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These are various Buddhist-themed and/or "spiritual"-themed entries that I wrote to my blog, 2006 through 2008

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June 6, 2006
Center of All Centers

Center of all centers, core of all cores,
almond self-enclosed and growing sweet--
all this universe, to the furthest stars
and beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,

a billion stars go spinning through the night
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.

- Rilke

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September 6, 2006
Burning Man And A Zen Monastery : Compare And Contrast

In the past ten years, I have had dreams where I know that I am at the Burning Man festival, or at a winter retreat at the Tassajara Zen monastery. The thing of it is, in these dreams, the location is often not in the actual location of Burning Man or Tassajara; that is to say, the location is not literally a city of tents and art structures in middle of the Black Rock desert of Nevada, or a Japanese-style meditation center nestled in a wilderness valley in the Ventana Wilderness of Monterrey County. The physical spaces in these dreams have instead been, for example, a huge concrete institutional government building, a snowy Scandinavian ski chalet, or the swampy marshlands from the Lord Of The Rings movies. It is as if, in my subconscious, both Tassajara and Burning Man are not just actual places, but they are internal states of being, liberation, and permission - they are psychic-spaces, mind states as well as external places, and I can "be there" on the inside when not actually "being there" in geographical space.

Thinking about the similarities of these dream states got me thinking about the various other similarities and differences of going to the Tassajara monastery to meditate, and going to Burning Man. Among the similarities:

* Both take a lot of time, effort, planning, money, shopping, and general intentionality to get yourself to.
* Both are held out in nature, remote and far away from strip malls, newspapers, and the government. We're off the grid. Both have a vibe opposed to commercialism, capitalism, and Republicanism. There are rules for protecting the environment.
* People are generally on their best behavior at both. You can mostly leave your tent/cabin door unlocked. If you forgot to bring something, someone very well may help you out and give you one.
* Both have their more hard-core committed lifer types, and their more checking-it-out one-time-ers
* People wear funny outfits.
* People take on new names, to symbolize their break with normal life (names like Thunder Child, Desert Tiger, Ryoshin, and Tenshin).
* People usually sleep less than eight hours a night, but somehow it is fine - the openness of the experience gives you extra energy, you're not tired like you would be in normal life on five-and-a-half hours sleep a night.
* My feet and nostrils get dried out. My clothes get dirtier than usual. I eat less. I have to remind myself to drink enough water.
* Both of em are roller coaster rides - intensely blissful one moment, then an hour later dropped down into the depths of the pit, and then all blissful and clear again five minutes later.
* Neither are self supporting - both require food, fuel, and supplies brought in from the outside.
* In both places, people grow and expand, and have deep, meaningful, opening, liberating, life-changing experiences. We have actual new experiences and think actual new thoughts. Things sometimes feel sparkly and new. We get under the hood and tinker with our mind's engineering, and emerge with a reward of a deepened sense of possibility, vitality, love, openness, and insight.
* I am unusually in the moment at both places. In my normal life, if someone asks me how the past week has been, I usually have an immediate answer for them. But, at BM or in the monastery, I do not have such a meta-narrative about how the last week has been. I mean, I could say, "it's been superamazing" and it would be true, but more what I find is there is for me to say is a recollection of a number of intense experiences, each one a new now, with no simple story to tie them all together.
* The first time I visited each of em (95 for BM, 99 for the monastery), I did not really choose much about my experience, it was more like holding on for dear life as the deep and transformative psychological space of the place took me over, overwhelmed me, and took me on its ride; whether I was ready for it or not, both places blew me more open, larger, deeper, and more alive in ways I hadn't even known were possible. Having attended BM twelve times now and Tassajara now for five ninety-day retreats, though, neither brings the same easy rush - the experiences by themselves don't do it for me as much anymore. For both of em, now, getting the most out of it is more of a case of me being intentional and generating my own experience : deciding what my context is for being there ("why am I choosing to come here again?", "what do I want to get out of being here?", "who am I going to be while here?"), and what practices am I going to take on so as to create the experience I want for myself (for example, daily meditation at BM, daily yoga and being committed to be on time for things at the monastery).

There are some complete differences between the two places, though :

* Burning Man is all about hanging out, and doing whatever moves you or brings you pleasure. Everywhere you travel, there is a kaleidoscope of music, drugs, booze, bright colors, and The Sexy. At Tassajara, on the other hand, it is all about giving up our egofull selves by following the the monastic schedule and monastic rules as exactly as we can. And most people go the full ninety days of a retreat without any drugs, alcohol, sexy, music, or even many bright colors.
* At BM, you have many radically new experiences every day. At Tassajara, many of the days are as much like the last one as is humanly possible.
* At Tassajara, there is an endless list of rules enforced by religious authorities looking over your shoulder with everything that you do. Burning Man has a little less of that going on.
* A retreat in Tassajara is a lot about how much discomfort and pain you can open up to and be with - how much space you can create for the experience of discomfort to happen, without your system overloading. BM is a lot about how much pleasure you can open up to and be with - how much space you can create for the experience of pleasure to happen, without your system overloading (and, also, how much pleasure you feel like you deserve).
* Many, or most, people I meet at Burning Man are friendly, smiling, joking, and open to playing with humor, silliness, and social quickness right off the bat (even if the joy is somewhat superficial). It always seems easy to find someone to have a real talk about what is going on, even if you just met them. Many people at the monastery, however, are sensitive and introspective, and it might take months to get to know them before they are comfortable with joking around and silliness, or with having an honest, real, and authentic conversation about inner life.
* At Tassajara, you get to take a wonderful long resort-quality hot-tub soak and shower every day. At BM, not so much.
* At BM, I smoke cigarettes every night. At Tassajara, I breathe clean wilderness air deeply and naturally. At BM, I eat potato chips all day. At Tassajara, I eat brown rice and salad. At BM, I drink vodka all day. At Tassajara, I drink mountain spring water and different varieties of herbal tea. At BM, pretty much every night, I climb into my sleeping bag for the night at around quarter of four. At Tassajara, pretty much every morning, I climb out of my sleeping bag for the day at quarter to four. At BM, I sprawl out slump-ily in camping chairs and hammocks. At Tassajara, I sit up perfectly straight on a meditation cushion.
* A practice retreat at Tassajara is usually thirty five to ninety people. Burning Man is five hundred to a thousand times bigger.
* The biggest transgression anyone does at Tassajara is usually something like someone sneaking a snack of some unauthorized extra dried fruit from the storeroom. Some bad eggs however violate the community-trust vibe of Burning Man big time - passing out drunk on a dance floor, stealing a bike, and, occasionally, something (feloniously) much worse. Similarly - every year, someone dies or gets seriously injured at BM doing something reckless or intentionally self-destructive; I've never heard of that occuring at Tassajara.
* At the monastery, everything that can be recycled or composted is, and trash output is minimized. Burning Man ends with everything a big mess, with immense mountains of recyclables and decomposing food as part of the ocean of plastic trash bags.
* As they leave Tassajara, I often feel clean and focused, calm and centered, ready to take on the challenges of my life, but a little cold and formally distant from my fellow human. As we leave Burning Man, I often feel happy, connected, heart-opened, and full, but cracked out, wasted, and lazy about the challenges of my life. And I feel relieved when I finally get the fuck out after ninety days at Tassajara, and can go back to my normal life of sleeping, restaurants, and flirting. I feel mournful when it's time to leave Black Rock City and go back to paperwork and obligations.
* Some people do the Tassajara lifestyle for months and years on end, going deeper and deeper into Buddhist practice. But one week of full-on Burning Man is probably about all anyone can take.

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November 9, 2006
"A Disciple of Buddha Does Not Kill But Rather Cultivates and Encourages Life."

A friend recently asked my opinion about the morality of killing ants in her kitchen. This is what I wrote her in reply:

I have learned over time to trust the Buddhist ethical precepts as a foundation for spiritual evolution. I trust the tradition when it says that killing creates bad karma, and that bad karma interferes with happiness, clarity, and the potential transcendence. I also find it instructive that all mature religions/world religions advise against unprovoked killing. I think that, the more conscious we are, the more realize the beauty and preciousness of all life.

When I was in college I was confronted by the example of Jain monks. They'e the ones who wear masks, so that they won't accidentally inhale and kill little buggies, and who use a broom to sweep in front of themselves as they walk, for a similar bug-preserving reason. I was like, wow, that's hardcore. Is that the example I need to eventually live up to?

But I have also thought about how in the Bagavad Gita Krishna tells Arjuna of the moral rightness of killing his kinsmen in battle, because life and death are all part of the same divine dance, and Arjuna's path as a warrior who kills is his dharma - his role to play in the whole unfolding drama. The current Dalai Lama said that if someone is trying to kill you, and you have a gun in your hand, it is perfectly moral to kill them first. And on the simplest level, other living creatures die so that we can eat each day, and our bodies kill, what, millions if not billions of bacteria and viruses each second. There is a way, I think, in which just existing in time and space is a zero sum game - to maintain our own lives we must and do end countless other lives.

Some of how that practically plays out for me -

Do you know that during the Meiji Restoration in the late 1860s, as the daimyos attempted to Westernize Japan, they enacted a massive (and successful) program to get the nation to eat beef. That's because the Japanese were so influenced by Buddhist teachings that they were almost totally vegetarian-eating. As someone following the Buddha way, I also was a vegetarian for years. Like many Tibetan Lamas, I am not now. I started eating meat again ten years ago at a time when I was lifting, and wanted more protein in my diet. Since I started eating it again, I do not, however, throw meat away if I buy it or it is served to me. If an animal died for my sins, I feel that it is my place to honor it by successfully ingesting it.

Many years ago, I squashed a wasp during an especially deep and emotional therapy group ceremony/session/rebirthing/sumpin-or-other, while I was in a deep and raw state. That act ate at me for days. I have wondered since then if I would feel bugs death as much if my psyche was that open all the time.

These days, I will squash silverfish in the bathroom, moths if they are anywhere near my sweaters, mosquitoes on my arm, spiders if they look menacing. Before I kill them, however, I say a little prayer, though, where I wish them liberation in their rebirth, or wherever they are going. And sometimes I will capture a spider or a bee that's inside and carry it outside.

I don't want ants in my house. But I think that I would feel bad if I killed them with a spray, or with massive stomping - that feels wrong. What I do is buy those poisons that they carry back to their queen and that make her infertile. So, after a few days or weeks, no more ants, but none of em got killed either.

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February 1, 2007

One of my friends was wondering in his blog if cultivating meditative equanimity would mean losing his passion. And here are the thoughts on the issue that I shared with him : as my teacher Shinzen Young says [shinzen.org -> Articles -> "What is Equanimity?" "How Should a Meditator Express Emotion?"], one of the biggest confusions that people have about meditation is equating of total internal openness and acceptance with external helplessness, passivity, apathy, ineffectiveness, denial, numbness, and indifference. Will equanimity make one a big sack of potatoes or a mindless zombie?

And, the answer is, no. Because equanimity involves non-interference with the natural flow of subjective *internal* sensation, dropping your attachment and resistance and other viscosity *internally*, while apathy implies indifference to the controllable outcome of objective *external* events, growing numb to the real world *out there*. There is a difference between accepting something in our awareness and our heart, and accepting something in our discernment and head, in other words, condoning or desiring it to be so. There is a difference between letting something go in our hearts, losing attachment to it, and pushing it away, or walking away from it, in the external world.

How does a person act in the world? That of course is an endlessly debated question, and there are endless philosophies of life out in the world. You could say, however, that all people pretty much want to increase pleasure and avoid pain, in how external circumstances affect them. Buddhism has suggestions on how to act on the outside in order to be happy : tell the truth, don't steal, etc. But the path of insight is, in the end, about fully being aware and accepting of your *internal* experience of your life.

There are the decisions we make in life on the one hand, and the quality of mind in which we make them on the other. My understanding of the Buddhist path is that we continue to have preferences, we continue to find meaning and value in engaging and succeeding in artistic and musical expression, dating and marriage, making money and career, friends and family and community, competency, success, sports, etc. We simultaneously however recognize that none of that stuff can ever be finally and totally relied on for lasting peace of mind; anything on that list is subject to change, and sometimes is taken away in an instant. So, we are able to be stay open, equanamous, and fluidly unattached internally, however things go. The goal is to be engaged in life as a normal human being, yet simultaneously living partially beyond the normal human world - "seeing through the illusion".

We can still get married, we can still step out of the path of the truck, there just isn't a lot of tightness about it. The ideal is to engage all the stuff of life, without the normal compulsive drivenness of blind unconscious attachment to how the good feels, or aversion to how the bad feels. If a person works through their compulsive drive to eat, they still eat; it's just that they enjoy dining, rather than scarfing.

Equanimity actually frees up internal energy for responding to external situations. Internal allowing actually gives one the freedom to externally express - or not. Inner acceptance and non-clinging actually allows us to act more powerfully and effectively; complete internal expression (full-flow) leads to skillful external expression, and it can help all of our actions to be more loving, constructive, and free.

A quote from Shinzen Young :

What we're accepting here is the body sensations caused by a situation. We're not (necessarily) accepting the situation itself. This is the essential difference between equanimity and indifference. We humans are constantly getting confused over this point. We think that if we totally open up to the subjective sensations created in us by people and situations, we will become vulnerable and ineffectual as a result. But that's profoundly untrue! Crime and injustice are, indeed, what we should vigorously oppose. The anger, fear and sadness flavors they induce in our bodies are parts of us that we need to embrace unconditionally. When we are able to do this, our actions and responses can be clarified through our mindfulness. When we are unable to do it, our actions and responses will be distorted by our emotions.

A slightly different way of talking about it is: let's say you were on a long road trip, and, at some point, you started hearing a disturbing pinging noise coming from the general direction of your car motor, a noise that sounded like something was wrong. Well, probably the first and best thing to do about it is to first clearly and simply notice that you were hearing a disturbing pinging noise coming from the general direction of your car motor, a noise that sounded like something was wrong. That doesn't mean that you *want* to be hearing a disturbing pinging noise coming from the general direction of your car motor, a noise that sounded like something was wrong - it doesn't mean that you would *chose* for that to be happening, or that you think that the noise is *good*. But panicking, or blaming yourself for not getting your motor checked recently, or getting mad at your car's manufacturer and slamming your fist against the steering wheel, or, worst of all, turning up your car stereo to drown out the pinging sound and carrying on as if you hadn't heard anything - none of those will help you to deal the situation. The thing that will give you the most power to deal with the situation in the best possible way is to, first and foremost, with an open, simple, clear, equanamous, and accepting mind, notice what seems to be happening in the present moment, and accept it, and then notice how you feel about the situation, and accept and give accepting space to that, and ... take action from there, whatever action seems best

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March 19, 2007
What Is A Saint?

A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a person setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shapes of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such people, such balancing monsters of love.
-- Leonard Cohen

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April 5, 2007
Peace as Balance
Recently, on an email list that I am on, there was a discussion about peace and about dark ritual. Some people liked what I wrote, so I am posting my thoughts here :

I do not think of peace as a whispy pastel-colored gently-undulating open space, emptied of all potential violent force. I think of it instead as a harmonious balanced relationship between all the potentially dangerous powers within ourselves or without. It is a balance that we at best find and lose, and then find, and then lose, and then find again.

It is my guess that this world will never do without primitive violent forces, the thick bloody elements of matter that are far from evolved spirit : volcanoes erupting and earthquakes smashing, animal predators ripping the flesh off the bone of their prey, microbes attempting to eat us, human violence, and the various darknesses within our minds and souls. The best that we can aim for is bringing awareness and allowingness to the heavy thick darkness of life and of ourselves, and thereby transform it into light, and finding some sort of balance for the time being. It's like a relationship between two people : peace comes from constantly coming back to the now, realigning and communicating about the new truth of the moment, renegotiating the balance between the push and pull of two potentially dangerous powers - it is NOT trying to get rid of that dark power, which is ultimately impossible. And sometimes the path and practice towards finding that balance and that "peace" involves ceremony, ritual, literature, and art that embodies and embraces the darkness - as a tool of our evolution, as a tool of alchemically transforming the violence within us into spirit.

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April 9, 2007
Tangles

In the Buddhist scripture The Flower Adornment Sutra, one verse says

All my ancient twisted karma
From beginningless greed, hatred, and delusion
Born of body, speech, and mind,
I now fully avow.

This li'l verse is something that is chanted regularly in Mahayana Buddhist temples. I would translate the li'l verse as :

There are tangles inside of me, like tangles in a ball of yarn.

These tangles come from beginningless dawn of time. They are carried through my childhood, through society, through my ancestors, maybe through my past lives, through the process of evolution, through all of it. Who can say how far back it all goes? Who can say where it all comes from?

The tangles can be called attachment towards and aversion away from the things of this world, and, even more fundamentally, they are our deluded alienation from our the effortless eminations of our spiritual source.

I know that I carry these tangles in my body, in the words that I speak, and in the thoughts in my mind.

I now vow to commit myself to taking full responsibility for untangling my tangles.

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December 28, 2007
The Brahma Viharas

One core teaching of classic Buddhism is "the Brahma Viharas" (the "divine abodes", aka "the four illimitables"). The B.V.s is one of the many lists of virtues that one is to cultivate in the classic Buddhist path. It is a list of virtues that are specifically for cultivation in the heart however.

The first on the list is a well known Buddhist virtue : metta (Maitri in Sanskrit), i.e. loving kindness, which I understand as a warm hearted feeling of wishing others well being at all times. The far enemy (i.e. polar opposite) of metta is said to be hate, and its near enemy (i.e. what it can be mistaken for but is essentially not) is said to be simple garden-variety preference-laced affection.

The second attribute is karuna, compassion, which I understand as a warm hearted feeling of wishing others well being specifically when they are not doing so well. The far enemy of karuna is contempt, and its near enemy is pity.

The third Brahma Vihara is mudita, "sympathetic joy", which I understand as a warm hearted feeling of wishing others well being when they are doing great. The far enemy of mudita is jealousy, and its near enemy is joy at other's unhealthy success (i.e. Enron stock rises ... again!).

The final brahma vihara, the one I understand balances out the other three and stops them from being too gushy, is Upekka, equanimity, an evenness of emotionality whatever happens. The far enemy of upekka is resentment, and its near enemy is indifference.
The four residence halls at the Spirit Rock meditation center in Marin are named Metta, Karuna, Mudita, and Upekka.

Some people may be surprised by "the Upekka prayer" - it probably doesn't match many people's conception of what Buddhism is all about (which is more like lovingkindness and compassion). You could say that the Upekka prayer is a verse for Buddhists to chant when they get too codependent, too wrapped up in another person's guff, and when their Metta, Karuna, and Mudita gets all gooey and attached. The verse is as follows:

You are the owner/heir to your own karma. Your outcome depends on your actions and not my wishes. No matter how I might wish things to be otherwise, things are as they are. Although I wish only the best for you, I also know that your happiness and unhappiness depends upon your actions, not my wishes for you. Whether I understand it or not, things are unfolding for you according to a lawful nature.


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April 2, 2008
Truth

This morning as I bicycled down Mission Street, across the big intersection with Van Ness, the following words from my Buddhist teacher Gil Fronsdal came to me through my iPod headphones. I felt a simple pleasant feeling of clarity and peace open up in my chest and belly as I listened to them, and I hope that you feel some of the same in reading them:


So what is it to be a "true person"? One of the simplest definitions of what is "Truth" (and perhaps pointing to the "truth that will set you free") is that we are being truthful when we do what we say and we say what we do. We can tell the truth at least to ourselves, and maybe even to others too. Living in truth, there is a harmony between our words and our actions. Buddhists would go one step further, and say that truth is expressed when there is a harmony between our "beingness", what we really are, with what we say and what we do - in a sense, when they are the same.

I associate truth with peace; for me, there's an association of being truthful and being peaceful. Being truthful helps overcome the conflicts that we carry in our minds, in our psyche. Being truthful means living without internal conflicts - not having to hide, be apologetic, be embarrassed, be defensive, or be aggressive in a weird way. Instead, we are simply able to rest in the truth, to speak the truth, and know that the truth in itself is adequate and enough.

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June 20, 2008
At The Heart Of Things

At the party last weekend, I was talking to a friend who was, as I understood it, bummed that someone who had been his best friend for years isn't speaking to him much any more these days. I said to my friend that I felt confident that his friend still loves him deeply, just doesn't know how to show it.

I recollected for him a quote that I love from Werner Erhard, the founder of e.s.t./Landmark Education/The Forum personal growth courses, since I knew that he had done a lot of Landmark courses. The quote is, "What I'm about to tell you is very real, I'm telling you the truth, I'm telling you what's really so for those people: their inability to respond, their bound-upedness, is the highest expression of love which they can muster. About this I know the answer: they have a capacity for love, like yours or like mine, which is absolute. The only thing bound up in their life is the expression of that capacity. So what you're getting is a bound expression of an absolute love for you."

This ideal is brilliant. After listening to this for the first time many years ago, I realized that, of all the people I have met in my life, as big as my heart has stretched to love them, I will forever and always continue to love them that big. That is true, however, on the deepest levels of my heart - the deep deep place where my heart merges into purity of my soul, hovering just above the deepest point in my individual self, that place where my individual soul merges into the infinity of the cosmic soul.

On a more superficial level, though, I have a life to live, I have places to go and things to do. I may not *feel* love for any particular person who I've known - I may or may not even like them, or want them in my life. But I know that that is the "bound expression" of my love that Werner Erhart talks about, and that, on the deepest level, it is impossible for my heart to truly close once it has opened (the "absolute love" that he mentions).

Another thing I love about this thing that Werner says is seeing that anyone who has loved me in the past, on the deepest level, underneath their personality, their defenses, their preoccupations, and the rest of the worldly bullshite, still loves me as much as they ever did. If there is static in the present day, then I may never see or feel or hear about this love, we may "work it out" or we may never do so, but it's in there somewhere, at the heart of things, where Truth lives. Seeing this creates a sense of peace in me.

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August 13, 2008
Seeing Through Subjectivity

Deepak Chopra is far from my favorite spiritual teacher, but I do seem to like plenty of what he has to say. In specific, recently I have been working/holding in mind the following little aphorism by him:


"You are your own reality. You create it; you carry it with you; and you project it onto everything and everyone that you encounter. Everything you think you see on the outside is really a projection of your own mind."


I love that little saying - it feels so liberating. I mean, that's so much of the spiritual path, in a nutshell, right there. It helps me to feel free when I would otherwise feel tight, to realize that it is just my mind making meaning out of a situation.

And, as long as I'm gonna "pull a Chopra", there is another quote that I love that is similar by another heavily-marketed pop-spiritualist, Byron Katie :


"Everything you think you see on the outside is really a projection of your own mind. Everyone is a mirror of yourself, your own thinking coming back to you."


And then, there is our friend Arthur Schopenhauer, who said, "Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world."


Those three quotes remind me of the "three worlds" teachings of the Ancient Indian founder of the Yogachara school of Buddhism, Vasubandhu (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasubandhu , en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogacara ), another thing I have been thinking about an ass ton lately.

The teaching is, there are three worlds :

* The world of Source/Divinity/the Trancendent. This is what we seek, and it the only "place" we find peace. It is present and not present, it exists and doesn't exist, and, like Kant insisted, it is unfortunately completely beyond the human psyche's ability to directly perceive.

* Then there is the world of things - cars, clouds, oceans, bugs, computers, trees, mountains, galaxies, other people. This "world" is also unfortunately beyond the human psyche's ability to directly perceive.

* The world of our own subjective phenomenological perception. Ah - finally, something we can directly perceive. We can know how the world appears to us!

Vasubandhu taught, the more we realize that the third (the subjective) world is not the second world (of "things"), and the more we peel the third off the second, the more the first world (Spiritual Source) shines out of all things. And that, he said, is what we all want.

I love that! I've been running that over in my mind a lot lately.

The eminent Japanese Zen Master Eihei Dogen Zenji also said something kinda similar, in his famous writing "The Genjo Koan." He said something to the effect of, when you don't pay attention, you think that you see everything exactly as it is, in all directions. But when you actually start to pay attention, you realize that you are seeing only a tiny fraction of reality, and that the world is filled with infinitely recursive levels of brilliant detail - it just goes on and on, more and more deep, more and more rich, the more you look. A translation of his actual words in The Genjo Koan:

When dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient. When dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing. For example, when you sail out in a boat to the midst of an ocean where no land is in sight, and view the four directions, the ocean looks circular, and does not look any other way. But the ocean is neither round nor square; its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. It only looks circular as far as you can see at that time. All things are like this. Though there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions, you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach. In order to learn the nature of the myriad things, you must know that although they may look round or square, the other features of oceans and mountains are infinite in variety; whole worlds are there. It is so not only around you, but also directly beneath your feet, or in a drop of water.

And, of course, good ol' Sid (Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, that is) said it first, 2,500 years ago : "All that we are is the result of all that we have thought. It is founded on thought. It is based on thought."
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August 22, 2008
Meditation Retreat Poem

In August 2005, I sat a ten day vipassana meditation intensive at the Tibetan Buddhist center Vajrapani, in the hills of Santa Cruz (with my gf at the time Nicole, and Sarah Wescott turned out to be there too). At the end of all that sitting, the group's last night together, we gathered by the stupa for an acknowledgment ceremony, that also turned into something of a talent show. For what I recall, we were encouraged to recite impromtu poetry about our experience on the retreat. Today, I came across the poem I came up with that night, and wanted to share it here. For people who have been on sitting retreats, the experience might sound familiar. :)


What is protecting that tender tender heart, down there somewhere?
Vast turning wheels of thinking, criticizing, and doing;
sliding off the oily slippery right now and splash-landing my ass
on dense cloudbanks of thoughts and awkward confusions.

A few hours later, as the light through the window fades,
all sense phenomena as subtle vibrations emanating
out of the divine void and blinking back into it,
kneading and massaging me down to my soul.

Thank Dharmakaya I had one good sitting!
But what's that I tell folks?
Oh yeah, you never can tell, the good meditation is the one that you did.

hell and heaven,
back and forth,
it will never end until Poof!
suddenly it all does.

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