My walk

I just got back from a very peaceful walk along the waterfront in the marina.  I chanted the divine name the entire way and let my whole life and self lay out in front of me for a look.  It was good to detach from it, take none of it personally and simply to re-align with the presence of God in the moment.  I got a lot of encouragement from it and enough separation to see a few things that need to be changed as well as some things that I would just like to change.  The idea of finding your “all” in God is the most quenching of ideas.  To find and carry that strength and contentment within yourself at all times is the highest of ideals.  I am extremely happy to have had someone whisper the idea into my ear.  Santosha.

the One.

ok, so I read that like 90 percent of blogs have died since the big surge a while back and I felt ashamed.  So, even though it isn’t popular anymore and even though it’s not cool anymore…I will continue to blog where I left off.  There is a story about a swami who gave a weekly class at a University.  It tells about a time when no students showed up for the class.  One of the Swami’s assistants dropped by the class quite late and found the swami addressing an empty classroom.  When he asked the swami what he was doing, the swami replied that he spoke for the pleasure of the divine and would remain faithful to his duty, even if no students were present.  Oh, btw, the other thing the article said about blogs is that 91 percent of them were blogging for an audience of one.  Tongue in cheek as that might be that ONE might not be who we suspect.

we’ll see

I am leaving for a 10 day retreat at Lake Tahoe today and won’t return until a week from Monday.  I very much enjoy writing to you and hope to be able to continue while I am away; but I do not know what will be available up there.  If I don’t post for awhile, all is well and I will return with all kinds of things to talk about.  In the meantime, may blessing fall out of the most unexpected places and leave you giggling with delight.

Santosha.

Memory Lane

I finished reading the Narada Bhakti Sutras yesterday with my friend Bill.  I think the last few pages were actually the very best of the book.  Narada really sets the bar for what it takes to see God.  He really takes flight as he calls the reader to let go of everything for God alone…even your own body.  He says success does not come any other way.  Jeezalowheeza kids, that is some real cookin.  I became a monk in order to realize the Divine and have  been exercising myself for a decade now.  Mind you, I thought I would have gotten somewhere by now (grin);  but when I read scripture like that, I feel like a turtle watching the birds fly.  I keep pluggin along cause I have to say I’m better off than when I started.  I suppose that is the great thing about walking…you eventually get there.  My vows are around the corner now.  Things like this are on my mind a bunch.  The only blessing I’m looking for is to really mean those words as they come out of my mouth.  Here is to gathering all your marbles and giving them to God.

hmmm…

We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think.  Words are secondary.  Thoughts live; they travel far.  Each thought we think is tinged with our own character; so even the jests or abuse of a pure and holy man will bear a trace of his own love and purity and do good.

Man it would be cool to realize God today.

Recursion

I got onto the roof of the monastery last night and was staring at the Golden Gate bridge and the city lights and thinking about life in general.  It’s funny how it passes so slowly but adds up in a recognizable way.  The truth is a whir of experiences, but the result is a small collection of memories.  When I scritinized these memories, I saw many of them had become more story than actual memory.  I could only put my finger on a few scraps of actual experience from each one of them.  There are vast gaps missing that I usually just ignore.  I do remember, though, a strange experience when I was about 8.  I had just come in from baseball practice (maybe) and was standing in the foyer of our home in Sunset, Utah.  While I was standing there, I remember having a daydream that was so vivid that when I snapped out of it I was amazed at it.  I remember walking to my room and sitting on the top bunk of the bunkbed and thinking about it for awhile.  What I kept thinking about was this:  how do I know that I’m not standing in some vestibule somewhere daydreaming all of this?  My daydream in the foyer was so real while I was caught up in it that I have returned to that thought many times in my life; and I have to tell you, I would not be surprised even to this day, if I snapped out of it and was an eight year old kid just back from baseball practice, standing in the foyer of his home in Sunset, Utah.

Kaleidescope

It can be helpful to view the mind, personality, emotions and senses as as many colors seen through a kaleidescope with you as the viewer.  They are together affecting, but not defining what you see.  Know that you are the ever free, ever loving, ever pure Self which is seeing but not being defined or affected by the colors presented by the kaleidescope.

In the reverse, see this Self (pure, free and loving) as flowing through the tube and affecting the world.  If it does not stick to any of the components of the tube (senses, mind, personality, emotions) it will manifest truthfully on the other end as its nature…again pure, free and loving. If it is manifesting differently as selfishness, anger etc; know that you are attaching to one of the tubes components and the manifested is not true to its source; you will experience pain.

This idea is merely an exercise; but, it will bring you closer in line with what is really going on in this apparent world than from where we normally sit and act.

God?

In a large sense, the values of “modern” society are a comfort.  The idea of reason, scientific investigation, logic and insistence on verified truth is a good foundation for some serious advancement.  The unfortunate aspect of this development, is the fact that much of modern religion has not been willing to step up to the challenge.  This unnecessary reality can only be due to the individual participants of these religions divorcing their “faith” from these values; in short, not doing our homework.  Imagine the billions of dollars spent each year, imagine the entire lifetimes of investigation, training and testing that are going into this scientific revolution.  Imagine the organization and unified efforts of those involved at getting to a better understanding of their fields of study.  Picture the cross-discipline seminars and technologies that are being shared as discoveries have begun to overlap areas of study.  Now imagine the current state of religion.  The average religious person spends $1 a week for the plate at service (grin…non scientific estimate based on casual observation),  spends significantly less than an hour a day investigating his/her beliefs (so argue with me, I’d love to be wrong), bickers endlessly with differing viewpoints…not in search of a common truth but in asserting his/her own belief structure, and generally believes themselves already in possession of the greater truth despite the relative non-difference between their life and that of others around them.  And?  Well, if I had a dollar to bet on which side was going to get at some truth first…

So what is the real message here?  Well, either stop being religious and misrepresenting the potential of the teachings of the great masters or do your homework.  Get with it.  Don’t start your studies with an effort to smugly support your pre-existing beliefs; put all of your ideas on the chopping block and test them, observe them, meditate on them and see if they hold up.  If they don’t, change your hypothesis.  If you haven’t started the investigation, stop being non-religious and do the same.  A good place to start is here:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Swami_Vivekananda

Debugged…

As I have begun to poke around this experience of being alive over the last few years, I have to admit I am a bit amazed at the amount of material that I have heaped upon a very few provable ideas  that I have about the reality around me.  Over time these weakly supported hypothesis form other relationships and become intrinsically important to my world view.  This rolling mass of ideology then takes on its own importance and actually protects these initial assumptions from deeper probing by my current self.  This attachment to my cumulative sense of self then exerts a value on self preservation.  If you are still following me, grin, the problem only becomes apparent when an enlightened soul says something like this:

“Within the petals of this flower there lies concealed a subtle space, transcending which, one sees at length the universe in Space dissolve.”

This can only mean that one of my weakly provable initial assumptions upon which the rest of me is dependent, is wrong.  Now the debugging begins and I imagine I will be in the lab quite some time before I find out the offending line of code.

Goings on…

I was out at the Shanti Ashrama yesterday doing some maintenance on the cabins.  Amazing thing is that those simple cabins are about 100 years old.  100 years and they are still standing.  The one pictured is the Meditation cabin.  Some have said it is the first temple of its kind in the “western world”.  Anyway, the day was hot, but the quiet and stillness of the place was worth it.  There is nothing like such a remote place to settle the mind and enjoy time with yourself and the Divine.