breakingsod.com

A debate(although Trungpa Rinpoche hardly gets a word in edgewise) between Krishnamurti and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

View it on U Tube. Hang in there through part one, things get infinitely more interesting as they really start enjoying themselves.

Having been raised on Krishnamurti’s teachings, it was really amusing for me to watch him debunk formal meditation and to see Trungpa Rinpoche(one of my favorite teacher/authors) beam at him.

I only wish Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche could have taken part. It would have been enlightening to hear them discuss neuroscience and meditation.

Then again, it might have made our ordinary disorderly human brains asplode.

:}

Had a fabulous five day getaway out on the gorgeous Olympic peninsula last week.

Sam and I started out with a day in Port Angeles. I really enjoy exploring a new town with my kid. It’s kind of nice to see things from the perspective of a ten year old-especially one who likes the same sort of things I like.

We played on the beach for hours, browsed the bookstores(quite a well-book-stocked town, Port Angeles), admired and goofed around with the numerous sculptures that adorn the street and waterfronts

We’d cozied up in our little hotel room near the ferry with stacks of books and drawing materials when the gorgeous golden sunset light came seductively slanting in the window.. Somehow(bagels or chocolate usually work), I managed to persuade the foot-weary Sam to go for another little walk with me to capture the loveliness of the world’s turning.

Sooooo purty.

Back at the hotel, we settled in for a snuggly night of reading chapters(halfway through Tailchaser’s song and finishing up Sea of Monsters) and laughing at the monotonous, incessant chirping of the crossing lights, repeating the same call over and over like some deranged wind-up bird.

It was sweet to go to sleep in our little white room, looking forward to meeting Rita at the bustop after breakfast and Delayne at the ferry in the afternoon.

But that’s the next post…

I just found out the translation of ‘The Wind-up Bird Chronicle‘, one of my favorite books, by one of my favorite authors(Haruki Murakami) was cut down by 25,000 words due to a contract stipulation at Knopf.

Damnit. I want to know what we missed!

Stoopid publishers.

Hurray, a new author to devour! I loved this book. Ben Okri writes beautifully, telling the story of a tender-hearted artist maturing in a Nigerian ghetto compound. His writing plunges you into the horrors endured(or perpetrated) by his characters in a similar way to another of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami. It’s an intense and magical portrayal.

I should warn you though, it’s potent medicine. Read it only if you have the fortitude to be shaken and stirred by the passion, brutality and confusion of life.

is a tremendous book. It was recommended to me on Goodreads, by the Murakami fan club.

Really looking forward to the rest of his books!

Goodreads will suck you in.

I hooked Sophie up and now she’s happily cursing me as her day disappears online in bookish delights.

Mine too.

“One of the most important tasks of adulthood is to discover, or to rediscover, the ability to lose oneself. To do this we must understand the difference between unintegration and disintegration. The Chinese expression for orgasm, ‘having a high tide‘, describes this difference quite effectively. In a high tide everything is floating, the self is submerged or dissolved, there is no longer any foothold or point of reference, but it is not chaos. When we are afraid to relax the mind’s vigilance, however, we tend to equate this floating with drowning and we start to founder. In this fear, we destroy our capacity to discover ourselves in a new way. We doom ourselves to a perpetual hardening of character, which we imagine is sanity but which comes to imprison us. Our shoulders get more and more tense.”

Going to Pieces without Falling Apart, Mark Epstein, MD.

Control is futile. Resistance, inevitable.

I’m reading Shunryu Suzuki’s ‘Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind’. It’s delightfully, intensely, simply rife with paradox.

I love his talk on control, this is my favorite excerpt:

‘You cannot do it. The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then they will be in control in it’s wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is the way to control him. So it is with people: First let them do what they want, and watch them. This is the best policy. To ignore them is not good; that is the worst policy. The second worst is trying to control them. The best is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them.’

‘She couldn’t understand it. Was she simply too shallow to suffer indefinately? or was she too wise to become attached to her suffering, too feisty to permit it to rule her life? She voted for wise and feisty, and walked on, kicking leaves.’

Tom Robbins, ‘Skinny legs and all’

The Root of Suffering

What keeps us unhappy and stuck in a limited view of reality is our tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to seek security and avoid groundlessness, to seek comfort and avoid discomfort. This is how we keep ourselves enclosed in a cocoon. Out there are the planets and all the galaxies and vast space, but we are stuck here in this cocoon. Moment after moment, we’re deciding that we would rather stay in that cocoon than step out into that big space. Life in our cocoon is cozy and secure. We’ve gotten it all together. It’s safe, it’s predictable, it’s convenient and it’s trustworthy. If we feel ill at ease, we just fill in those gaps.
Our mind is always seeking zones of safety. We’re in this zone of safety and that’s what we consider life, getting it all together, security. Death is losing that. We fear losing our illusion of security-that’s what makes us anxious. We fear being confused and not knowing which way to turn. We want to know what’s happening. The mind is always seeking zones of safety, and these zones of safety are always falling apart. Then we scramble to get another zone of safety together again. We spend all our energy and creativity and waste our lives trying to recreate these zones of safety, which are always falling apart. That’s the essence of samsara-the cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places.

‘Comfortable with uncertainty’ Pema Chodron

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

Anais Nin