The functioning of daily life in a post-industrial society exacts faith from its participants in all sorts of ways. We have faith that the power grid is functioning, and are unpleasantly surprised if the room stays dark when we flip a switch. We have faith that a cashier will agree that a ten-dollar paper bill signifies ten units of currency. The privileged have faith that police officers won’t shoot them.
In The Heart of Lo Gekar, the ancient story is re-imagined from a woman’s point of view. In the hours after the battle ends, our heroine senses something more than conquest. She senses that the battle is not yet over. We follow her up the mountain trail where we see her find the demon’s heart, cast aside yet still beating, on the mountainside where the gompa will eventually rise.
Uncover your true self, why are you so disheartened? Even this endless time is looking, for your essence! Chains of perceptions, preconceived ideas, that have bounded you as garments. Melt and make them swords. You are unshakable as a mountain. Vast as a sky. Still, why you are in such a state? All this time you clung to ideas, fears, worry. Made them anchor, attached to belief of others. Saw yourself from their eyes, wanting them to like you.
Article about the painter Yayoi Kusama: Each part of the cosmos is reflective of the whole, like the sparkling jewels in Indra’s Net, our capacity to experience this infinitude eventually becomes exceedingly clear and unhindered. Connecting the dots, from Indra’s Net to the Infinity Nets, the fabric of the universe can be perceived and experienced as one and the same.
My teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist Mahamudra, Dzogchen meditation master and artist, was the most profound teacher of life, art, and mind. I received pointing out instructions from him which brings the investigation and recognition of mind’s flawless nature into personal experience cutting through conceptual obscurations, that is our endless, dualistic thoughts and emotions. My abstract contemplative art practice is completely informed by these realizations.
We trade one rigid, constricting way of being for another rigid, constricting way of being. And because we call the new way spiritual practice, we may tell ourselves and others that this is great, this is better, this is how and who we want to be in our practice and in our life.
Return to sitting. Within a loose sense of the body, let the mind move with a long sweep up the spine, or, more deliberately, with… Read More »ABIDE AND MOVE
The process that I went through to come to my current appreciation of making offerings is a worthwhile lesson in curiosity, diligent investigation, and the development of evidence-based faith. I need things to make sense. I need to know that what I am doing has a purpose and leads to a measurable outcome. I’m not fond of hypothetical constructs, blind faith, magical thinking, adherence to protocol, or unquestioning obedience to authority. If somebody tells me to do something “because it’s good,” but then offers no reasonable explanation as to why it is good, I tend to walk away.
Padmasambhava however used it as a place of practicing Vajrakilaya, and if you have the right karma, you will see some relevant images in the cave walls. There are also various rock formations which have Buddhist, Hindu and in some cases Kirat, mythology attached to them, such as the two rocks just inside the cave door, which are meant to be the the body and head of a demon decapitated by Padmasambhava.
“For Dan Dlugose” In vast sky’s expanse sun and moon circle round. Their journeys mark the flow of time. Glory be to you, blue sky—for… Read More »MILAREPA: SONG OF MEETING AND PARTING
So, my friends, what is it you are putting your feet on Earth for? In what way are we going to use our senses and our practical aptitudes to bring benefit? How are we going to treasure and care for Mother Earth? How will we make whatever garden it is we are growing in our lives flourish, so that others may share in our riches? And what are richness and wealth?
As fuming smoke whirls around their faces, it takes on the flickering shapes of a myriad of demons who brush against them leaving slimy traces of spit and mucus. Black demons with crows’ heads, human bodies and iron wings fly nearby past, carrying naked writhing corpses in their iron beaks. Phosphorescent green owls with the faces of old women and talons of bronze hoot as they rip brains out of skulls. Vultures red as embers with bloody claws at the end of their muscular human arms pull the entrails from screaming people not yet dead.
Our current dominating ideology is that of the neo-classical economics thinking combined with Darwinist philosophy of survival of the fittest. It teaches us that we are in an eternal battle zone where money constitutes the ultimate goal, and only the fittest survive. To get money, we must work hard. And we must fight others as competitors, and seek to place ourselves in the front, by all means. Besides from the fact that such a strife indeed does inflate our self-focus in quite materialistic ways, it also ties us up in very tight time schedules, leaving little room for self-inquiry.
Most of it is forever now, an emptying, recovering, trust to be…
I arrived in this ancient venture I’ve no where to go but to where I am already.
They call it crazy and they are… You don’t have other place to be
but here, to complete.
No matter how complex a situation may appear on the surface, when we break it down we find a series of simple guiding posts. In this regard we can speak of two sign posts; relative reality and absolute reality. From the latter perspective we must remain just as we are. That is, as we really are; the changeless, ever present self from which all of this display arises.
Most of our life in the world is the mind directed outwards. For most of us, this is how it needs to be, but we know there is this whole inner world of ours that is the foundation for the quality of our entire life, and all our relationships. If that inner life is thriving, healthy, enriched, liberated, illumined, then everything we do gets that benefit.
Forgotten Ocean from Therese Lahaie on Vimeo. Therese Lahaie: An invitation came from the Glass Museum in Ebeltoft, Denmark to exhibit my kinetic sculptures involving… Read More »FORGOTTEN OCEAN
Deluded minds they say, Ignorantly going round, With one-pointed mind pray, Or else be forever bound. Make believe existence, self-created, Inseparable from potent space be,… Read More »THE THREE YANAS
For almost all countries that Buddhism came to, it was a force of civilization. Japan, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Tibet, Mongolia, all got their written languages from Buddhist scholar-missionaries. But not China. China was a civilized country at the time, with its own language and literature when Buddhism arrived.
Why are you so dissatisfied my Dear? Are you not confused by what should be and shouldn’t be? Are they not of your conjurings? Why… Read More »INTROSPECTION
