manitou

What contrast between his eyes and his chosen circumstance. It makes you wonder what point he is making to those he is talking to, the gesture of his right hand. But there is a fire inside him.

That was a wonderful interview, and great food for thought for the mind of a westerner. I loved what he said about genuinely trusting the path. It occurred to me when he was asked the question of whether there was compatibility between the western seeking for 'having fun' and the Buddhist way, that the difference he didn't speak of was the nature of 'having fun'. It seems that our western way often involves artificial things, like more drinking, drug taking, owning bigger boats - a constant monster named Having Fun that requires more and more food to stay satisfied. It seems to me that the Buddhist version would be a more childlike basis, a return to our childlike nature. Two opposites, actually. His basic premise for the possibility of merger of the cultures and his own drive to do so is very encouraging and motivating. Thank you, CT

Thank you, Rene. Spoken by one who truly understands, which shines through your words. The choice is, truly, to breathe or not to breathe.

I am feeling the only thing I have no power over. The death of my spouse of 35 years. He has been gone for a month, and just yesterday I found myself hollering in the forest 'BUT I DON'T WANT YOU TO GO!!'. There is absolutely nothing I can do to bring him back. I cry from my soul daily, I wake up with red and swollen eyes. Every other thing in life that I think I have felt powerless about, I was not powerless. I always had a choice, even if I couldn't see it at the moment. Usually lack of courage was the problem. I see that so clearly from this position today. To feel powerless at the death of someone you have spent half your life with, every single day, is to feel like you are laying on the ground, flat, with absolutely no power. I have no options but to accept this. Which apparently I haven't done yet. Total surrender is my answer, and yet I fight it still. I don't want to believe he's gone. I feel like half of me has been amputated. Yes, I know there are Buddhist answers. and yet I still wallow in the pain of loss.

My personal take is that all things arise from desire, even sentient life. Inanimate created objects are ideas that a sentient being once had, but because time is really an illusion, it's all here and now; therefore the creator of the desk or chair is still here. However, even within the void, which permeates all, there is a shelf life, whether animate or inanimate. Personally, I think there is a comparison between the law of attraction and compassion, or an agape type of love. I think it is this agape love that spins the planets, spins the atoms, and is the underlying current in everything. I agree with you that compassion is an inherent desire to grow, expand, or realize, and that it is an outbound radiance. I think that is the crux of creation. I don't think compassion needs an object, as the agape love doesn't need an object. They are both an inherent radiance.

I wonder if we'll ever really know

Gravity. The thing that binds protons and neutrons to the nucleus. I see the void and all the thought-stuff it contains as a quantum physics thing - both a particle and a wave of probability. The void is the wave of probability. The phenomena are the particle aspect. Dreams? I don't know. Maybe a combination of the two interacting differently somehow.

Could this not include the law of attraction, inherent in all phenomena?

Going to the extreme end of this subject, isn't the Buddhist goal to not make moral judgments at all? To live in the is-ness of the situation without ascribing good or bad to it? To see the void within everything?

especially after they're gone

In the midst of my own grieving, I find myself falling into being entrenched in the deception of thinking that I was separate from my life partner; how deeply and painfully I cry and feel the loss. But to realize that the root of all phenomena is the mind, when I can get out of the deception of separation, it almost brings a relief and a faint smile to my lips, knowing that his essence is here now and the form was merely deception. As in the last line of your quote, 'It is free of any coming, staying or going'. What an incredible change of perception this knowledge brings. And yet, the tears are somehow necessary; it is a cleansing purge, the likes of which I've never experienced before. Thank you for being here.

How incredibly beautiful, and how very different it is to feast my eyes on such humility - both in the Lama and the trusting and hungry people - people hungry for just the touch of compassion, that seeming common denominator of the law of attraction. It is wonderful to see people who are so fully enraptured with this man, with the simplicity and purity of their longing for closeness to him. And yet, he sees himself not as anything special, rather as part of the whole; that all of us are the very same but unknowing of this. How different this is from our segmented Western society, superficiality at the forefront. There is so much beauty in closeness to the earth, and we are so sorely lacking.

I have just lost my partner of 35 years, who died suddenly from a stroke. I am not looking for sympathy or even kind words here relating to that on this thread. But I am going to soon be walking through exactly what we are talking about. I must eliminate most things other than the most basic necessity - including even my two beloved dogs - to fit into a one bedroom condo. I have beautiful things that I have treasured for years - collections of pottery, native american jewelry, and beautiful furniture and art - from two houses. The challenge of ripping these things from me will be welcomed in a way, dreaded in another. And yet it must be done. I must strip myself down to nothing. I so appreciate the line that this thread has taken here; if it doesn't appeal to some, please know that one of our members, namely me, certainly needed to hear everybody's input and is most grateful that this came up at this particular time. Love to all. I waver between transcending the situation and being entrenched in it. Grief comes in waves.

I, like Silent Thunder, see an overlap with Daoist thought here. Paraphrasing the many translations, there are two way of looking at and understanding things. One is to become entrenched in the situation, the evaluation, the emotions. The other is to transcend and see the true essence behind it and see it as part of the whole. We have the choice at any given moment.

And I'm guessing that it is desire that keeps this endless loop resonating, and in fact is the reason for the endless loop.

Unless it's missing one

Or maybe this could be explained as if you do get the pony, the wanting switches over to something else? And if I'm reading CT's original post, it is the wanting that is resisting its annihilation? Is this because the feeling is more important than the illusion of the pony? Because the feeling is really the closest thing we have to reality? And it is the feeling we are clinging to, the attachment of wanting more?

This seriously contorts my mind. Could somebody please put me out of my misery?

OMG. I've never heard anything like that! Yes, there was definitely a house being built next door. Obviously, there was a 1) jackhammer 2) dremel 3) rotary saw 4) hammering of nails 5) furniture being dragged across a wooden floor 6) a whistling workman on his lunch break, and 7) a dirty old man possibly masturbating.

Incredible array of sounds that whipbird makes. Thanks, Nungali. It was interesting that in earlier times (in your Wikipedia article) it was placed in the crow family and it was also identified with flycatchers - which seems strange because his bill seems a bit heavy and decurved for the flycatcher variety. (maybe that's why he was first placed in the crow family - it actually does resemble a more delicate crow bill) But in reading your post and the Wikipedia article it does indicate that the insects he takes are from the underside of leaves, which makes more sense. I don't know if the bird is named 'whipbird' to reflect that loud and unexpected ending to his rather delicate trill, but it almost does sound like a cracking whip.

I used to live at the beach in California and I never tired of watching those birds. And they get so incredibly creative about how they steal food from trash cans or beach bags if somebody walks away for even a few minutes. They remind me of crows with their intelligence and opportunistic tendencies. A woman who was laying about 20 feet away from me came back to her beach towel and actually asked me if I took her sandwich. I laughingly told her that it was a gull. To this day I'm not sure she believed me. For a real good time, take a bag of Fritos to the beach and throw them up into the air. You'll have a horde of 'gullfriends' in no time.

I worry about what happens to them when winter strikes and everything freezes. Do they somehow survive? I empty the pond so they're not at the bottom. Maybe underground somewhere?

There are these adorable little green frogs living in my small pond that sun themselves on the rocks surrounding it. When something startles them, they make this little chirping sound as they do this magnificent Esther Williams type swan dive into the pond. It always amazes me just how far their dive extends out.

Odd. I often do that, and I've noticed that the flock immediately disassembles

This has nothing to do with birdies or even nature, unless Appalachian human nature counts. The same sign just came up next to an old general store in Pennsylvania. It happens just about this time each year when the temps start to dip down at night. It's spray painted onto a piece of plywood in scrawly handwriting, and it says this: got farwood