Continuing on the journey

Complexities arise as you begin to immerse yourself in a spiritual practice. I’ve experienced this with my past Christian practice, and am now beginning to see similiar complexities with buddhist practice. Really, what seems to be true is that you really can’t put your faith blindly in anything.

What am I talking about? Just recently I read two sort of disturbing forums/dialogues about 1) Nichiren Buddhism and 2) Geshe Michael Roach. I don’t think it is necessary to go into the details of the posts, other than to say they made me cringe and nervous in the way that I once cringed and was nervous when fundamentalists slammed every other variety of christian out there or when a strong, visible leader stumbled and I realized my own faith was rocked as a result.

What I am taking away from my recent disillusionment is this: Listen to your own mind, check in with your own experience and follow your own heart. I know that too often I put my trust in other people to tell me what is right and wrong. That means tradition etc. It is just too tempting to opt out of the decision making process and let yourself follow blindly.

I know there are a lot of times that you need to trust that the answer will be revealed. I’m not knocking the ‘I don’t know yet’ answer. But watch your heart, that is all. Trust yourself, the wisdom is ultimately inside of you. 

Wake up light

I saw a cuban film a while ago that I can’t remember the name of. It was about a woman who worked for the post office and rewrote people’s letters to one another and made them happier and more insightful. In one of the letters she wrote a beautiful poem about waking up and rejoicing that you have life. It made me think about the way I wake up. Normally I wake up grumpy and groggy, not happy about where I have to go that day. That can change.

If I can have this thought in my mind as I wake up, “I am alive, I have another chance to wonder at the abundance in this life, my kids, my wife, my house what ever it is. May the light of my soul guide me etc. etc.�. And then invite all goodness into my life and be open to the experience of life, not shutting it out, then I can change the negative feeling of waking up grumpy where people want to avoid beng near me, to a more rejoicing attitude.   

See more progress on: Wake up with lightness

Test post

I am doing 43 things.

Bathroom sit

Everyone has bathroom reading material. A lot of times this material will tell a lot about a person, and I guess mine is no different. I have a book called The Transmission of Light sitting in my magazine holder beside the throne. It is a Zen book about the oral transmission of enlightenment. It starts off with Shakyamuni enlightenment and follows the direct line of teachers and the story of how they attained enlightenment. The pieces are short and sweet, perfect for reading on, well you know. The intriguing part of these stories of course are the koans that helped the students become enlightened. Koans are short, almost nonsensical poems that break the minds habit of approaching the world in a dualistic manner. The teacher will ask a question and the student replies. The teacher then says Wu or no or yes that is it etc.

I’m not much of a koan kind of guy. Mostly, I just don’t get it, but somehow the sayings stick in my mind:

Teacher, what is the nature of mind?
do you hear that dog barking? do you hear my voice next to your ear?  

The lost and found

I was lost and now I’m found.

I watched an episode of Lost last night. I’ve only seen a few episodes of the series but it seems every time I tune in the episode I see is really relevant to what I’m thinking about.

Last nights episode tied into my thinking about transformation. The character Eko, who was a really bad ass guy in Nigeria – a war lord without a soul – discovers that there is a crashed plane on the island that contains heroin. It just so happens it is the plane that he forced his brother, a priest, to let him load with statues of the madonna who were stuffed with heroin. Long story short, Eko faces his evil nature and is overwhelmed by love, the love of his brother who sacrificed his life to save his brother from commiting sin.

The show was written really well, with allusions to the bible and attempting to deal with the complex issue of evil. I had just finished reading a section of the Bhagavad Gita that talks about love and how it can transform even the most determined sinner.