THE SECOND HELPING

Given the feeding frenzy that is Thanksgiving dinner, it's not hard to see what Americans mean when they insist God helps those who help themselves. I for one am still waiting to taste the Harvard beets that never got to me six years ago because somebody else short-stopped them and dug in too deep. This year the white meat was gone by the time I got to the turkey.

The morning after this beloved ritual of stuffing, grabbing gravy, and insisting everything has been served with a sprinkle of God’s blessing, it's also easy to see that the Protestant ethic, God helps those who help themselves, is the modus operandi of America's gluttonous economic system too. It's become the same sort of feeding frenzy, only with different people at the table. Once we ordinary citizen “turkeys” are eagerly killed and gobbled up, these stuffed ones help themselves to the gravy. Only in this case they don't even bother to pretend to give thanks for the sacrifice of we “turkeys” who last year turned the other breast to pass it.

A society so devoted to helping yourself this way has created a weird hierarchy in which people get rewarded in inverse proportion to their benefit to others. We so value grabbing over sharing that those who actually commit their lives to trying to do something vital to somebody else—social workers, schoolteachers, caregivers-- end up trashed at the poverty level of an income scale that shoots to the moon for people who do absolutely nothing but play with money, people who say of themselves, "we eat what we kill without feeling any compunction to share." If you don’t believe me about perverse payrolls, read the Nobel winning economist Paul Krugman who this morning said in the New York Times, “there’s broad agreement — I’m tempted to say, agreement on the part of almost everyone not on the financial industry’s payroll — with Mr. Turner’s assertion that a lot of what Wall Street and the City do is “socially useless.”

The Buddha, of course, said the cosmos helps those who help others, because what goes round comes back at you. That’s karma, or destiny, a promise that it really is good for you to do and be good to others. And it isn’t supposed to be fattening.

As it happens, on the Dzogchen Ponlop paramita practice calendar, November is for meditation, which he says actually means honing the qualities of a Bodhisattva. First and most famously among them is the will to help others. So to balance the press prattle about takers, I’d like thank some givers. And I’d like to start with all those anonymous folks who spend their entire work year sewing up and blowing up those awesome balloons in the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. Snoopy… Superman… Santa Claus…how wondrous to work only to put joy in the world! What would life be like if everyone’s job goal was to make others innocently happy like that?

I would like thank those who actually forego all monetary income and physical pleasures to become bearers of the Buddhadharma, actually living out the aspiration to help all sentient beings. This is not so easy. The Rinpoche level requires the stamina and stoicism for endless airport marathons of security checks, visa approvals and missed connections. Plus a punishing schedule with a different location almost every week, surprise food and strange beds, infinite interviews with total strangers, infinite requests for help. How they suffer to alleviate others' suffering.

At the lower levels, the food is terrible and the accommodations anything but gracious. Think floor. I think about an accomplished monk who struggled mightily without English language skills or familiarity to stick to his post in the middle of nowhere Colorado. Last year at this time, when he was packed and ready, he was denied a visa that would have let him go home to see his seriously ill mother in the Himalayas. He is still here, smiling and guiding those in retreat while other monks considered also seriously devoted to the Dharma burst out of their robes because the bright temptations of our culture—the gifts, attention and meals respectfully offered—blinded them to the beauty of their calling. Suddenly it seemed bleak. Now one is wandering somewhere in Ohio, struggling to find a job, finding out that no one tends to the needs of just another unemployed, unskilled guy in jeans.

I give thanks to the Nepali bamboo flute genius Manose who for the last two years has been circling the globe delighting and inspiring people with intensely sacred sound from his bansuri. His music so touches the human spirit that his CDs keep topping the charts and selling out, not only at yoga centers but Target stores. “I have enough money,” he says, “and it just keeps coming so I tell people: ‘Don’t pay me. Send money to help people in Nepal.’”

Thanks also to everyone who plucks a guitar string, hits a piano key or blows into a flute because no harm can come from this, only joy—after all the frustration of getting it right, of course. But thanks for sticking to the flatted fifths and syncopations and scat singing, because I totally agree with the country music disk jockey who used to close his hour-long NPR show with the tag line: “Just remember, making music is never the wrong thing to do.”

And thanks to those like Emmanuel from Silicon Valley by way of Nigeria who two weeks ago saw a photo of school kids in Nepal playing soccer in bare feet, and immediately tapped out an email message saying: “Soccer is my sport so I’d like those kids to love it too. I want to buy them shoes. How can I do that?”

Like Sioga who wrote from Ireland last week, “I am a retired nurse, a Buddhist for 35 years…a mother of two adult sons, widow and farmer, horse breeder and master gardener, with a passion for gardening. This past summer I spent in voluntary work with Wwoof Ireland, 'willing workers on organic farms traveling around Ireland, working in various gardens, tunnels, restoring a walled-garden, composting, soil amending, small animal care, and learned so much, shared of myself, time and talents in this exchange. …So, I have experience and confidence in the garden, and kitchen and would be glad to offer to be of service.”

Thanks even to those like the San Francisco dentist who last week said: “Even if you don’t have insurance coverage, I feel so strongly you should have X-rays that I will only charge you half price.” What a tidy resolution to a health care crisis!


~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

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Worth The Trip

The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche paramita practice calendar made October exertion month, and by the most auspicious coincidence, precisely the time my own Rinpoche was a mere hundreds instead of the more normal thousands of miles—and oceans —away. So I made the enormous effort to go see him for the weekend he went public. And, as it turned out, so did dozens of others. Here’s to them, and to everyone who goes the extra mile to get to the Dharma.

In “namtar” (spiritual biographies), talks and texts of commentary, we are continually reminded of the long, perilous journeys seekers of the Buddha’s truth were forced to endure to pick up a kernel or two of it. Great gurus were made by great hardships crossing the Himalayas, or in the case of Atisha around the year 1,000 A.D., crossing the Bay of Bengal to get to Sumatra. Not long after that, the remarkable yogi Rechungpa trekked from Tibet to India in the desperate throes of leprosy, fueled by dogged determination, and consequently brought back to the Vajrayana the practice of Vajrapani. The late Tulku Urgyen in his juicy memoir Blazing Splendor reminds us that even in the 20th Century, devout Khampas on pilgrimage to Lhasa or Tsurphu endlessly confronted bandits, burst bridges, worn horses and dwindled food supplies, yet they persevered. And right on the turn of the millennium, His Holiness Karmapa escaped Chinese captivity in order to get authentic teaching by slogging through snowdrifts at night and riding ponies down the steep escarpments of sacred Nepalese valleys.

Framed in this grand perspective, four hours, a flat tire and a speeding ticket on the unnerving I-5 plus one hour in enervating LA freeway traffic and another madly dodging the absurdly dodgy drivers on the freeways around San Francisco Bay does not look like suffering. Especially when the reward was two days of teaching and a talk on how Dharma can help you surf the heavy waves of these troubled times.

Still, only gumption gets you going to an unknown city where you must push your way through a puzzling and poorly marked maze of speedways, nest in a generic motel and scratch alien territory for decent, safe food, all in order to grab a seat in a strange space where mostly strangers who seem to know each other are packed in like sardines and lines for the toilet are long. Nobody ever talks about this sometimes disconcerting and spooky experience. So it was immensely gratifying for Rinpoche to open his remarks by acknowledging how everyone crammed into that room had deflected the abundant, glitzy distractions of Los Angeles, including a beach that was probably an easier place to be in the abnormally high heat of that mid October weekend. He thanked us for this amazing choice of coming to hear Dharma, because we didn’t have to.

According to what I heard and overheard, what people didn't have to endure to be there included two other flat tires and a delayed flight. Those who came by air constantly had to find rides and those who had cars had to find parking places good for at least three hours. One woman drove alone more than a day and parked herself in a bare bones off-ramp motel to be at this gathering where she knew absolutely no one. There was no food within walking distance except McDonald's or scary prepacked salad at a low-grade supermarket, and no GPS guidance toward a real meal. One couple drove six hours each way and stayed only two hours because they had to get back. One couple drove eight hours each way to stay slightly more than 24, due to pressures from work. Every effort was made, as some Dharma defenders like to say, to be here now.

The reward was a “head” start on surviving these desperate times. Rinpoche advised those of us who had bothered to be there to rely on aspiration prayers, particularly the Verses of the Eight Noble Auspicious Ones by the late Jamgon Mipham Rinpoche. Other students had reported back on its astonishingly positive effect, and if that wasn’t convincing enough there was, as always, the ancient story of the dog’s tooth actually becoming a Buddha relic because the old woman on whom it had been foisted off steadfastly believed in it to have that kind of power.

For those still skeptical of aspiration prayers or those who wanted a two-pronged putsch, Rinpoche recommended relying on the boomerang karma known as merit: being generously charitable to others inevitably brings good fortune back at you. What goes round comes round. And of course the third way was the Lojong slogan loosely translated as: remembering emptiness is the best protection. That is to say, never lose the view of Mahamudra in which impermanence is peripheral vision and emptiness the center of attention. Nothing is really happening and even if you think it is, it's all going to change to yet another happening in a second. Don't get sucked in and hooked.

In other words, just getting there and back didn't do it for the paramita practice. Any which way you went, exertion definitely had to extend way beyond October. But then, Dzogchen Ponlop says exertion really means overcoming your laziness to find joy in the Dharma


~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

http://www.sandygarson.com

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The Land of the Fee and Home of the Rave

What can you say about the theater of the absurd health care drama this past week? It takes a pillage?

Well, here we are at the 20th anniversary of real freedom, the fall of the Berlin Wall, conveniently forgetting it's also the bigger anniversary of Kristallnacht.

And here we are at yet another commemoration of Veterans' Day with only a Demander in Chief to lead us veterans of scarring wars with the barbarians of the insurance industry and Huns of Wall Street. Ah domestic violence.

Pity, these headlines. I so love excuses to drink champagne.

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

http://www.sandygarson.com

http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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EVERY DAY IN THE DHARMA IS HALLOWEEN

I’ve never thought of Halloween as Buddhist practice, but that weird and scary truth collided with me last night in the middle of San Francisco’s Castro Street costume cavalcade. It hit me as a bigger surprise than my even being there, for as far as I knew, I was going late in the afternoon to my friend Sonia’s Day of the Dead food fiesta in the abutting Mission district. Tall and lanky Sonia comes from Spain where this season of death and shut down Americans signify with Halloween is celebrated as el dia de los muertes, making it her turn to make dinner for the handful of family-less young foreign professionals I’ve brought together. We gather on each other’s holidays for kitchen revels we call “family” dinners.

This one started later than we anticipated. As it did, Billy and Ana, who comes from Cuba, consulted an iPhone pumpkin face app and carved a feline face on the great pumpkin offered to me that morning as a friendship gift. Once a candle was safely nestled in it, all of us went to work on the array of dishes Sonia managed to create in an aging studio apartment kitchen of minimal equipment: vegetarian paella, tuna empanada, potato omelet (tortilla espagnola), sopa secca, leek soup and Catalonian chicken with stewed fruits. Between bites, we talked about the meaning of Halloween, and thus equivalent rites and rituals in the countries we represented. After a desert buffet, Nepalis, Ram and Rakita, announced they needed a walk to digest this culinary extravaganza.

Actually, we were all feeling our stomachs as round as that devilishly flickering pumpkin, but since more family was en route, only four of us went out into the noisy nightscape. "Where are the costumes we've heard about?", the Nepalis innocently asked. Chinese-American San Francisco native Wayne turned us up 18th Street toward the Castro.

The infamous epicenter of Halloween hoopla was only five blocks away and every couple yards, the crowds and mayhem we had to walk through thickened. We were brushing against convicts in stripes, a bevy of crossdressed blue tints, pirates, footballers and cavemen, stepping aside for Alice in the white pinafore of Wonderland, Clarabel, Dr. Spock, Spiderman, Superman, happy hookers with brightly painted faces and a serenely sleek white jellyfish. Almost every building was decorated with cobwebs, goblins, black cats, spiders and pumpkins candle lit. Nothing seemed untouched by this occasion. Effort had definitely been made. Even the almost full and ghoulishly jolly moon contributed special effect. I in my ordinary everyday clothes started to feel very self-conscious as we huddled on the corner of Castro Street, trying to not get sideswiped by the onrush.

Bare-chested cowboys passed, a man riding a yellow bathtub duck, the phantom of the opera, clowns, a man dressed as the famous dachshund sign from the now defunct Doggie Diner. “Yesterday I passed an entire elementary school in fairy tale trick or treat finery mobbing the local shopping street," I said aloud as though my companions might hear and care. "Then I walked into my office and I felt so let down because nobody was dressed up as anything. ‘Okay,’ I said to perk the atmosphere, ‘trick or treat. I’m disguised as me.’ ”

Castro Street was studded with gaudily sequined studs-- one crossdresser parading by in gorgeously glittery red high heels chunky enough to look comfortable. The crowd flowed like a river of wigs and boas, wicked black witch hats and bared human flesh. In the midst of such a carnival of free flying imagination, I stood as…well, as me. Others had for a brief and certainly shining moment escaped by pretending to be somebody else, and there I was stuck on me.

I started to think about not being in costume, of having so defensively declared the day before that I was dressed as myself. Of course, life is a come as you are party, so who would blame me? But still, if given this one chance to do otherwise, why did I so stubbornly show up as myself? That translates as my self, when as a Buddhist I’m supposed to dump the my and thus have no self.

Who would think you could start doing Mahamudra in the middle of Halloween night in the Castro? But there I was. Every new costume that came in view came with my question: who is this self I am dressed as? Did clothes make the woman? When are clothes not some kind of costume? Frankly, on that Castro corner the predominant get-up was navy blue San Francisco policeman and it was not pretend because the city was making damned sure there were no shootings as in years past.

I stood there trying not to be jostled by police or paraders, trying to figure out who was dressed in this loose orange and black outfit on my body. Maybe, I whispered to myself, I should’ve made an effort like everybody else out here tonight. I could have dressed up as White Tara or something.

The trick or treat truth of the Dharma hit me like a three-jewels slot machine kaching!

Almost exactly a year ago, Jetsun Tenzin Palmo visited San Francisco and in an intimate Dharma talk, she said our basic ignorance is simply not knowing who we are, not having right awareness. “You are so silly,” she chided. “You don't even realize the joke's on you. You work so hard at visualization practice, struggling to imagine yourself as the deity, don't you? But really all along, the truth is and has been that you already are the deity—visualizing itself all day long as you!”

So there it is. Every day in Samsara is a Halloween costume party. Every day a bright light is burning behind whatever face is carved onto us pumpkins. Every moment on the Buddhist path prior to enlightenment is trick or treat. That's what I learned about life celebrating the day of the dead.

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

http://www.sandygarson.com

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Columbus Day Discovery

What can you say when at the start of a workweek, Barack Obama turns his back to His Holiness the Dalai Lama after inviting him to the White House—the first President to renege like that? And then at the end of the week, he wins the Nobel Peace Prize? Could you say here is a man of principal, our American principal, a man standing on all of it, even if the United States of America has no principal left, just a lot of interest in keeping the Chinese from cashing out our one trillion dollars of debt? Is that what our elected representative who had His Holiness’ khata in his pocket when he took the oath of office really represented? Peacekeeping the profits of our Chinese overlords?

What can you say when the President of the United States wins the Nobel Peace Prize merely because he represented the American people’s hope for more peace of mind, and some American people attack him with verbal smart bombs? We used to say attacking your own country is treason, and treason is a crime. What can you say now that it is very lucrative entertainment and powerful political strategy? Tilopa would say seeing others faults is the basis of Samsara.

What can you say when the operative aspiration of the Chinese Communist Republic and the ultra capitalistic Goldman Sachs Republicans turns out to be one and the same motto: ‘to get rich is glorious’? “Capitalism is the exploitation of one man by another,” the son of the founder of Italy’s Communist Party said to me during a press junket many years ago. “Communism is the exploitation of one man by another with a different name.” Oh say, can you see if our flag, the symbol of democracy, is still there?

What can you say when the giant corporations who cannot afford a liver transplant for a dying 22-year-old woman or heart surgery for a 27-year-old Montana family man have enough money to pay for a quarter of a million dollar South Dakota employees’ whoopee weekend in southern California, five million in annual salary to keep Wellpoint’s CEO well on point, and another million dollars a day for lobbyists to protect their godlike monopoly on human life in America? What can you say when killing people in cold blood is supposed to be a heinous crime, but turns out to be a perfectly acceptable American business plan?

What can you say when you see the people you elected to represent you don’t want to. Olympia Snowe represents the state of Maine where 70% of voters want public health care but she won't vote even a shrug for it. What can you say when the money you pay through your taxes pays these people to stand in and stand up for you but you get taxation without representation?

What do you say because what you pay people to take care of you is dwarfed to insignificance by the money from their pimps, the insurance companies and oil or coal companies, who pay up to a million dollars a senator for them to screw you for the pipsqueak money you paid? What can you say knowing that lavishly dispersed money was actually your money, and that it did not go to buy you as it was supposed to, but rather to deny you medical attention? Or get the planet Earth the health care it needs so badly too?

What can you say when the paper of record reports the one fashion designer who for two decades made millions of fanatic fans and billions of dollars by making what the Times called "moderately affluent" women over 50 look easily elegant and stylish has decided more money's in the Bebe skintight younger crowd and so has abandoned fuller figures for some illusive piece prize? Can you say it's like Obama turning his back to His Holiness and Congress turning its back to the American people? Can you say it's going for the gold? Or should you say His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the American people and women over fifty are so, so...well, so yesterday. And as we all know America's favorite song says: tomorrow, tomorrow, we love you tomorrow...

What can you say at when, as we celebrate Columbus Day, we have discovered a new world like nothing we’ve ever seen? What can you say about a nation created to form a more more perfect union that has chosen to come apart at the seems?

Maybe the answer is blowing in the wind that brought such fog and chill to San Francisco, the Blue Angels couldn't shatter the peace some prize on a holiday weekend.

I can only say this week brought news that a sangha in San Rafael, California is busily trying to raise money to provide clean toilets and drinking water for the villagers of holy Bodh Gaya. Thrangu Rinpoche’s Canadian sangha said they want to help raise awareness of and thus money for the Veggiyana project feeding monks and nuns nutritious food so they can perform their duties in good health. Two Buddhists wrote from Maine they were going on pilgrimage with Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche and would like to be of benefit afterwards by volunteering to help perhaps the schoolchildren or nuns in Kathmandu. And Lopon Neten Dorje who safely returned this week from his museum stint in San Francisco to his monastery in Thimpu, Bhutan, wrote in his scant English: “You are so kind to the poor monks and nuns. Please keep it up.”

What my Brazilian correspondent who sends Buddhist homilies said this week came from the late Bokar Rinpoche: “Like birds landing on a tree top together, and then dispersing, we are together for a very short time. So it makes sense to live in harmony, in unconditional friendship.” Let's all say: svaha.

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

http://www.sandygarson.com

http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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I of the Storm

We in the precinct of the paramitas have come to the end of patience practice month not a second too soon. The universe has been way too accommodating this September, raining down a monsoon of opportunities for private practice in case all the public chicanery wasn’t enough. “Everybody’s stressed,” an old friend said on the phone from Phoenix, referring to her multimillionaire son-in-law with two fabulous houses and lots of first class airline tickets. “Read the news. Even a superrich guy like McAfee had to sell his multizillion dollar house underpriced to round up money.”

In smallville, where we never rich or nouveau pauvre reside, this was the month my condominium management job from hell produced an even worse cavalcade of client demands, time consumed by evening meetings and horrific screaming by a homeowner’s perpetually work-free boyfriend who wants to do away with me so he can have my job. This was on top of the even more tragicomic dysfunction in an office the cheapskate owners run with a changing array of unpaid high school interns. I even got to be face to face with luxury people who pay me $80 a week for 10-15 hours of complex work as they rushed to refuse a raise to $88 for next year.

During Patience month, the superman general contractor handyman I rely on at my job stopped showing up or returning calls, abandoning me in mid crises. Yesterday he fessed up. The corporation he’d sold his private business to was forcing him to “prioritize their way.” Although he was famously calm even in calamity, he had become stressed to the breaking point by losing his old customers, reputation and independence. The people he now worked for had no idea what it was like to be face to face with customers and stay on the human side as he'd always done. And there aloud was the corrupting truth of corporatism, the sole cause of our health care and financial disasters: those tidily removed from the effects of their decisions don’t have to take the affected into their accounting like real people fighting on the front line of reality.

This month the janitorial contractor failed to show up because his lady returned from visiting her native El Salvador so sick, he had to rush her to an emergency room and wait all day until someday took care of her. Then he had to spent two days at his house fending off her family who kept showing up to demand she come home and get back to work—their infinite demands being what weakened her enough to get so sick. A heating contractor with five kids confessed he was so stressed out from customer losses after following an attorney’s expensive advice to incorporate and change his company name, he needed to find something to help him get up in the morning and what did I know about meditation.

This was the month a young Nepali couple here in San Francisco found out the baby they’re expecting will be a girl, so I should think pink for my shower invitations. But the bad news is that little girl will not be in the pink if the little mother-to-be doesn’t eat more protein. Her family wasn’t vegetarian, she said, but as a youngster, she couldn’t bear to swallow meat or eggs, even when her late mother tried to force her. Ironically, only a week earlier, while I was plying her with corn pudding and mashed fava beans, she asked me why it was so hard for me to convince Tibetans in Nepal to add vegetables to their diet when vegetables were so available all around them. And here she was in protein-packed America, knowing she was in jeopardy yet resolutely sticking to her same old tofu and lentils. “She’s doing the best she can,” her husband said.

This was the month I lost rental income when the friend who signed up for my little cottage in Maine found herself glued to a chair at New York’s Sloan-Kettering Cancer Hospital, as the holistic advocate for her beloved sister being alternately bisected and battered by differing teams of specialists, often making matters worse. It was the month an older friend fell, broke her leg and had to move fifty miles away to live with cousins who could take care of her. She was stressed about her cats.

This was the month a tidy, conscientious couple each suddenly had to take on more than forty hours of work to pay for repairing termite damage to their front entry—something insurance refuses to cover. An older friend of mine was denied hardship refinancing for her apartment, meaning she is being forced to move—who knows where? A younger friend is completely out of work, so stressed he is trying to sell his house and go across the country to live with his parents. To really push the patience point, a family member, with whom I choose not to communicate to protect myself from more years of being harmed, showed up in my town because all is not whoopee anymore and invited me to lunch as though nothing had gone before. Because this was patience month, I went.

Of course the beat-all patience practice came from the computer. Twenty six hours down the tubes trying, trying and trying some more to sort out the scrambling of my charitable Veggiyana website just because I tried to post updates. That will teach you absolute truth about higher power and your own impotence in this world. The most frustrating part was the host support aides refusing to help me because I wasn't the original site manager, my cousin who knew how to do it. The world is so awash in crime and porn --during September criminal hackers hijacked the New York Times site, fearful web hosts have to be so vigiliant, mine wouldn't even let me onto my own Buddhist site! Stubborn me then solicited a tech professional who took my chair for four hours trying, trying, trying himself to fix things, all the while telling me nothing in the world requires as much patience as computers. They are merciless in demanding perfection; their way or no way.

This is just some of what’s been happening in my small world. As we plunge into October, which will be exertion month, life in these United States feels like a cultural earthquake at 8 on the Richter scale. “Things fall apart,” Yeats said, “the center cannot hold.” We are suffering the birth fangs of impermanence, the sea change of seeing change.

The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche defines the paramita of patience in three ways: not caring about beings doing harm—not being bothered by that but remaining still as a log, enduring the pain of situations with calm and clarity and enough resoluteness to not let pain hijack or detour you on the path, and finally, to appreciate the inescapable truth—suffering, impermanence, emptiness.

There was no way to deal with such a heavy barrage of stressful public and private issues this month, nothing to do but just give up. "What me worry?” It was a seismic shift for someone so used to sticking her neck out, she damaged it years ago. But with too many fires to put out, there really was nothing to do—except be patient. A people pile-up like that teaches you to give up hope of influencing anybody’s outcome, neither the national health care fiasco nor the little protein problem. Just worry about the virtue of your own. As a cousin of mine used to say: Everybody has to walk their own gangplank. Calm was called for.

Learning to keep that calm was learning to get out of the way—not so much of others as of my own expectation that I was going to make a difference--change the world-- or be a failure if I couldn’t. Fortunately the Dharma teaches that changing your mind IS changing the world.




~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

http://www.sandygarson.com

http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion

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First, Boo No Harm

The paramita practice calendar created by the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche says September is for Patience, and wonder of wonders, the universe jumped right in and sent along enough obstacles and negativity to require transcendental quantities of it-- in all three forms. And not just for me, myself and I.

This was the month all Americans forced to exist in what’s most accurately called the Pharmakaya were asked to do exactly what the paramita politely describes: not care about beings who are harming us, not care about the harm they are doing and not get bothered by such harmful actions. So instead of screaming at ersatz Town Hall meetings or taking impolitic placards of misspelled words to impolite tea parties, September has been patients’ time, Shantideva says, to just remain as still and unmoved as a log when someone is harming you.

In other words, meditation words, stay calm in this whealth care crisis. Perhaps visualize Obama’s cool calm…and for Buddha’s sake, don’t think: yeh, he can afford to keep calm because he’s going to get world class medical attention forever without having to worry how and at what cost. Patience is avoiding discursive thoughts like that.

September has been the month bubbly ranneth over Wall Street while we on six-pack (mine’s water bottles for the car) Main Street stood stuck in unemployment, credit card assistance, mortgage refinancing and even post office lines, waiting for the some day our stints (or is it mints?) would come. So instead of noisily screaming “You lie!” at Congressmen and Senators who in theory represent you but in practice represent their corporate sponsors, September has been the perfect time to practice the patience of undertaking pain.

“When you encounter difficult situations with beings,” Dzogchen Ponlop says, “you should endure the pain, remain still, calm and clear and continue with your Bodhisattva mission, so to speak.” What a transcendental chance to practice pain we got this month when consumer protections were torpedoed, finance reform dismissed, and the Supreme Court edged close to letting corporations buy representatives outright, turning this country into their company store indenturing all us citizens for lifetimes.

And September provided a fabulous opportunity to practice that third form, “the patience of accepting truth”, having the courage to “understand the path that is sometimes inconceivable” and truly believe in the reality of emptiness. All you had to do was read about and watch Barack Obama in nonaction, fulfilling none of the promise gestated nine months ago at his inauguration. If September’s news didn’t instill true realization of the emptiness of expectation, hopes and mental activity--and what the path to inconceivable suffering looks like, I don't know what will.

More on personal patience practice in a moment…


~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

http://www.sandygarson.com

http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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