A friend’s husband is dying.
We often comment on “how suddenly it happened”, but
we are always dying.
It’s the seeing that is  sudden
It’s knowing when that terrifies
when you are not already aware of your death each moment.

We consider how fortunate we are to not be dying, but in fact it may be the other way around when it comes to the power of understanding death and rebirth.

There is no fulfillment later in life. Ever.
There is no later in life. Ever.
There is only now.

What you are waiting for is here.

She “annoyed” me while I was shaving
About to respond with my typical condescension…
dripping with sarcasm
Stopped…
Told myself
“Its her birthday for God’s sake”
“Let it go”
“Be nice”

Why can’t I treat everyday like it’s her birthday?

I cringe when I read a scholarly treatment of Buddhism. It amazes me that so-called enlightened or practicing folks spend endless hours debating the details of a system of beliefs, when they are supposed to be practicing non-belief. The passions in these debates are as passionate as in politcial or other debate in our society.  Those that are “experts” what to be seen as knowing it all.

I’ve also recently had conversations with people that have been around, know, or read about other gurus that profess to teach awakening, but are living their life completely in the opposite direction. They now see themselves as more important than others. They live duality. Their egos have taken back over their day to day lives. This is not meant to judge, but rather to wonder. How does one prevent that back slide when one becomes a teacher. 

I guess it means you need to stay awake, but the trappings of power, fame, and/or worship make reality fall away again.

This is an inspiring piece at the NY Times Magazine. 

“I felt saved by Zen,” he told me. “The Humpty Dumpty image is corny, but it’s right. Meditation put me back together. It helped me overcome the split between the body and the mind. The question that remained was what to do with emotions and the self.”

The story of a man confronting his buddhism in conjunction with his emotional baggage despite being a Zen master.

If he hadn’t been so distraught, he might have laughed at the absurdity of it: a Zen master in the waiting room of a psychoanalyst. He was a connoisseur of contradictions, an unsentimental man with a “Zen noir” temperament and an un-self-sparing wit. “Anywhere I hang myself is home,” he liked to say.

via Enlightenment Therapy – NYTimes.com.

The world is collapsing… imploding. Our greed has us pinned against the wall.

• Economic collapse
• Environmental collapse
• Moral collapse

Greed driven by mental chatter. Suffering.
We create our disease and try to cure it with more of the same disease.
Seeking things is driven by our internal mental chatter.

Mindfulness is our only cure. The cure is already in all of us.
Seeking. Seeking. Seeking nothing, but finding pain.

Can you feel it within you?
Its there. Waiting for you to see it.

The end of suffering.

Just listen. Listen to your chatter.

There’s another you in you. Not really YOU, but what you see as you.
You aren’t you really. You are we.

The chatter is constant. Stop and listen to your thoughts.

Just listen.

Don’t judge. listen.

Its liberating to find out what you thought was you… isn’t.
The identity you hold too is a sheet of glass. See through it.

The moment you see it is the moment everything starts to get better.

Starts… No instant cure.

That babbling bum in the street is no different from you. His chatter is just audible, more anti-social.

As I write this my chatter says “publish a book”, “be respected and well regarded by others”.
It makes me chuckle.
Our chatter wants us to be liked or hated. It wants us to be an object. Recognized as ME.

Can you see it now? Listen.
For 30 seconds see and hear your thoughts…

Watch them parade in front of you. It’s amazing when you see it.

Right now they own you. but they need not. It need not.

Just listen. For now.

Just see.

My wife is going through tremendous physical discomfort right now as she is 6 months pregnant and has nausea throughout. She has a tendency to experience a great deal of illness and pain when not pregnant as well and it has in the past aggravated me to a great extent. She has also had bouts with depression as many people do in this world.

Today she had what we would call a hissy fit – twice. She took out on me her hypersensitivity and tendency to get overly stressed about any issue. Her attachment to emotions is very strong and it comes out in a very emotionally violent manner.

When I can see what is happening, I want to engage her. First I want to defend my ego by fighting back against her. Then, I have begun to be able to stay calm and not react to her and I can see her ego rise into an even greater frenzy and getting angrier. I try not to show emotion or reaction in my non-reaction, but I never fail to be amazed at how rapidly she is capable of exploding into venomous anger. My silence accelerates that. If I try to just speak calmly to her at the moment, then that too explodes the situation. I have to allow her to ride it out. but it is I can tell you exceedingly difficult to do.

It’s always been pretty easy for me to move on from my emotions. I should say, easier than it seems to be for most people in my life. I’ve always been able to see that time spent on emotion is wasted. That is not say that I do not have my times of stress, compulsion, addiction, insecurity, etc. etc. etc. I have plenty and still do often, but now that I am more able to see my emotions, it is becoming easier to watch them float away than it was before for me. While this is a tremendously freeing thing to see and develop in life, it also can make it more difficult to interact with others. This is especially true for those I am close too, that are obsessed with their emotions, stress, and thinking and believe they have absolutely no control over any of it. Its difficult to interact without confusing or frustrating them, because it is so much easier to “move along” from our thoughts and emotions.

This has always been a frustrating quality for friends to understand. They feel like you don’t care about the big important emotions and moments that they care about, but in fact it just seemed pointless to waste energy on things I could not changed and/or that had already passed.

Certainly I won’t stifle the awakening, but it throws me off to see that happening. In addition, I find I am telling less white lies and sharing more things off the cuff than i would have previously. Again, in the normal mode of life operation, this can cause problems, but the benefits far outweigh as long as i try to be as compassionate as possible without the normal delusion within which I used to act.

My wife is the person that I am speaking about and tonight we had a moment where it was painfully evident what was happening for me. She has a tendency to turn everything that happens into a BIG problem that is ongoing. We have a 2 year old son and a baby girl on the way and I want them to sense I what they can be if they awaken and so I don’t want the negative influence over their day to day existence, but I “love” my wife and would never consider a different environment for them. So, I guess I will move along from hear and do the best I can in this moment.

Buddhist Temple Built from Beer Bottles : TreeHugger

Fifty years ago the Heineken Beer company looked at reshaping its beer bottle to be useful as a building block. It never happened, so Buddhist monks from Thailand’s Sisaket province took matters into their own hands and collected a million bottles to build the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple.