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Buddhism
Not Another Word
When I signed up for a “silent vipassanâ yoga and meditation retreat” at the Esalen Institute, I didn’t even know what the word vipassanâ meant, but I wasn’t worried about it. I planned to use the week as a personal sabbatical. I’d get up at sunrise and bathe in the hot tubs overlooking the Pacific, then drift into the morning sessions for a bit of yoga or meditation, and spend afternoons writing in the loft of the big blue art barn.
July 2010
excerpted from
The Doors Of Perception
According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But insofar as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.
July 2010The Facts Of Life
The Buddha taught that there are three principal characteristics of human existence: impermanence, egolessness, and suffering or dissatisfaction. According to the Buddha, the lives of all beings are marked by these three qualities. Recognizing these qualities to be real and true in our own experience helps us to relax with things as they are.
April 2010Enlightenment Is A Bitch
At first it isn’t so bad — a taste of ecstasy, / the world covered in honey. Even snails / scrawl the names of buddhas with their silvery trails.
March 2010excerpted from
Small Is Beautiful
Economics As If People Mattered
Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on worldwide systems of trade.
October 2009A Mindful Marriage
Kittisaro And Thanissara On Celibacy, Sex, And Lasting Love
Being outside of the monastic community gives us the freedom to offer interfaith workshops and to include practices from other traditions. Also, because we, as a married couple, experience challenges that one doesn’t experience in the monastery, we have more empathy for the struggles of our lay students. We all need to work on those sharp edges that come up, especially in marriage, and to be more patient, gentle, and compassionate with each other.
January 2009
Ikkyū At The Wind-Eye
I’m not complaining. In fact I want to praise You. But here’s the trick about You, me, and praise: every time I vanish into the Moment and feel how You took 10 million years to prepare a place for me, I’m flooded, as You come again, by a gratitude that drowns me.
December 2008
Sunbeams
May 2008To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
Pilgrimage To Nowhere
If spiritual seekers coming to Thailand were treated like their sex-tourist brethren, a contingent of saffron-robed monks would accost you at the Bangkok airport, getting up in your face with a laminated menu of spiritual offerings and shouting, “Intensive Vipassana meditation! Twenty-one-day monastery stay! All-you-can-eat vegetarian meals! Hurt your knees! No sex! Donations only!”
May 2008
