Integral Options Cafe

Monday, November 27, 2006

The Progressive: Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest

November 27, 2006

DUMB: Using your car as a deer hunting weapon is dumb... and apparently illegal. A Vermont man allegedly plowed his car into a deer decoy believing it was a real deer as a warden and two deputies watched from hiding places nearby. "The three were monitoring the stuffed deer as part of a routine sting operation to deter illegal hunting when they saw the Chevy stop and shine a light on the fake deer. They saw the vehicle drive onto the field and accelerate into the decoy, sending it flying about 30 feet, Danville game warden Dennis Amsden said." The hunter/driver's girlfriend and 4-month-old daughter were in the car at the time.

DUMBER: You know, somebody in law enforcement should really look into this whole terrorsism thing. Five years after 9/11, the CIA and FBI only have a few agents with even a limited proficiency in Arabic. None of 33 FBI agents with Arabic skills works in sections of the bureau related to international terrorism.

DUMBEST: Not sure which is worse, banning a Christmas wreath shaped like a peace symbol is dumb or not knowing the difference a peace symbol and a satanic symbol. The Loma Linda Homeowners Association in Pagosa Springs, CO, is fining Lisa Jensen $25 a day until she removes a Christmas wreath in the shape of a peace sign. The residents who complained interpreted the peace sign as anti-Iraq war protest or thought it was satanic symbol.

David Aronofsky's The Fountain

The Fountain has been getting some good press. Sean at Deep Surface gave it a mixed review, however, feeling that despite the fantastic visuals it just didn't suck him in. Reviewer Kim Voyner wanted to love it and didn't -- maybe because of high expectations.

I loved Pi many years back, and I also enjoyed Requiem for a Dream.

The trailer for The Fountain is visually stunning -- and this is the kind of movie I'm drawn to -- so I am still hoping that I will like this film more than those who have only been moderately satisfied with it.

Here is the trailer:

Here is part of an interview with Aronofsky from The Nerve Film Lounge:

While making this film, you lost two stars [Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett] and had to slash your budget. How did that change your concept?
The old conception of the film is captured forever as the graphic novel that we released through Vertigo Comics. That shows you where the story is different, and you can see, it really hasn't changed that much. The part that changed wasn't the movie itself but how to execute the movie — how to bring it to life. It was the first time my collaborators and I were really playing the studio game. The film was conceived as a studio picture. But we didn't know what we were doing; we had to learn that whole process. When we had to change things around, we were able to figure out how to make it more streamlined and pure. Having an extra couple of years in pre-production allowed us to figure out what the core story was — just what it was exactly we wanted to tell. And, of course, how to tell it in a way that was financially smarter as well.

I was surprised to hear that you initially resisted casting [Aronofsky's fiancée] Rachel Weisz in the film. The whole film feels like a love song to her.
Well, for starters, the script and the film existed in a pretty strong form before she ended up with me. But life and art do end up coming together in a strange way. I became conscious of these connections after the film was done, when I looked at it and started to think, "Uh oh, people are gonna read things into this." That said, I would have shot any actress as beautifully as we shot Rachel — although Rachel is pretty easy to shoot well.

I was also surprised by how consistent The Fountain seemed to be with your other films. All your characters seem to exist in these obsessive loops — they do the same things over and over again, in different ways, rather than progressing in conventional narrative ways.
Some writers I've talked to say they don't see any connections between my films, but I personally think there are a lot. There's certainly nothing conscious about it — that's just the way it happens for me. I write my characters the way I think they would act, and they come out in this pretty distinct way. I think all my films have something pretty simple at their heart.

Read the rest.

Bad Sex in Fiction Prize

The Independent (UK) presents this year's nominees for the Bad Sex in Fiction Prize, with the winner to be announced Wednesday. The goal of the award is to embarrass authors to the point that they will quit writing such dreadful scenes -- so far to no avail. Here are the finalists:

We were not entirely surprised to see the great Tim Willocks there, with his novel of the Crusades, The Religion (Cape), "a book that never lets the beacon of the hero's gigantic todger slip below the horizon for more than a few pages", according to our reviewer, Tim Martin. "That's the Bad Sex Award in the bag," he concluded, after quoting passages involving "fast-engorging privities" and "the folds of her matrix". In the bit that wowed the Literary Review, the hero "bent her across the the cold steel face of the anvil... she called out to God and convulsed with each slow stroke, her head thrown back and her eyelids aflutter, and her cries filled the forge..."

But Willocks faces a tough challenge from Thomas Pynchon, with a sex scene between a man and a spaniel ("Ruperta had trained her toy spaniel to provide intimate 'French' caresses of the tongue for the pleasure of its mistress... Reef followed, taking out his penis, breathing heavily through his mouth. 'Here Mouffie, nice big dog bone for you right here...'"

Then there's Irvine Welsh in Bedroom Secrets of the Masterchefs (Cape), in which a character uses spit as a sexual lubricant: "Skinner took his thick green slime and spread it like a chef might glaze some pastry... A ludicrously distended clitoris popped out from nowhere like a jack-in-the-box..." Oh, yuck.
It was rather mischievous to nominate David Mitchell's Black Swan Green (Sceptre), yet the judges were won over by "Now she made a noise like a tortured Moomintroll..." together with the image of "cressy" pubic hair.

Water imagery is to the Bad Sex prize what post-colonialism is to the Man Booker. This year Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother (Cape) qualified handsomely. "And it swept over her like surf sweeping over sand then falling back and sweeping up over the sand again and falling back. Images went off in her head like little fireworks. The smell of coconut. Brass firedogs." Genius!

But lest you think the big boys (fnur fnur) have it sewn up, the little-known Julia Glass mounts a strong challenge in The Whole World Over (Hutchinson): "all the words this time not a crowding but a heavenly train, an ostrich fan, a vision as much as an orgasm, a release in something deep in the core of her altered brain..." and so on, on, yes, on!

Honourable mentions also go to Iain Hollingshead's Twentysomething (Duckworth) - "her crotch taut against my bulging trousers" - and Michael Cannon's Lachlan's War, published by Cape, in which a woman climaxes "with surprise". Perhaps it was the firedogs.

Dharma Quote: Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche on Equanimity

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In the current issue of Shambhala Sun, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche has an article on cultivating bodhicitta. As a precursor to developing bodhicitta, however, Rinpoche encourages us to cultivate equanimity. I liked his explanation of what it is and why we need it.

The point of first cultivating an attitude of equanimity is to open up our view. We tend to have fixed ideas of friends and enemies, and based on that view, we see the world through the lens of good and bad: sharks are bad and bunny rabbits are good; democracy is great and communism is bad.

Equanimity is a spacious, vast, and even state of mind; it does not take sides. It's not about being untouched by the world, but letting go of fixed ideas. How else are we to develop compassion and loving-kindness for everyone and everything? Equanimity levels the playing field -- we are not excluding anyone from our practice.

He goes on to offer several methods for cultivating bodhicitta. It's a nice article, but I wanted to share the clarity of this statement on equanimity.

Poem: Thom Gunn

[image source]

Considering The Snail

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth's dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail's fury? All
I think is that if later

I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.

Satire: Al-Jazeera Refuses to Air O.J. Special

From the fertile mind of Andy Borowitz:

Al-Jazeera Refuses to Air O.J. Special

'Not Up to Our Standards of Taste,' Says Satellite Net

The Arabic-language Al-Jazeera network, which gained international notoriety for putting some of the most renowned sociopaths in the world on the air, today became the second network to refuse to broadcast the controversial O.J. Simpson special, "If I Did It."

After the Fox network cancelled their airdate for the Simpson special, producer Judith Regan immediately sent a tape of the program to top executives at the Al-Jazeera network in the hopes that the media outlet who made a star our of Osama bin Laden would be a good fit for Mr. Simpson.

But after reviewing the tape of the Simpson program, Al-Jazeera executives decided that "If I Did It" was a non-starter at their network.

"O.J. Simpson certainly qualifies as a delusional madman, which is the bread and butter of our broadcast schedule," said Al-Jazeera spokesman Hassan El-Medfaii. "Having said that, 'If I Did It,' is not up to our standards of taste."

While some media observers took the Al-Jazeera statement at face value, insiders close to the decision not to air the O.J. special said that the network was "queasy about getting into business with Judith Regan."

Instead, the network has decided to broadcast a new special starring Mr. bin Laden, entitled, "If I Declared a Global Jihad, Here's How It Would Have Gone Down."

According to those who have seen the special, Mr. bin Laden's program is a ninety-minute hate-filled rant, but not as vicious as Michael Richards.

Elsewhere, President Bush said that the U.S. has now been involved in Iraq longer than in World War II, adding, "And all I got was this lousy t-shirt."

Speedlinking 11/27/06

This morning's image is of Crater Lake in Oregon, from The Fairest:

Happy Monday. I hope you had a happy and safe holiday weekend.

BODY
~ Value Of Exercise For Seniors Shown In Multi-center Study With Stanford.
~ Diet May Help Prevent Allergies And Asthma. I wish I could get my clients to believe me when I tell them this.
~ Blocking An Inter-Generational Cycle Of Obesity. This is another article on the importance of proper nutrition while pregnant.
~ Pilates can aid some with Parkinson's. "Movements in Pilates exercises are controlled — sometimes moving the body only inches — but those small motions are making a big difference to some people with Parkinson's disease."
~ Blame Myelin For Many Neuropsychiatric Disorders. The article doesn't make this point, but it should: healthy fats in the diet builds healthy cells in the brain.
~ Humans Inhabit Body of Experimental Robot.

PSYCHE
~ Antidepressants and Weight Gain: The road to happiness needn't be paved with pounds.
~ Study On Neuronal Circuits May Help Explain Memory And Cognitive Decline In Alzheimer's Disease.
~ Expert Offers Tips On Coping With Grief During The Holidays.
~ From Sean at Deep Surface: The Universe is Expanding.
~ From Will at ThinkBuddha: Doing the Right Thing.
~ Mike at Unknowing Mind offers Nothing Gold Can Stay, a look at the Frost poem.

CULTURE
~ Eternal Hope at The Daily Kos has offered up their Articles of Impeachment against Bush and Cheney. Makes the liberals feel all warm and fuzzy, but with Pelosi next in line, it ain't never gonna happen.
~ Why We Worry About The Things We Shouldn't...And Ignore The Things We Should. For example: "We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isn't) in our hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,000 of us annually."
~ Religion and Science. This post features a discussion of the Beyond Belief series.
~ A look at the Heritability of religiosity.
~ From Ryan at Integral Awakening: Research on Tibetan Yoga. Can Eastern practices be adapted to Western needs?

HABITATS
~ Could the Sun be causing climate change? Human influence only accounts for 50% of the current situation according to most scientists.
~ Thinking Clearly About Space, a series of articles on space science.
~ Two-Thirds of China Cities Face Water Shortages.
~ Self-Perpetuating Paradigms: How Scientists Deal With Unexpected Results.
~ Crossing Wild and Conventional Wheat Boosts Protein, Avoids Genetic Modification.
~ Lemur boon on Madagascar: Genetic analysis turns up three new species. They're so cute.

MATTERS INTEGRAL
~ An Integral Approach to Enlightenment and beyond. By Alan Kazlev.
~ Joe at Until responds, Another respected guru has faced scrutiny, to my post on Sogyal Rinpoche.
~ NEWS: I'm Looking for a Turquoise CEO. Ken Wilber is looking for an integral level CEO willing to work on the cheap.
~ Ryan at Integral Awakening offers Three Qualities of Contemplative Practice

Reclaiming My Self

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My college girlfriend (who was sometimes much wiser than either of us gave her credit for) once said she felt like a single spoke in the wheel that was then my life. She understood that I had many interests and that she couldn't be a part of all of them.

Over the years I let far too many of those interests drop away. This happened the most when I quit drinking many years ago. As part of that process, I imposed a strict discipline on my life that has held until the last six months or so. The result of that discipline was that I let even more things fall away that had once been important to me. It felt necessary to focus my life on a few areas and to eliminate anything connected to the time in my life when I drank.

As I just indicated, that has been changing. I spent the majority of this holiday weekend breaking down the structure that has been so crucial to defining who I am the past several years. In reality, this process has been underway for months. As a result, whole areas of my life -- of my personality -- are opening again to me, parts that had seemed lost forever.

It's been a challenging process and it has only just started. There is a lot of work to do.

While I was experiencing growth over the past few years, I was all about the transcending and not so much about the including. This has left me unbalanced in many ways, but more importantly it has left me without the foundation of work and experience that helped form the person I have become.

Part of me has fought this process because, as a Buddhist, I'm "supposed" to be all about transcending the self and breaking down the ego. But this is faulty logic. We cannot transcend selves that are broken or incomplete -- the damaged or wounded or incomplete areas will sabotage us at some point in the future. This is the lesson I have taken from the abusive guru stuff I have blogged about recently (here and here).

However, as I begin to reclaim disowned parts of myself -- not necessarily subpersonalities, but aspects of my personality -- I am beginning to feel more whole. And at the same time, there is less solidity to my self-concept. I'm not sure if that makes any sense to anyone but me, but it works.

Let me return to the wheel image. As I feel more and more spokes in the wheel, the hub becomes smaller and smaller -- with the hub being my "self" and the spokes being subpersonalities, interests, and personality traits. Maybe someday the hub will be reduced to the pure emptiness that is my original face. Or maybe it will take many more lifetimes.

Either way, I find this new process exciting. I have to admit that it would never happen to the degree it is now if I was still in an intimate relationship -- the chaos and flux would be too much for any partner to hang around for. It would be unfair to subject someone to this -- it certainly isn't easy for me, either. Some days it feels totally out of control and that I am coming unglued. Those are probably the days I am fighting the process.

I don't know how this will play itself in my daily life. It's been easier to do this on what has mostly been an extended weekend. I guess the coming days will either be tough or they won't.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Video: Intro to Kaballah

I found the link to this curious little short film at Intent Blog. It's a nice, brief (five minutes) introduction to the basics of Kaballah.

The F-Word

The word "fuck" is perhaps the most versatile word in the English language. This funny little short film (created to look like an old informational film) explores all the various uses and meanings of the F-word.

Not child or work safe.

Sunday Poet: Octavio Paz

When I left Seattle back in 2002, I sold 95 percent of my poetry collection. I thought I was through with poetry -- but I was wrong. One of the books I recently reacquired is the Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, one of my favorite poets. Here are a few poems from that collection that I have found on the web.

Brotherhood
Homage to Claudius Ptolemy

I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.

*****

Between Going and Staying

Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.

The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.

*****

Sunstone (fragments)

a crystal willow, a poplar of water,
a tall fountain the wind arches over,
a tree deep-rooted yet dancing still,
a course of a river that turns, moves on,
doubles back, and comes full circle,
forever arriving:
the calm course
of the stars or an unhurried spring,
water with eyes closed welling over
with oracles all night long,
a single presence in a surge of waves,
wave after wave till it covers all,
a reign of green that knows no decline,
like the flash of wings unfolding in the sky, (...)

I travel your body, like the world,
your belly is a plaza full of sun,
your breasts two churches where blood
performs its own, parallel rites,
my glances cover you like ivy,
you are a city the sea assaults,
a stretch of ramparts split by the light
in two halves the color of peaches,
a domain of salt, rocks and birds,
under the rule of oblivious noon,

dressed in the color of my desires,
you go your way naked as my thoughts,
I travel your eyes, like the sea,
tigers drink their dreams in those eyes,
the hummingbird burns in those flames,
I travel your forehead, like the moon,
like the cloud that passes through your thoughts,
I travel your belly, like your dreams,

your skirt of corn ripples and sings,
your skirt of crystal, your skirt of water,
your lips, your hair, your glances rain
all through the night, and all day long
you open my chest with your fingers of water,
you close my eyes with your mouth of water,
you rain on my bones, a tree of liquid
sending roots of water into my chest,

I travel your length, like a river,
I travel your body, like a forest,
like a mountain path that ends at a cliff
I travel along the edge of your thoughts,
and my shadow falls from your white forehead,
my shadow shatters, and I gather the pieces
and go with no body, groping my way, (...)

...because two bodies, naked and entwined,
leap over time, they are invulnerable,
nothing can touch them, they return to the source,
there is no you, no I, no tomorrow,
no yesterday, no names, the truth of two
in a single body, a single soul,
oh total being... (...)

to love is to battle, if two kiss
the world changes, desires take flesh
thoughts take flesh, wings sprout
on the backs of the slave, the world is real
and tangible, wine is wine, bread
regains its savor, water is water,
to love is to battle, to open doors,
to cease to be a ghost with a number
forever in chains, forever condemned
by a faceless master;
the world changes
if two look at each other and see (...)

I follow my raving, rooms, streets,
I grope my way through corridors of time,
I climb and descend its stairs, I touch
its walls and do not move, I go back
to where I began, I search for your face,
I walk through the streets of myself
under an ageless sun, and by my side
you walk like a tree, you walk like a river,
and talk to me like the course of a river,
you grow like wheat between my hands,
you throb like a squirrel between my hands,
you fly like a thousand birds, and your laugh
is like the spray of the sea, you head
is a star between my hands, the world
grows green again when you smile,
eating an orange,
the world changes
if two, dizzy and entwined, fall
on the grass: the sky comes down, trees
rise, space becomes nothing but light
and silence, open space for the eagle
of the eye, the white tribe of clouds
goes by, and the body weighs anchor,
the soul sets sail, and we lose
our names and float adrift in the blue
and green, total time where nothing
happens but its own, easy crossing (...)

—when was life ever truly ours?
when are we ever what we are?
we are ill-reputed, nothing more
than vertigo and emptiness, a frown in the mirror,
horror and vomit, life is never
truly ours, it always belongs to the others,
life is no one's, we all are life—
bread of the sun for the others,
the others that we all are—
when I am I am another, my acts
are more mine when they are the acts
of others, in order to be I must be another,
leave myself, search for myself
in the others, the others that don’t exist
if I don't exist, the others that give me
total existence, I am not,
there is no I, we are always us,
life is other, always there,
further off, beyond you and
beyond me, always on the horizon,
life which unlives us and makes us strangers,
that invents our face and wears it away,
hunger for being, oh death, our bread

*****

[Note: "Sunstone" is a very long work, so what appears above are some fragments apparently chosen by Weinberger (though I can't be sure) for publication on the web.]

Octavio Paz was a very prolific poet, so even the Collected Poems (which is bilingual) does not collect the earliest work -- author and translator agreed that there is a distinct difference in the two periods and that they should remain separate in publication. We benefit, however, from the fact that Paz and his translator, Eliot Weinberger, were good friends and worked together to be sure the translation was faithful to the author's intent. The result is a challenging collection of poems that move from modernism to a post-modern feel, with a liberal dose of surrealism tossed in (Paz was aligned with Andre Breton and the surrealists for a while). But Paz is also a political poet, and that commitment informs his entire body of work.

Here is some biography from the Nobel site (Paz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1990):

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.

Here is one last poem I was able to find on the web:

Touch

My hands
open the curtains of your being
clothe you in a further nudity
uncover the bodies of your body
My hands
invent another body for your body

Octavio Paz on the web:
Wikipedia
Nobel Prize site, includes his speech
Academy of American Poets
Octavio Paz - Weinberger translations, source of these poems
Octavio Paz - Johannes Beilharz translations. These poems are highly formatted and not suitable to a blog post, but certainly worth reading.

Alice Walker on The Pause

Alice Walker has an interesting article over at In These Times on listening to the pause. It's essentially a feminist statement, but the message is as useful for men as it for women. The article is also coming partially from a tribal-magical mindset, but that doesn't negate the value of the message as long as we are aware of it -- we may have transcended and included that level of development, but we included it as well as transcended it, so it can still speak to us in important ways.

All Praises to the Pause

By Alice Walker

One of the many gifts I received from strangers after writing The Color Purple 24 years ago was a bright yellow volume of the I Ching. It opened to the 63rd hexagram: “After Completion.” This is a time when a major transition from confusion to order has been completed and everything is (at last!) in its proper place even in particulars. Interestingly, according to the I Ching, this is a time not of relaxation, but of caution.

The I Ching is a compass of great value. Uncanny in its ability to share its Wisdom at just the moment it is required. How many friends, even best and closest friends, can do that?

What it is referring to in this hexagram is something that I am going to call “the pause.” The moment when something major is accomplished and we are so relieved to finally be done with it that we are already rushing, at least mentally, into The Future. Wisdom, however, requests a pause. If we cannot give ourselves such a pause, the Universe will likely give it to us. In the form of illness, in the form of a massive Mercury in retrograde, in the form of our car breaking down, our roof starting to leak, our garden starting to dry up. Our government collapsing. And we find ourselves required to stop, to sit down, to reflect. This is the time of “the pause,” the universal place of stopping. The universal moment of reflection.

I encourage you not to fear it. And why is it important not to fear the pause? Because some of the most courageous people on earth are scared of it, as I have been myself. Why is this? It is because the pause has nothing in it; it feels empty. It feels like we have been jettisoned into wide open, empty space. We can not see an end to it. Not seeing an end to it, or for that matter, not even understanding a beginning or a need for it, we panic. We may decide to make war, for instance, in the moment the Universe has given us to reflect. By the time we recover from our hasty activity a thousand small children may be lying dead at our feet.

Sometimes there is a feeling of not being able to continue. That, in this pause, whichever one it is, there is no movement. No encouragement to move, at all.

Read the rest of the article here.

The Perfect Teacher

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I posted the other day on my disappointment with having found out that Sogyal Rinpoche had been involved in some of the exploitive behavior that has gotten other gurus in trouble. His particular offense was many years ago, but it bothers me he was capable of acting that way.

The same day that I posted that entry, the Daily Om was on life as the perfect teacher. I didn't read it that day, but now it seems a little synchronous that it showed up on the same day that I found out about Rinpoche.

Life
Your Perfect Teacher

Many of us long to find a spiritual teacher or guru. We may feel unsure of how to practice our spirituality without one, or we may long for someone who has attained a higher level of insight to lead the way for us. Some of us have been looking for years to no avail and feel frustrated and even lost. The good news is that the greatest teacher you could ever want is always with you-that is your life.

The people and situations we encounter every day have much to teach us when we are open to receiving their wisdom. Often we don't recognize our teachers because they may not look or act like our idea of a guru, yet they may embody great wisdom. In addition, some people teach us by showing us what we don't want to do. All the situations in our lives, from the insignificant to the major, conspire to teach us exactly what we need to be learning at any given time. Patience, compassion, perseverance, honesty, letting go-all these are covered in the classroom of the teacher that is your life.

We can help ourselves to remember this perfect teacher each day with a few simple words. Each morning we might find a moment to say, "I acknowledge and honor the teacher that is my life. May I be wise enough to recognize the teachers and lessons that I encounter today, and may I be open to receiving their wisdom." We might also take some time each day to consider what our lives are trying to teach us at this time. A difficult phase in your relationship with your child may be teaching you to let go. The homeless person you see every day may be showing you the boundaries of your compassion and generosity. A spate of lost items may be asking you to be more present to physical reality. Trust your intuition on the nature of the lesson at hand, work at your own pace, and ask as many questions as you want. Your life has all the answers.

There's nothing new about this idea or approach -- it's what Pema Chodron teaches in all of her books and lectures. It's also what Lama Surya Das tends to teach.

But for those of us who are disillusioned with the guru-student relationship, or never found it very desirable in the first place, seeing life as the teacher -- and paying respect to that each day, as we would a conventional guru -- can be a very useful way of practicing surrender.

If we pay attention, and if we are willing to surrender to what life brings us, we will get all the challenges we need for growth from our daily lives. And if we are Buddhist, we will get an enormous range of opportunities for mindfulness and for surrendering ego. We simply have to be willing to accept the challenges as they come and not resort to shadow defenses.

This is easier said than done, of course, or we all would be much more enlightened people. But we can choose each morning, as the material above suggests, to be open to life as our teacher and to accept the lessons that come our way.

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Monday, November 27, 2006

Al-Jazeera Refuses to Air O.J. Special

'Not Up to Our Standards of Taste,' Says Satellite Net

Sunday, November 26, 2006

All Praises to the Pause

By Alice Walker