
the means to rediscover and celebrate the enchantment of being human."



"Equipped with a fresh perspective, inspired in part by this lens brought to
us from the far expanses of space, we are empowered to think in new ways,
to reach beyond prosaic restraint and thus attain new insight."

-Wade Davis

leaving words

A familiar, yet distant, feeling of excitement,
anticipation,
fascination,
creeps into my consciousness;
another piece of the long, winding road of life waits to reveal itself;
in the smoky tea shops in crowded alleyways,
in the overburdened local bus plunging through the darkened countryside,
in the children playing innocent games on dusty roads,
in the spices of the curries,
in the gentleness in the eyes of a simple hello;
the darkness of uncertainty heightens my senses as i set off into the unknown.
Breaking the chains of ordinary life,
removing the shackles of the routine,
venturing,
journeying,
within and without,
at least for this brief while,
the beautiful, mysterious thread of this precious life.



"To love fully and live well requires us to recognize finally that we do not possess or own anything...not even our own body. Spiritual joy and wisdom do not come through possession but rather through our capacity to open, to love more fully, and to move and be free in life."
-Jack Kornfield

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.

A Polychromatic World

"The significance of an esoteric belief lies not in its veracity in some absolute sense but in what it can tell us about a culture...what matters is the potency of the belief and the manner in which the conviction plays out in the day to day life of a people...the measure of a society is not only what it does, but the quality of its aspirations."

"I sought escape from a monochromatic world of monotony,

in the hope that I might find in a polychromatic world of diversity,

the means to rediscover and celebrate the enchantment of being human."

"If people are the agents of destruction, they can also be the agents of cultural survival."

-Wade Davis

The Light at the Edge of the World

Songlines

"A moment begins with nothing.

A man or a woman walks, and from emptiness emerges the songs,

the musical embodiment of reality,

the cosmic melodies that give the world its character....

the world as it exists is perfect, though constantly in the process of being formed.

The land is encoded with everything that has ever been,

everything that ever will be,

in every dimension of reality.

To walk the land is to engage in a constant act of affirmation,

an endless dance of creation."

-Wade Davis,

on the Aboriginal Songlines

Garbage Warrior

an inspiration little documentary viewed this weekend....

Kristof on Gates

By Nicholas Kristof

My Sunday column is about Bill Gates and his first annual letter, which will be released Monday. You can sign up for it or read it on the Gates Foundation site, and by all means also take a look at the video of parts of my conversation with Gates.
It’s well worth reading in full for what it says about health, development and education. It’s largely aimed at elites — that’s you — and I do hope the Gates Foundation will figure out more ways to market its issues to the general public so as to help build more of a social movement for these causes.
On the whole, I am so impressed with what the Gates Foundation is doing, particularly in global health. It has managed to focus scientific research on the diseases of poverty and galvanize an effort that will probably culminate in life-saving vaccines. If some of these big bets pay off — say, a malaria vaccine — then the impact on Africa will be incalculable, and the benefit will be seen in economic growth as well as lives. My hunch is that Bill Gates is going to be remembered more for what he did in health than what he did in software.
Discussions about Gates always tend to migrate into discussions of aid effectiveness, and there are serious questions about how well aid works. But I should also note that the two areas that have the best track record in aid are health and education, and perhaps the two single most cost-effective interventions ever were the campaign that eradicated smallpox and the battle against childhood mortality led by James P. Grant of Unicef beginning in 1980. So, sure, I grant that aid often doesn’t work as well as is hoped — but sometimes its successes are simply spectacular.
In the letter, Gates notes that he and Melinda started off focusing on reproductive health, apparently thinking that family planning was the crucial barrier. That is indeed a problem for hundreds of millions of women (and one reason I’m delighted that Obama has restored funding to the U.N. Population Fund). But Bill and Melinda realized that it’s more complicated than a technical matter of providing contraception: when families expect several children to die of diarrhea, measles or malaria, then they want more children, and throughout history the first step has been to reduce childhood mortality and then fertility soon drops as well. If poor people can be assured that their children will survive, they will have fewer children. That’s one reason Bill and Melinda Gates moved their focus from reproductive health to global disease — and the results may be truly historic.

Stimulus For the World

A Stimulus Package for the World
By ROBERT B. ZOELLICK
Published: January 23, 2009
A vulnerability fund for developing countries could help limit the severity of the international downturn and prevent the contagion of social unrest.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/opinion/23zoellick.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Words

"Just as a white summer cloud, in harmony with heaven and earth freely floats in the blue sky from horizon to horizon following the breath of the atmosphere -- in the same way the pilgrim abandons himself to the breath of the greater life that leads him beyond the farthest horizons to an aim which is already present within him, though yet hidden from his sight."

-LAMA ANAGARIKA GOVINDA

Words

"Just to know that such cultures exist is to remember that the human imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention...

equipped with a fresh perspective, inspired in part by this lens brought to us from the far expanses of space, we are empowered to think in new ways, to reach beyond prosaic restraint

and thus attain new insight."

-Wade Davis

Words

Though my view is as vast as the sky, my attention to the law of Karma is as small

as a grain of barley seed.

-Padmasambhava

Words.

Within itself,
the mind is already at peace.


In the mind free of grasping,
everything is known.



-Joseph Goldstein

Dhammapada

Drink deeply.
Live in serenity and joy.
The wise person delights in the truth
and follows the law of the awakened.

The farmer channels water to his land.
The fletcher whittles his arrows.
And the carpenter turns his wood.
So the wise direct their mind.

-From The Dhammapada

The Reporter

The Chances of the World Changing