Personal Blogs

The Buddha once asked a king, "Suppose there are armies coming for you in all directions, crushing and killing everything in their path. There is no hope of escape from this impending doom. What would you do?"

The king said, "I would practise generosity, give, and be kind."

The Buddha praised his response, saying that was indeed the wisest thing any of us can do in that situation. Our deeds generate our karma, and that's what we take with us to our next existence.

For the king it was easy, but for some of us we don't have wealth or possessions to give away, so how do we give?

What is compassion's way? Is a question I have been mulling over and reflecting on for this past week or so.

Perhaps sometimes compassion's way is to remember the spiritual practise, other times to help another being in need, to get up and be of service to others, to practise loving-kindness and radiate that all around as you go about your day, maybe it is to be kind to yourself, to let go of something, maybe it is to have a moment of stillness, when we meditate we are not causing harm and this can be a way of giving, a Zen teacher said to me he thought my paintings were a way of giving. I had never thought that before, and that gave me something to reflect on.

How can we practise generosity and kindness? It seems there are a myriad different ways to do this, and when one thinks about it, one can find a way that fits with each moment. It got me thinking of all the different ways we can give. That's what matters in the end, the choices we make in each moment, and despite what the world does, how crazy and disturbing it gets, when that doom comes for us over the distant horizon, we can choose to be kind, to give, despite it all. This includes being kind to yourself as well, no room for judgement or shame, you are a being too. Unconditional love for all beings means just that, all beings. Be a friend to yourself as much as to others. 

The world just now feels a lot like the one in the story of the Buddha and the king. But whatever time in history, there is always an impending doom coming for us, we are all dieing after all, a doom none of us can escape, every body has an expiry date. Death is natural, when we die we should remember our good deeds, not the ones we feel shame for, so we should feel good about ourseves, happy that we learnt from any mistakes and grew. We should focus on our acts of giving, of kindness and love. We should remember the friendships and that both the good and bad times created the depth of connections we have. We want to die with a warm, loving, kind, generous, serene heart, as that is what will be the seed for our next existence. 

The hardest part sometimes is to remember. The word mindfulness means to remember, to keep something in mind. The five wise reflections are something the Buddha recommended people chant regularly to help them remember what really matters in this life:

The Five Wise Reflections

"I am of the nature to age; I should not be surprised by old age.

I am of the nature to become sick; I should not be surprised by ill health.

I am of the nature  to die; I should not be surprised by death.

Everything I hold dear, and everyone I love, will become separated from me due to the nature of change, due to impermanence.

I am the heir of my karma, owner of my karma, born of my karma, related to my karma, abide supported by my karma. Therefore should I frequently recollect that whatever karma I do for good or for ill, of that will I be the heir."

We can also practise compassion for our future self. 
What we practise now we become. 

 I am finding words increasingly dissatisfying to use, it feels good to be silent and just observe phenomenon without the internal commentary. It is so easy to get tangled up in thoughts and our stories about what we think is really happening (which are often wrong). It can be difficult to untangle oneself from them.

Words are good to start with, if one can get some degree of control over the thinking process and keep it directed towards just one thing, it can be used to talk oneself into a more subtle state of mind that goes beyond words, and using the breath as a tool as well to help energise and relax the body, one can glide on the momentum into deeper states of mind.

 To switch off thinking feels very good, in fact I wonder if most of the suffering we all feel comes from thinking too much, the brain is always trying to analyse everything, solve everything, do this, do that, the wanting, whether that's something you desire, or wanting things to change, the guilt, the chasing, the pain, the suffering -- belieiving that which you are wanting will make you happy and your life isn't complete without it.

Thoughts and words can be tyrranical, and keep us imprisoned in our heads, yet thoughts aren't all there is to the mind, the mind is much bigger than our thoughts. It feels so good to switch them off and go somewehere beyond the internal dialogue - fly free from all the wanting.

An abstract painting of a rockpool.

Prints available at: https://lnkd.in/drPth84D

I am of the nature to get ill,
I have not gone beyond illness.

I am of the nature to age,
I have not gone beyond ageing.

I am of the nature to die,
I have not gone beyond dying.

Everything I have which is beloved and pleasing
will be taken from me.

Whatever I do, for good or for ill,
I will inherit the results of that (karma).

Man, I don't know how the Buddha did it. The spiritual masters make it look and sound so simple. But in practise it feels far from that. My mind is challenging and instead of getting enlightenment, I seem to just get crazier... I'll keep trying though, keep picking myself up when I fail and try try again... it is the only consolation I can feel in this mad world, that therein is the path to liberation, the great masters all say there is a way out, that it is possible. And what a motivation for practise death is, the reminder that  every body on Earth has an expiry date.

Sorry for all the spiritual stuff. I know it isn't everyone's cup of tea, but then noone has to read this.

 I guess I just don't feel much hope for the future. Feels like the world is ending. The oceans are dying, the forests are burning, the insects are dying, many species are going extinct. The rise of the right wing fascists and the surveillance state. The loss of welfare and worker's rights, loss of human rights next, and the misery of low wage crap jobs, working long hours in sweatshop conditions, suffering from lack of sleep, and despite working so hard having to survive on food banks is the experience of many. And when the shit really hits the fan, there will be a refugee crisis unlike anything the earth has known, worse than the one even now. 

I don't feel much hope for this world, and it causes me to want to escape and look deep within for solutions and freedom from all this madness and oppression.

This world is so fucked man. Our poor kids having to inherit this hell.

The only positive I can find is that this amount of suffering makes the incentive to become enlightened much more appealing. A grand opportunity to become awakened for everyone in these times, and there's so much spiritual knowledge at our fingertips, more than at any other time in history, that is something at least.

Don't believe everything you think.

All his friends and acquaintances constantly thought about his socially awkward moments:

https://www.theonion.com/anxiety-ridden-man-rightly-ashamed-of-every-single-thin-1819573445

(:

Back to the study, feel like I've been hit by a train in my sleep. Moving about is difficult and tiredness in ma bones. Trying to maintain a positive vibe in my brain. Put on some tunes to encourage these hands of mine to move and get into the rythm of study. Head feels foggy and thoughts don't come easy. Still in my pyjamas, feel a little on the rough side, nothing feels smooth and lush internally like I wish it would. Sitting in front of my computer, eyes stinging, body aching, grumbling at movement, (going to need a painkiller I think,) like a hungry wraith trying to grab hold of some ethereal motivation to bring this mind back to life. I had an intense dream, but no idea what it was about now, the memory of it has gone back into the depths of my unconscious neural ocean. But the feeling it has left behind still seems to linger a little in my psyche, like ripples on the surface of a pond.
   Watched a TED talk on motivation, about positive thinking, but none of what was suggested seemed to resonate with me, I don't find training my inner neural network is as simple as this suited smiling fella seemed to suggest. I guess I must be an outlier, one of those folks that statisticians rub out to make their data fit whatever model/theory they are trying to sell as the next great insight into human psychology. The brain consists of something like 10 - 100 billion neurons on average with each one of those neurons having 1000 - 10 000 connections. The mind is an incredibly complex thing. There will always be outliers. Everyone is different, nobody on earth has lived the exact same life. Each one of us is truly unique, our DNA a unique combination of switched on phenotypes, and our brains are not exactly the same, no two people on earth have had the exact same experiences in life that shape those connections and neural networks in our minds. In a sense every person really is an island, we've all experienced this world in our own unique way. And we can only percieve the world based on our own experience of it. Nobody can fully understand what it is like to be someone else, we can only imagine what it is like to be another and theorise, but never truly know. There never will be one size fits all.