“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” –Meister Eckhart
Transparent Eye
January 20th, 2010Lama Surya Das’ Chants a Tibetan Blessing for the New Year
January 8th, 2010
THE BIG QUESTION
December 24th, 2009Should Humanity Have Been Created? This has long been a debate among learned Jews.
In fact, long ago in the holy land, several centuries after Jesus’ time, the most learned rabbis of the two rival schools of philosophy, Hillel and Shammai, met together to discuss this critical issue.
After two years of intense debate, they decided by majority vote–in true Jew fashion, pessimistic realists to the end, that…It would’ve been better if it hadn’t ever happened!
But then, again true to Jewish form, they decided that given the obvious fact that we have been created—shit happens!—we must always examine and evaluate our deeds vigilantly and candidly. This I read in the NY Times on the last day of Channukah, attributed to Professor Jack Spiro of Virginia.
Doesn’t this sort of sum up our condition? Or is it mere sophistry?
Did God create humanity, or humans create God–or do we co-emerge together, as I’m beginning to think?
Whether you’re a theist or not, isn’t the real existential issue here whether it was worth we ourselves being born into this evanescent world, and what to do about it? In other words, the big question, evergreen: How shall I live? Why are we here, for what purpose; why am I here, and how do I fit in?
Now that we are here, what kind of world shall we co-create?
This I contemplate today as snow blankets the East Coast, looking like a brightly shining field of gravestones, all apparent differences resolved.
The Art of Happiness, 10th Anniversary Edition: A Handbook for Living
November 17th, 2009
Amazon.com Product Description:
Nearly every time you see him, he’s laughing, or at least smiling. And he makes everyone else around him feel like smiling. Even after spending only a few minutes in his presence you can’t help feeling happier. If you ask him if he’s happy, even though he’s suffered the loss of his country, the Dalai Lama will give you an unconditional yes. What’s more, he’ll tell you that happiness is the purpose of life, and that “the very motion of our life is toward happiness.” How to get there has always been the question. He’s tried to answer it before, but he’s never had the help of a psychiatrist to get the message across in a context we can easily understand.
Through conversations, stories, and meditations, the Dalai Lama shows us how to defeat day-to-day anxiety, insecurity, anger, and discouragement. Together with Dr. Howard Cutler, he explores many facets of everyday life, including relationships, loss, and the pursuit of wealth, to illustrate how to ride through life’s obstacles on a deep and abiding source of inner peace. Based on 2,500 years of Buddhist meditations mixed with a healthy dose of common sense, The Art of Happiness is a book that crosses the boundaries of traditions to help readers with difficulties common to all human beings. After being in print for ten years, this book has touched countless lives and uplifted spirits around the world.
Available in:
Hardcover: 352 pages; Riverhead Hardcover; 10 Anv edition (October 1, 2009) ISBN: 1594488894
Purchase this book online at Amazon.com
Calm Centeredness
November 14th, 2009Friends and relatives often comment on how preternaturally calm I am and seem to have become. This was not always so. I was an overactive and swift-reacting three sports jock growing up in the NY suburbs in the fifties and sixties. This acquired equanimity and centeredness I attribute to decades of meditation practice and the inner gravitas stemming from the sacred art and practice of Presencing. It helps keep my ship upright, steady, balanced, and on course even amidst stormy waters. Right yourself, and your whole world comes aright.
Once in the early ninetie, I was getting a ride in France with my old Dharma friend Pema Yeshe, a middle-aged goddess originally from Brookline, Massachusetts — a Radcliffe grad with a country house in the Buddhist neighborhood of the Dordogne Valley in southern France. PY was a dreadful and fearful driver, as everyone knew; but being totally, and perhaps foolishly, equanimous concerning life and death, I’d unthinkingly and perhaps foolishly put my life in her hands and was riding shotgun in her old car to the market at the picturesque town of Sarlat (site of many a movie set).
As we were tooling through the cave-rich, river-winding, country road on the way there, twisting and turning, without guard rails or shoulders, with her hands gripped on the steering wheel and without turning her rigidly held head even a smidgin’ towards me, she squawks in an unusually tightly constricted high voice: “How can you be so calm? You’re making me nervous!”
Isn’t this one of life’s amusing and contradictory realities? That things about others bother us even when they are the opposite of what you’d normally think would bother us, because we are so vulnerable to every whim and wind of inner continuing and reactivity to outer vacillations and the vagaries of everyday life experience. One could just as welll draft upon the happiness and well being (or calm centeredness and serenity) of another and benefit from the calm of someone near us in a tight situation, couldn’t we?
Less: Accomplishing More by Doing Less
October 7th, 2009
Amazon.com Description:
A certain kind of busyness is crucial to life, allowing us to earn a living, create art, and achieve success. But too often it consumes us and we become crazy busy, nonstop busy, and we expend extraneous effort that gets us nowhere. Marc Lesser’s new book shows us the benefits of doing less in a world that has increasingly embraced more — more desire, more activity, more things, more exhaustion. Less is about stopping, about the possibility of finding composure in the midst of activity. The ideas and practices that Lesser outlines offer a radical yet simple approach to transforming a lifestyle based on endless to-do lists into a more meaningful approach that is truly more productive in every sense.
Available in:
Paperback: 224 pages; New World Library (February 1, 2009) ISBN: 1577316177
Purchase this book online at Amazon.com
Buddha
September 30th, 2009deluded, a buddha is a sentient being;
awakened, a sentient being is a buddha.
ignorant, a buddha is a sentient being;
with wisdom, a sentient being is a buddha.
if the mind is warped, a buddha is a sentient being if the mind is impartial, a sentient being is a buddha.
when once a warped mind is produced, buddha is concealed within the sentient being.
if for one instant of thought we become impartial, then sentient beings are themselves buddha.
in our mind itself a buddha exists, our own buddha is the true buddha.
if we do not have in ourselves the buddha mind, then where are we to seek buddha?
– Hui Neng, sixth zen patriarch of China
Enlightened Leadership, Gandhi and Obama
September 22nd, 2009
This morning I was reading about an article about a school child who recently asked President Obama who he would like to meet and talk with, or have dinner with, if it could be anyone at all. This is not a new question for our time. I seem to remember that someone posed the same query to President Kennedy, who was known for, among other things, the many star-studded dinner parties he and Jackie hosted. JFK said that Thomas Jefferson was who he’d like to dine with, insouciantly adding that there hadn’t been such a gathering of renaissance-minded brilliance and talent at a White House dinner party since Jefferson dined there alone.
Mr. Obama thought about the child’s question, and replied that his choice would be Mahatma Gandhi, adding that it was because he effected such positive and long lasting change for his country though nonviolent methods and he’d like to learn more about that.
The editorial writer joined in with plenty of political pundits, saying Obama’s choice revealed how soft he is in a rough and tumble world, and moreover how he needs to be more tough and better understand the realpolitik in which he, as a world leader, should be engaged more powerfully and uncompromisingly. But, I myself intuitively feel that this critique misses the mark, because for me, his principled and thoughtful choice is profoundly related to the kind of leadership we need today in our troubled, divisive world. For even if short- term benefits aren’t always apparent through a reflective and principled leadership stance, upon deeper consideration we, I believe, must conclude that long term goals and compassionate, collective ideals take precedence.
I myself am engaged in some research on enlightened leadership and what I lovingly call “authentic higher education”, including our need for and possibility of developing the skillful means and practices conducive to improving ourselves—and inculcating in the younger generation the universal wisdom necessary for knowing how to live our lives, how to flourish together, and how to contribute to a better world for ourselves, our children and grandchildren. For higher education in this country has become little more than vocational training and needs an infusion of contemplative awareness to truly educe the best in our young people. This is a discussion beginning to happen now as we consider what to do now to major issues and how we shall live, thrive, and further implement further effective alliances and altruistic actions.
Pittsburgh
September 18th, 2009
The first time I visited Pittsburgh was for an unhappy occasion: the funeral of my nineteen year old college friend Alison Krause, shot and killed at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guardsmen in May of 1970. Since then, I have returned to teach Buddha’s healing wisdom and compassionate message several times, and am here right now conducting a meditation and self-inquiry weekend for my Dzogchen local group.
I sincerely hope that, when the G-20 summit occurs here later this month — protests and demonstrations are being planned — that all my friends here in town and others will remember that fighting for peace and God is a contradiction in terms, and strive to become peace rather than kill for it. As Mahatma Gandhi said: “We must become the changes we wish to see in the world.”
AUDIO: Listen to Lama Surya Das’ interview on Peaceburgh.com.
Let’s make Peaceburgh happen during the G-20 summit,
not falling into the pit of bitterness and recrimination.
Happiness: Essential Mindfulness Practices
September 12th, 2009- by Thich Nhat Hanh
Happiness: Essential Mindfulness Practices Description:
“Encouraging readers to be intelligent and skillful in their practice, this new collection by Thich Nhat Hanh outlines the essential steps by which we can all obtain real and lasting happiness. Each day, we perform the tasks of everyday life without thought or awareness — walking, sitting, working, eating, driving, and much more. But Hanh points out that if we remain truly aware of our actions, no matter the task we’re performing, we can stay engaged in our lives and better our outlook through mindfulness. This key practice is the foundation for this accessible, easy-to-understand volume, and an invaluable tool for change for both seasoned Buddhist practitioners and lay readers interested in bettering their lives through full awareness.”
