simontzu

Mauritius

Am off to Mauritius today with my mother to celebrate her 60th birthday.  Sun, sea, sand AH! Island life.  Entries will probably be sparse until I get back...

No-Thingness II

Osho on Nothingness:

Buddha has chosen one of the really very potential words - shunyata. The English word, the englishequivanlent, "Nothingness" is not such a beautiful word.

That's why I would like to make it "no-thingness"- because the nothing is not just nothing, it is all. It is vibrant with all possibilities. It is potential, absolute potntial. It is unmanifest yet, but it contains all. In the beginning is nature, in the end is nature, so why in the middle do you make so much fuss? Why, in the middle, becoming so worried, so anxious, so ambitious - why create such despair? Nothingness to nothingness is the whole journey.

No-Thingness I

The Door is Open - A Dialogue
by wei wu wei

Part I

I am not nothing!

why so?

Because I am not anything to be nothing.

You mean?...

I would have to be something in order to be nothing, but I am not anything.

Why?

In order to be nothing I would have to be. I have to be even to say that I am not.

Since you cannot say that you are nothing it cannot be true?

It cannot. But I can truly say that I am not any thing. I can say that what I am is not anything that objectively appears, nor anything that can be imagined, visualised, sensorially perceived, or cognised.

Back on the bike

Today I was back on the bicycle for the first time since the accident.  Was riding quite a bit slower partly due to still being a bit sore and partly due to a slight lack of confidence.

Right near the end of the ride I was about to swing into my street and picking the bike up onto the pavement when a guy calls out.  "Hey weren't you the guy who was run over?".  Sitting in the resturant was the first guy to arrive on the scene (apart from the person who hit me), he actually was the one who called the ambulance. It was somehow rigth that he should be there just after my first ride and makes me feel somehow more relaxed about cycling again.

The other bonus of the accident is the seat was broken and I now have repalced the racing seat with a much more comfortable riding seat.  My prostate is pleased.

White Lions of Timbavati

More elusive than the African leopard, rarer than the legendary snow leopard of the Himalayas, and as white as the polar bear of the Alaska, rumours of the existence of pure White Lions have lived in the African Oral Tradition for centuries. But there is only one place on earth were they have materialised – the Timbavati region, bordering the Kruger National Park of South Africa.

To the African elders, used to looking for spiritual signs in nature, the White Lions’ arrival was the fulfilment of ancient prophecy that identified these majestic creatures as angelic messengers from God. Identified as a sacred site by African Kings for many hundreds of years, the name “Tsimba-vaati” in the ancient Shangaan language means “the place where starlions came down from the heavens”. Born to the golden lion prides that roam the vast Timbavati region, the African elders explained their mysterious white colour in spiritual terms, meaning purity and enlightenment, beyond all racial connotations. White is sunlight, all the colours of the spectrum in one - beyond colour, creed, race or gender. The White Lions are a magnificent icon for South Africa’s rainbow nation, and a unifying symbol across world culture.

Prized for their rarity, the White Lions were artificially removed from their natural habitat into captive breeding/hunting programs in South Africa, and sent to zoos and circuses around the globe, most famously Siegfried and Roy’s magic act in Las Vegas.

Tragically, all White Lions today are in captivity. After their forced removals from their sacred homelands, they have been extinct in the wild for over 12 years.

After studying the ancient knowledge of the White Lions with African elders from all cultures for over ten years, Linda Tucker went on to found the Global White Lion Protection Trust in 2002. The mission of the Trust is not only to protect the lions themselves, which are at great risk from aggressive speed-breeding programs and trophy hunting, but also to protect the indigenous knowledge that holds them sacred.

At last, after many years of battle, the primary objective of the Global White Lion Protection Trust has been achieved – to return this unique animal to the ancestral land that is their birthright.

Visit the website at: http://www.whitelions.org

I'll take the Nine

In a dream Nasrudin saw himself being counted out coins. When there were nine silver pieces in his hand, the invisible donor  stopped giving them.
Nasrudin shouted "I must have ten!" so loudly he woke himself up.
Finding that all the money had disappeared he closed his eyes and murmured. "All right then give them back - I'll take the nine."

Searching, Seeking, Questing

by Rabindranath Tagore

I was searching for God for thousands of lives. I saw him, sometimes far away. I rushed, by the time I would reach there he had gone further. It went on and on. But finally I arrived at the door, and on the door was a sign, "This is the house where God lives."

I became worried for the first time. I became very troubled. Trembling, I went up the stairs. I was just about to knock on the door, and suddenly in a flash, I saw.

If I knock on the door and God opens the door, then what? Then everything is finished -- my journeys, my pilgrimages, my great adventures, my philosophy, my poetry, all the longing of my heart -- all is finished! It will be suicide!

Seeing the point, I removed my shoes from my feet because going back down the stairs might create some noise. And from the moment I reached the bottom of the steps I ran. I have not looked back. Since then I have been running for thousands of years.

I am still searching for God, although now I know where he lives. So all I have to do is avoid that place, and I can go on searching for him everywhere else. But I have to avoid that house. That house haunts me. I remember it perfectly. If by chance I accidentally enter that house, then all is finished.

So you wanna be Enlightened?

Do you know what it is?  Really?   

Really really?

If you do are you sure you still want it?  Its a pretty alone state let me tell you.  No I'm not enlightened but I know what it is and it scares the shit out of me.

Life is great! there are challenges to be overcome, loves to be had, communities to be built, skills to learn, games to be played, societies to be shaped. What glory, fun and juice there is in a fully engaged life.  Why bother with waking up if the dream is so juicy?

So why do I want to go there? Why does it seem that I am headed in that general direction? The answer is I don't want to go there.  I have no choice for wherever I seem to go there it is looming before me.

Jed McKenna

Am reading "Spiritual Enlightenment: The damnedest thing" by Jed McKenna.  Another proponent of the negative way.  Reminds me a lot of Wayne Liqourman in Ram Tzu mode.

I liked this bit:
Here’s the most directly I am able to say this: The one and only truth of any person lies like a black hole at their very core, and everything else, everything else, is just the rubbish and debris that covers the hole. Of course, to someone who is just going about their normal human existence, it’s not rubbish and debris, it’s everything that makes them who they are. To someone who wants to get to the truth, however, it’s blockage— obstruction. All fear is really fear of this inner black hole, and nothing on this side of it is true. The process of achieving enlightenment is about breaking through the blockage and stepping through the hole. Anything that’s not about getting to and through the hole is just more rubbish and debris.

....this bit made me laugh out loud...

I pause to let that sink in. Like I said, the point here is less to aid Zina in her quest for enlightenment than to show her that she’s not on one. I sometimes wonder if I would make a good Zen master— Roshi— but I don’t think so. Or maybe I’d be a great one, depends how you look at it. My emblem would be a graphic depiction of the Buddha’s head lanced on a pike, complete with dripping blood and dangling viscera. The motto beneath the emblem would be DIE! Students would line up outside my door after zazen to come in and tell me their experiences and as soon as the first one opened his mouth I’d start shrieking at the top of my lungs “ You’re not him! You’re not the real guy! You’re the makyo guy! You’re just the dream character!” I’d probably start hitting the student with a stick at this point, which is one of the perks of being a Zen master. “ You’re supposed to be dead! Why aren’t you dead? Why are you coming to see me? You’re the problem! Get out and come back when you’re dead. That’s the guy I want to talk to, not a stupid dream character. Now GET OUT!”

------

This is a good book no doubt about it, the first person style of McKenna adds flavour (love his curmudgeonly views on the seekers coming to see him) and he is a good communicator.  If you have not encountered the negative way before and maybe find Wei Wu Wei a little dense then this book could be of interest.   If you like it then read U.G Krishnamurti's work which is available for free download.

I am working up to a general commentary of the negative way in general but am not there yet so will hold back from any comment until then.

Silence

Scientists wishing to explore sound must first find complete silence, in a noise pollution-free anechoic chamber. Oli Usher investigates

Thursday  August    11, 2005
The Guardian

   Silence holds a paradoxical place in science and in human consciousness. In science, the quietest conditions that modern technology allow are invariably used to research sound. And our own search for "peace and quiet" never extends as far as wanting no noise at all. Real silence is strange and disturbing, not relaxing. Most people cannot sleep without at least some background sound.

The closest humankind can get to complete silence is the inside of a heavily soundproofed anechoic chamber, a handful of which exist in universities and labs across Britain. These are used for a range of interesting research - but they also have a profound effect on the people who go into them.

Read the rest...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1546178,00.html