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Saturday, May 21, 2016

Death

Am thinking about death.

I have enrolled in a course "In the Mirror of Death", which is an introduction to a Tibetan Buddhist understanding of death and dying. The course is inspired by The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, and is run by Rigpa, an international school of Rinpoche's Nyingma lineage that teaches Tibetan Vajrayana/Tantric Buddhism.

The first evening of the 8-week course started this past Monday, with a modest group of about 14 people, including the two facilitators. We all shared our intentions for taking the course. Some of the people there are aging and shared that they can feel death coming and want to gain wisdom about this. Another person indicated their experience being diagnosed with terminal cancer, and being told they only have a short time left to live. Another had a near-death experience because of an accident.

These are archetypal people, people who, through circumstance, are awakened to a remembrance or commemoration of their mortality. I wonder about who I am in doing this work, feeling the humility of these questions: When I take the space and time to think very seriously about my attitudes and assumptions about death and dying, my very experience of life is fundamentally transformed.

My priorities shift.

Only the things that are important to me are important to me.
Other things may become important to me, and then they will be important to me.
Otherwise, there are few things left to feel self-importance around.

Victimhood.
Fear-mongering.
Greed.
Vengefulness.
Resentful competition.
Lies, falsity.

These "ugly" facets of our nature are also seen as the scared antics of little children, with whom we all share a mutual desire to be free from our anxieties and suffering, our needless addictions and spoils of rage... as humans, as living beings.

When I remember these feelings, I remember also the danger of sentimentalism. We are all adults, foolish adults that can be very dangerous with too much power. I cannot use the term "like children" to mean a negative. This is more about an observation of developmental expressions.

Cleanliness, Ungodliness

Tonight, I'm feeling inspired by tidiness,
sublime Clean; not out of aversion to dirt or chaos, but in just the calm apprehension of Tidy, or perhaps Tidiness as the space that apprehends Me.


That in a spacious room, where everything has its place, the space becomes numinous, alive, breathing, saturated with pure potential... all is as it is, not Right nor Wrong, but just waiting, for the right Event to make itself known, for it to take root and sprout some joviality or debauchery or just present as spaciousness, roominess, for a meditation practice.


Meditation as liberation, from attachments to the past or strange anxieties about the future, meditation as the present moment expressing itself through me (which is not other than itself), the sense of calm, clarity, attentional rest, witness and embodiment both as well as neither, humility, compassion, assertive service to the arising of all phenomena.

Friday, May 20, 2016

It's Been Over A Year

Why haven't I published in awhile?

I suppose, I began this blog with a few people, invited a few others to write with, til it dwindled and became just my brother and me... And it was sort of a way of addressing transience and change and impermanence... the experience of loss... in a sense, it was a yearning of mine to draw many threads of people in my life together, but I think it was privileging my own voice, rather than theirs.

Now, I have been working on building a new organisation together with a group of different asianaustralians, who are interested in a more cohesive democracy, one that can inspire action and change.

Democracy is a form of choosing to remain in conversation with one another, and to see one another as legitimate subjects for political conversation, no matter the person's background or belief, including belief systems that are anti-democratic.

This is the paradox of democracy.

How do I lean into this? Let it rest...