Observations that dive deep into life and come up with treasures for all

Reading yesterday’s post from Chogyam Trumpa on being both mad and sane at the same time, I suddenly remember Zorba the Greek, a 1960s movie that powerfully influenced my life and kept on going off like a time release capsule through the sound track CD where Zorba punctuated the wild Greek dance music with his pithy statements. Zorba pierced the  sanity of the intellect with his impulsiveness and compassion. Those of us who believe we are sane are repulsed or unhinged by the illogical and irrational components of life, and we tend to wrap them in some protective label. Read More…

Posted under General Observations

I’ve been thinking a lot about stories, or stories have been thinking me, since the Sound of Music came to our town, or out town came to the Sound of Music. See how everything is reversable in my mind. And that’s the way stories are: an unhappy ending can also be a happy ending because every positive must have a negative and every negative cannot exist without its opposite. So our life stories—our personality plays we call ME—are constantly shifting from a smiling face to a tragic face like a clown. Our stories are where we live and we call it our history. Even the Bible is a collection of stories, and we call these God’s stories. And we read them over and over again trying to figure out what they mean. Read More…

Posted under meditation help

Today I’m taking the course outline and some other required papers to the local community college where I’m teaching a course on yoga next month. It’s not unlike fitting a square peg in a round hole. Institutions cannot function without plans and without the detailed outline of the means to a particular end. Education has become a Xeroxing process. Like the mind, institutions are afraid of blank spaces.

But yoga is freedom from this treadmill of compulsive thinking. So how does one teach the freedom from institutional thinking within the institution? Is it possible?

Yoga is union with freedom by becoming aware of one’s innate freedom that his hidden beneath the copies of information in our minds. We have papered our minds with the thoughts of others, and lost the belief in our own freedom. We think freedom is the freedom to choose among the thoughts of others.

Freedom is having your own original thoughts, thoughts that are unique and true to you, thoughts that have no argument and no choice, thoughts that have no doubt.

Posted under meditation help

Be a radical revolutionary, not just a plain revolutionary wearing Che clothes and John Lennon glasses between long curtains of hair. A radical revolutionary is a revolutionary without an image so that no one knows what you are because you have no image identity. A radical revolutionary is free without drawing a line in the sand that says freedom is on my side and oppression on yours. A radical revolutionary has no sides, no divisions.

A radical revolutionary is like a Trojan Horse because he can come in your door and plant the seeds of freedom in your house amd mind and you never knew he was there until you start feeling happy. And even then it’s difficult to find the cause of your happiness because freedom has no cause. Freedom is free and always available.

A regular revolutionary needs the fight, needs the enemy, and uses oppression to define his freedom. So the run of the mill revolutionary is not really free, he just thinks he is and is very careful to look that way. But the radical revolutionary is free but doesn’t have to think or look free. Freedom is radical because it doesn’t need anything. Freedom needs nothing to bounce off us. Freedom is like space and has no reference point.

Posted under meditation help

The cantaloupe is sweet after a few dashes of salt and a cool breeze washes the air on this fresh July morning as I write from my front porch. How whole everything seems, and by wholeness I mean complete and without conflict. Why you could almost say this morning is perfect. I wouldn’t add or subtract a thing. If I did add something, maybe put up a bamboo curtain to block the glare on my laptop, the sense of wholeness and completion, this basic goodness, would not be improved. When you start with basic goodness and a sense of wholeness, whatever you do, positive or negative, doesn’t subtract from that wholeness.

So this really comes down to our mind, doesn’t it, because we experience existence through mind. Most of us think about existence and find fault with it. Many are professional fault finders, finding errors where others don’t, even manufacturing imperfections just to prove that their belief in imperfection is correct. But if you start with perfection and a sense of basic goodness in existence, whatever you do is okay. Goodness can’t change goodness. Perfection can’t alter perfection. But if you start with imperfection, whatever you do will be, guess what, imperfect and incomplete.

So the way you experience you life depends on your starting point. If you stand in basic goodness, your life will be good, no matter what you do. If you are late or on time, if you forget or remember, if you irritate someone or give them pleasure, every action you take, every thought you make will grow from that basic goodness, and your life will be full of flowers.

Start from a sense of imperfection and incompleteness, a feeling of lack and discontent, then every action will breed more discontent and your life will be full of weeds, and your destiny will be to pull them and curse them; but nothing will grow except more weeds and you will not realize that it is in your own divided mind that they grow.

If your see this totally in one flash of insigiht, then that perception is your basic goodness and wholeness—then you are free.

Posted under meditation help

Independence Day always has a deeper meaning to me than a birthday party for our nation. There is something fundamental and ongoing in this revolution that we are still celebrating—something eternal to man. We are all either on the side of King George or the patriots; either we are breaking the myth or upholding the myth that keeps us bound.

And what is the myth of this perpetual revolution that defines man and each of us? The myth is always the basic assumption of who we are. We choose to be who we are, and if that choice limits us and we refuse to go beyond that choice out of fear, then we are with King George and the divine right of kingship. Power comes down from the top in the myth of King George, through the ideologies, race, family, and religion we choose. We are all conservatives here—and liberals too. The revolutionary doubts this myth and questions the very definition of what people say is real. Doubt is the revolutionary’s sword.

But if we are revolutionaries, radical doubters, then we belong to a different generation, the unborn generation. If we challenge the myths of who we are, then we challenge the right of the born to tell us who we are; and we stand for the right to remain unborn, to be more than I already am, and to always be what I can be, and that is to stand for a radical freedom—the freedom to be pure potential, creative, and free.

So I salute and fly my flag of radical independence here on my front porch in this tiny town of Blackstone. It matters not where we fly our flag of revolution from the tyranny of the born, because the unborn have no place or no time—remember, they are the unborn. They don’t even exist in form.

You are this eternal revolution where the battles are going on inside the mind with armies of thought moving in combat over the field of time. Yet, whichever army wins, it matters not to you, the patriot of the Revolution, because the unborn never joins the fight but stands on a hill overlooking the field, flying the flag of no man.

Freedom joins no army of the born. Oh, the unborn may walk among us wearing clothes of one form or another and make the good fight; but freedom never frowns and feels it is trapped in a limitation. Freedom is just the on going revolution of that tiny point of timeless presence that never stands in one place and like a river takes satisfaction in the flowing and makes his or her home only in the birthing. Happy Freedom everyone.

Posted under General Observations