A tantric yogi who has gained control of the subtle energies of the body and the subtle levels of consciousness will have control over the inner and outer elements and consequently can transform his or her ordinary samsaric form into a joyous rainbow body. But until we can do this, we have to accept the fact that our physical basis is a magnet attracting every kind of discomfort and pain.

...This samsaric body keeps us running all of our lives. We have to run to fulfill its endless needs, to keep it away from things that may harm it, and to protect it from anything unpleasant. We have to give it pleasure and comfort. We become ordained, and at first this is very satisfactory; but soon our body makes it so difficult for us that we think our practice would be less disturbed if we were to live as a layperson. So we give up and return to ordinary life; but then we end up with a family to support, leaving us with no time or energy for meditation. We have the pressing tasks of feeding, clothing, and sheltering our children, and of arranging their education and so forth. Our lives are spent alternating between work and worry, with occasional short periods of pleasure, and then we have to die; but even this we cannot do in peace, for, when we lie down to die, our last thoughts are worried ones concerning the family we are leaving behind. Such is the nature of worldly existence.

...To care for our old people--these ones who have given us our body, our life, and our culture--is a sacred duty of humanity. But most humans act more like animals than people, and often we see old people who have been abandoned by their families. Family units were very strong in Tibet, and old people were usually cared for directly by relatives. The national care for the old that we see in the West is something very good, a healthy sign, although perhaps here the spiritual and psychological basis is somewhat lacking.

The suffering of old age is something we all must face, unless we die prematurely. There is nothing we can do about it. Gone will be that false sense of personal ability and strength that made us so proud when we were young. Instead, helpers or friends will bathe us, dress us, spoonfeed us, and have to take us to the toilet. Rather than live under the delusion of permanence, we should engage in spiritual training so that we can enter old age at least with the grace of wisdom.

...So we can see that this body indeed causes us much grief in this life and, sadly, in their quest to satisfy its many needs, most people just collect an endless stream of negative karmic instincts that will lead them to lower rebirths in the future. These are the sufferings of the human world.

...The important point here is to become aware of the third type of suffering, the subtle suffering that pervades all imperfect existence, the all-pervading misery concomitant with having a perishable, samsaric base.... [All are] enmeshed in suffering because the nature of their body and mind is bound with compulsive cyclic processes. Until we develop the wisdom that is able to free the mind from these compelling forces, there is no doubt that we shall experience suffering throughout our lives, and that we shall continue to wander endlessly in the wheel of birth, life, death, and rebirth where the presence of misery can always be felt.

.... in the fed up, frustrated sense. Tired of this pedestrian life.

Time for change.

I caught the night bus back from Michael and Wera and Mieszko's place in Włochy.

Once I got to town I crossed to the tram stop on Jana Pawła II near Jerozolimskiego. I asked a girl ther if she was waiting for a tram. She said, in a Slavic accent, that I soon discerned as Ukranian, that she had no idea. So I asked more. It turned out she was heading to Solidarnosci but in Praga - to a Orthodox Church there. I'd completely forgotten it was Orthodox Easter this weekend. Anyway that's where she was heading. I explained to her in broken Polish, with bits of Russian, that there were no more trams, and suggested we walk.

So off her and I went. walking to Solidarnosci. We chatted along the way. She told me she was from a town close to Kiev and that she was here (from today) for 3 days for Easter celebrations. She liked to travel a lot, and had been in most East/Central European countries. She commented on the German nations strangeness. (I laughed.)  She was quite funny. Rambunctious. She made me laff. And I realised it was easier to understand Ukrainian than Czech! Hoorah!

Anyway we got to Solidarnosci and checked the timetables. No Trams or buses, so I pointed her in the right direction, we wished eachother well, and she went on her way and I on mine.

Life!!!

Slept late. Dreamed a lot. Not yet bathed. Ate food and drank two lovely, home brewed, real (as opposed to instant), coffees. Listened to Iggy Pop now listening to (early) Police. Just scoffed a piece of Pişmaniye. Just watched a doco. on the Rolling Stones. (Hm, am I getting old-er?!) Not planning on doing anything other than washing my clothes, sheets, etc.

Tomorrow's another day at work.

Fed up with running around. Let other's do that.

And in the meantime, China keeps on doing what it has been doing for 49 years with the (sometimes not so) tacit support of the rest of the world...

China arrests 9 monks over Tibet bombing: report

c/o: ABC.net.au

Posted 3 hours 14 minutes ago

China has arrested nine Tibetan Buddhist monks for bombing a government building on March 23 amid simmering tension following widespread riots, state me

dia has reported.

The bombing targetted a government building in the town of Gyanbe and was carried out by monks from the town's Tongxia monastery, Xinhua news agency said, quoting the Himalayan region's China-controlled police.

"Cewang Yexe, one of the suspects, brought a homemade bomb to the site on a motorcycle and moved it into the office building with the help of others. They detonated the bomb and ran away," the late Saturday report said.

Xinhua named Rinqen Jamcan, 27, a "ranking monk" at the monastery, as ringleader. All the suspects have confessed, it added.

The report, which did not mention whether the bombing caused any casualties or damage, was unable to be immediately confirmed.

- AFP

Flag of Tibet

Free Tibet!

What to do? Where to go? Where to live?

So many questions. So few answers.

Silly, I know, but one of my ex's who got in touch at the end of last year again (for gods know what reason) is now in a relationship.... and I feel a bit melancholy. *meh*

Religious brother walking in Assisi,Italy

.... I don't have a lot to say.

Tired. Actually more fatigued. Sore eyes. Disappointed. Pfft.

Life goes on.

Looking very much forward to spending the weekend in Dublin, Ireland. So watch out!

I just watched an extremely interesting film on cable channel PLANETE...

The End of the Neubacher Project

SYNOPSIS

THE END OF THE NEUBACHER PROJECT tells the story of filmmaker Marcus J. Carney and his mother’s family. At the outset all characters portrayed seem like mostly healthy, regularly neurotic members of an average family. The filmmaker tries to come to terms with the family’s Nazi past, but step by step he encounters greater entanglements and deeper levels of denial.  The main relationship in the film develops between the filmmaker and his mother, who is diagnosed with cancer during principal photography.

With its stunning use of family archive stills and 8mm footage, the film may rightly be called an epic home movie.  By adding to this private archive material the ample public material about Carney’s forebears in the Viennese city archives, he shows us a shifting world in which the boundaries between private and public dissolve. This quality in the film is truly epic. Deftly handling the montage of a great deal of gut-wrenching imagery, Carney explores the trauma of his own typical Austrian family, a family defined as much by its atavistic love of hunting as it is by its feeling of guilt for the whole nation’s involvement in National Socialism.  The broken centre of this family is to be found in its incapacity to mourn.  This incapacity to mourn is so pervasive that it kills.

The film has been eight years in the making.  Carney’s grandmother and mother, embodiments of the family’s history, both die during production.  As we witness these troubled women pass through the agony of their final illnesses, we discover to what extent they are still unable to confront the complicity of their whole family in running the machinery of the Austrian National Socialist state. The grandmother has never overcome her denial as a strategy of survival, and the more Carney finds out about her the more shattered his image of her gets, yet even his love. The mother has been torn between acknowledging the historical facts, hesitating to accept her parents’ guilt-laden involvement, and her innocent wish to love these parents. This devastated her life - and indirectly threatens that of the filmmaker. He finds himself in a similar position: how to love a mother who is incapable of truly positioning herself?

Carney never blinks in the face of their agony – and his camera never avoids his own.  He never stops shooting.  He exposes himself as much as he exposes the rest of his family.  As he stares without self-pity into the past and the tragically evolving present, we see him learn not to judge his mother’s denials.  He accepts that those denials have shaped him, too.  So he finally, through the making of this film, learns to love his mother sans peur et sans reproche.

In a final scene of surpassing grief, we witness Carney delivering the eulogy for his mother, dead at 61. He lays bare the denials his grieving family shudders to hear.  And his message to them, his insistence on the true lineaments of his mother’s history, is all the more shattering for his refusal to indulge in self-righteousness.

By the end of the film, Carney’s courage in making what truly is an epic home movie throws down a challenge to other filmmakers, and to whomever sees his film: If we do find the truth we’re always saying we’re looking for, can we live with it? THE END OF THE NEUBACHER PROJECT says we can. More important, it shows us how.

Tricycle's Daily Dharma: July 14, 2007

A Bigger Container

We can talk about "oneness" until the cows come home. But how do we actually separate ourselves from others? How? The pride out of which anger is born is what separates us. And the solution is a practice in which we experience this separating emotion as a definite bodily state. When we do, A Bigger Container is created.

What is created, what grows, is the amount of life I can hold without it upsetting me, dominating me. At first this space is quite restricted, then it's a bit bigger, and then it's bigger still. It need never cease to grow. And the enlightened state is that enormous and compassionate space. But as long as we live we find there is a limit to our container's size and it is at that point that we must practice. And how do we know where this cut-off point is? We are at that point when we feel any degree of upset, of anger. It's no mystery at all. And the strength of our practice is how big that container gets. . . . This practice of making A Bigger Container is essentially spiritual because it is essentially nothing at all. A Bigger Container isn't a thing; awareness is not a thing. . . .

--Charlotte Joko Beck

061115_nemi

My [now ex] boss called me after getting the news of my resignation. Either he really is a simpleton and a fool or he's just sucking up. He wants to meet and talk with me when I get back from Greece, I said I'd contact him once I was back. He said all kinds of things like 'I thought we got on very well', 'I thought we worked well together', 'You're a respected and valued member of the school'... blach blach blach. So why treat someone [and all their colleagues] as though they're not valued? Think about it dude.

Off to W-wa in just a few hours... look out D~! *eg*

Greece in just 2 days... *laughs maniacally* Watch out A~ & L~!!