Pain
Beesucker of Authentic Personality writes about what Buddha teaches regarding pain, “It seems that when we have pain or sickness there are two feelings - the physical discomfort, and then the feeling that we wish we were not feeling bad. … It seems that this second type of feeling is unnecessary - we can approach our physical problems with equanimity (I think that’s a better word than detachment). We can do this through a thorough understanding and acceptance of impermanence - knowing that all things are subject to change and growth and finally decay, including our body.”
Sit
In a gonzo post titled “fear and loathing,” the girl of auspicious coincidence writes, “I’ve come to the conclusion that I hate everything that I’ve ever written, including everything I’ve ever written that I love. … I’ve noticed that the best things that I’ve written have usually been written around a lot of heavy duty sitting practice. I need to get my ass to a dathun and just sit and then get my ass home and just write.”
Robert of Beginner’s Mind writes about the day before when the wheels came off and he and his poor dog had a rough time. In conclusion, he writes, “… I'm still uncomfortable about my mind state yesterday. I was about as far from mindful as you can possibly get without breaking the law. I suppose everyone has ‘those days’ now and then. But, Oh Boy! I need more time on the cushion.”
William of thinkBuddha.org tells us about [and shows us] the spiffy meditation space he recently set up for himself. “I suspect that anything that makes my meditation space a bit simpler and tidier can’t be a bad thing; and a single cushion is so much better than a huge pile of folded pillows.” he writes. “Of course, having said all this, it’s only a cushion. Back in the day, they’d just use a pile of grass heaped up, or simply sit on the bare earth, at the foot of a tree…”
Dave of Dharma Crumbs writes, after being away from bloggery for seven weeks. He looks back wistfully at a retreat in 2001 in the Santa Cruz mountains:
Totally not knowing what was going on in the rest of the world I spent each day doing meditation in a brambly field, down by a small pond. Sitting under a sapling on a rock, I would do meditation. … My attention was mostly occupied by the hundreds of dragonflies as they dipped to the water and danced to avoid the fish. They mated in the air, zoomed jaggedly, a multi-colored frenzy of bio-helicopters. Day after day for three weeks, I watched this miniature world of flight and color birth and death, mating and being eaten, fighting over mates, being plucked from the air by birds. Now wherever I go, hiking, kayaking, I look for water and dragon flies who magically delight me.whiskey river put up a delicious quote about sitting (and other things) on Jan. 14. Here 'tis:
If you can sit quietly after difficult news, if in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm, if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy, if you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate and fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill, if you can always find contentment just where you are, you are probably a dog.MLK
-- Jack Kornfield
This was posted on MLK Monday, a couple days past the roundup range of this Blogmandu entry, but I can’t resist. Grand good words by F. Kwan in foot before foot: the photoblog [formerly, Fogdux & F. Kwan & foot before foot]. I should inform the uninitiated that F. Kwan is writing about her three former selves and her current manifestation of self where she mentions four individuals in the last sentence of this quote:
Dr. King's dream was not ridiculous. We have a long way to go, however, from the mountaintop to the promised land. All our brothers and sisters of whatever hue and f/stop are equal to share in poverty and the reduced opportunity that is early twenty-first century Third World America. I wish I could write something hopeful and encouraging, but that person, along with the obese individual and the aspiring spiritual leader, have disappeared, leaving only the scrawny, bitchy photographer, who can do nothing but cough due to a lingering cold.
Rave
Jayarava writes a rave [i.e., posts to his blog The Jayarava Rave] that begins by looking at the nexis of creativity and mental illness and takes us through an experience of his, imagining he was coming to blows with a dharma teacher. “One of the ways the Dharma works is by getting us to look into our habits of thinking. We habitually see ourselves as this sort of person, and not that. We like these things, but not those. These kind of people, but not those. These are just mental habits acquired over the years. One of my mental habits is to imagine the worst, to imagine that I will come into conflict with people and that they will try to hurt me. Once upon a time this was in fact true, but it is not true now. By looking into these habits, and seeing the consequences of them I have begun the process of gaining a choice in how I imagine the world. It is quite clear that how I imagine the world is critical to how I experience the world.”
By Chance -- Avalanche
Both Bill of Eternal Peace in a post titled “The Swinging Door,” and James of The Buddhist Blog in a post titled “‘I’ is just the Swinging Door that Moves” put up this quote of Shunryu Suzuki:
If you think, “I breathe,” the “I” is extra. There is no you to say “I.” What we call “I” is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It just moves; that is all. When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing: no “I,” no world, no mind nor body; just a swinging door.The quote was recently posted in Beliefnet and comes originally from Suzuki’s book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Writes Bill, “I am sure that I speak for many when I say that this book was my first, glorious introduction to Buddhist practice. It was 1976. I was living in a beach house working minimum wage. A housemate was a guitarist. His girlfriend gave him the book and he passed it on to me. A small stone dislodged by chance -- avalanche.”
Silly Heart
Clarity, scribe of Clarity’s blog, writes from Cologne, Germany, where he’s to present at a teachers’ training conference and he’s nervous as hell. “The words of Cheri Huber's teacher kept coming to my mind as I was preparing: ‘You will do for others, what you would never do for yourself.’ I would've quit a thousand times if it were not for this silly heart that I carry that wants to offer itself to others.”
Truth and Consequences
Two Davids, Chalmers of fragments of consciousness and Bonta of Via Negativa, join the fray, and write about the fray and frayed reputations of truth-challenged writers.
Chalmers’s main interest is J. T. Leroy and the meaning of the term “J. T. Leroy” if, as is suspected, the person who we have been led to believe is J. T. Leroy does not exist. There are novels attributed to Leroy, so, clearly, in a sense, Leroy DOES exist. Writes Chalmers,
There are] descriptive as well as causal constraints on reference: for example, it might be required that for someone to qualify as the referent of 'J.T. Leroy', they have to fit Leroy's purported life-story well enough, and no-one does. Of course this is tricky: no-one says that James Frey did not exist, because his purported life-story was greatly exaggerated. And even with the largely fabricated life-story of Helen Demidenko, people are inclined to say that Helen Demidenko is Helen Darville. If the Leroy case were more like these cases, then presumably we would say that J.T. Leroy exists and wrote the novels, but that Leroy did not do most of the things that he/she claims to have done.Bonta begins his post, mostly about James Frey, with this provocative comment:
In response to people who wonder why an anarchist would refuse to shoplift, I'm fond of saying that no one demonstrates greater subservience to the concept of private property than a thief. In fact, I agree with Proudhon that, in a certain sense, all property is theft - but never mind that now. I'm more interested in a parallel insight suggested by the James Frey case: that no one depends more upon the strict adherence to a literal concept of truth telling than a liar.
Switching off the light
Dorian has ended Electric Blue Moodiness abruptly after 16 months. Left as a concluding message, an interesting quote by the enigmatic author of Catcher in the Rye:
Many have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them-if you want to. Just as someday if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."Do other things for now, O Dorian. Then, return.
-- J.D. Salinger
