end of first study section

tomorrow ends our first study period. looks like the format of this retreat is roughly a period of intense meditation practice, then study, then practice again, then study. so this transition marks the midpoint and start of the next practice period. tomorrow morning we have a translated talk with khenpo gawang, a tibetan monastic professor here visiting from india, and then in the afternoon one last class. then sunday is mostly a break day, before starting another meditation period on monday.

it’s beyond beautiful here, every time i look out the window i am shocked. i guess if i lived here, it would become ordinary. that seems to be a common way the mind works. we’re shocked by something new, or beautiful, but then slowly we develop conceptualizations about it and familiarity and just turn it into ordinariness.

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still in silence

i’m still officially in silence but i was checking to make sure no urgent email came through, so i thought i would say hi. hi!

it’s so beautiful here and we’ve had three electrical storms so far. i really miss those, we just don’t have them very often in california. one was like fireworks, with a few of us standing around outside the dining tent just watching the lightening for half an hour. the temperature varies from chilly at night to damn hot. i’m getting a farmer’s tan from walking around.

my retreat has about 120 participants and 20 staff and teachers. we’re mostly sitting in meditation in one large white tent with a wood floor. when it’s hot midday the walls of the tent are dropped and you look out to rolling hills of grass and pines. occasionally a hummingbird flies in and buzzes around inside of the tent.

made it safely, about to go silent

hi all. i’m getting situated at my meditation retreat, and nearly adjusted to the 8000 foot altitude now. tomorrow begins a few days of silence and intense practice. hope you’re all having a great week.

38 hours to go

and still a lot to pack. there’s so many small things i forget about, i’m already in a mad dash to get everything boxed and ready for storage. tomorrow is cleaning day, so tonight is mostly about getting everything stacked and out of the way. this is going to be tight as expected. then i’ll be off to colorado.

grrr… emotional today

i think my own sense of loss, over the bombing in london among other things, is coming in the form of anger. anger that we’re so blinded by our own anger even. ironic as that is.

i just wish people would increasingly see how interconnected we all are, how the world is getting smaller and smaller every year, how what we do in one part of the world effects everyone now, and how there’s just no more room for hate or indifference or selfishness. on ALL sides of the current conflicts - in palestine, in iraq, in america, in israel, in england, in russia, in ireland, in india, in pakistan, in china, in tibet, in afghanistan, in both koreas, everywhere. without those realizations all of our collective suffering will increase and increase. who wants that for anyone?

as a species we’re just not that bright, we keep doing things that make our suffering worse not better.

could the connections be more obvious?

al qaeda didn’t exist before the first iraq war, in fact their stated history starts with outrage over the first iraq war, then why are we surprised that terrorism would not increase after our most recent actions in iraq? Dave Lindorff says it well:

And when a country opts to attack civilian targets as a policy, as our government has done, it must expect the same in return. I’m not saying this is moral or justified. I’m only stating the reality.

many people apparently think terrorism is completely and totally unconnected with our actions in the middle east over the last fifty years, or that our actions were justified and their reaction unwarranted. the first iraq war we even tried to pin on the hegemony of one man, all the while forgetting that we ‘made’ that man and armed him to begin with. and we did that to continue the struggle known as the cold war, and it goes on and on in “us” versus “them” stupidity. the causes and conditions interconnecting and showing us the more we look that everything we do matters. trying to dismiss and label people as extremists or muslims or anything else is inherently ignoring the part we play and continue to play in the suffering of the people there, in what makes them so hateful and violent.

poverty and terrorism

i guess it’s not surprising that people would grab onto ‘extremism’ solely as a convenient excuse for terrorism. because that explanation removes any part we, the privileged, play in creating the causes and conditions of terrorism. tony blair, however, added a more balanced remark today about the plurality of causes of terrorism:

“Ultimately what we now know, if we didn’t before, is that where there is extremism, fanaticism or acute and appalling forms of poverty in one continent, the consequences no longer stay fixed in that continent, they spread to the rest of the world” said Blair.

the world is getting smaller and smaller, and it’s a trend that will not stop. but what you have to remember in this, however, poverty is always relative. there is a shared amount of resources in the world. the only way to ‘combat poverty’ is for the privileged to help the poor and reduce the gap between us. left on its own, the divide gets larger and these problems worsen. it’s true within a community or a country and within the larger context of the world now more than ever.

five days to go

in five days the house will be packed, moved into storage, and i’ll be just arriving in colorado for my next long meditation retreat. this retreat is officially my first vajrayana retreat, but really one learns the vajrayana all along in this tradition.

here’s a quote from His Holiness Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche for you about the vajrayana:

when we gain confidence in the view of the intrinsic nature without distraction or confusion, the arising of a deluded thought is like a thief entering an empty house. the house has nothing to lose and the thief has nothing to gain. whether the thief comes into the house or not, there is neither benefit nor harm. in the same way, thoughts will arise like reflections; but the moment they occur, the view of the intrinsic nature is right there. since the view of the intrinsic nature is stronger than the thought, the thought will automatically be groundless and rootless.

the intrinsic nature is emptiness; any conceptual elaboration upon experience is empty of true, separate existence. this awareness can be pointed out to you by a competent teacher, or you can find it through practice. but it’s up to you to stabilize it and develop confidence in it. then deluded thoughts like anger, jealousy, fear, addiction will self liberate like thieves finding nothing to steal.

the death penalty and prison wine

i recently learned that you can make wine on the cheap, if you don’t mind risking your health. googling this phenomenon however brought me to this haunting poem and recipe for prison wine written by jarvis masters - an inmate on california’s death row and also a fellow student of buddhist nun pema chodron.

reading the minds we prefer not to know

i feel ill, after reading the blog of the recently arrested sex offender who was found with a missing idaho girl. some hand picked excerpts from his blog and his picture are here and here. reading his thoughts in a journal is a level of intimacy that i never wanted to have. because he was found with the girl, and her brother was just found dead, the world now assumes he is guilty of kidnapping, rape, and murder; and yet his personal journal is still there for the entire world to read.