Majestic Resonance Imaging

I’d like to say the devil made me do it but I honestly think it was the Buddha. When the friendly older woman working as the MRI technician asked me if I was going to feel claustrophobic in a small space or scared by the machine’s “knocking” noise, I looked over from my prone position on the gurney and assured her I’d be just fine. “I’m going to meditate.” Why not? Here at last was free time.

“Oh no. You can’t,” she said worriedly. “Not here, dear. This is not a place of peace and quiet. The machine is very noisy. It makes a loud knocking sound. Here. Wear these headphones and I will play music to distract you. What kind do you like?”

I was thinking to answer: "Mantra," to help me meditate… to prove I could here and now in this scary colorless, people-less sci-fi setting. The Lojong teaching says: practice while distracted, and was this not an amazing opportunity for exactly that? Meditation was actually going to be my distraction-- from fear. That spotless, soulless sanitized room was unfamiliar and horridly forbidding, but the deities were recognizable old friends I called from time to time to keep me company. I could be quite comfortable imaging them around me.

So she wouldn’t worry, I told that sweet soul in the technician's turquoise two-piece to play me some jazz. She served up Diana Krall purring like Peggy Lee, with a warning: “Okay now, the first one will be three minutes. Don’t move.”

Jack hammering...the machine’s purr was constant low-grade jack hammering. Diana Krall was seductively singing: "Peel me a grape. Bring me some wine..." And I was totally alone in a large white room of bright light and alien machinery. It was surreal. I closed my eyes and summoned Tara, the great goddess who protects from fear, sickness and stupidity. One click of the mind and the icon blew up as touched and vivid as one on an iPad or iPhone. She was as white as everything in that room and that tunnel where I was stalled. The purr of the machine was her energy, protecting me, as I said her mantra over and over like the sound of a motor running. I tried to keep her steady in my mind’s eye, and felt my body melt into her warmth. I was so relaxed I was barely breathing. No danger I would move. Only my breath and lips were working, talking to Tara. How many recitations of the mantra could I add to my collection in three minutes?

“Are you doing okay?” the technician suddenly said into the headphones. “Music okay?” “Fine, fine,” I replied. “No problems.” “Okay, this next one is 3½ minutes. Ready?”

Who to call? What to do? Yes, of course: Vajrasattva as white as that room and the inside of the tube I was in. Vajrasattva who purifies. His drip of white was the steady sound of the machine. My rhythm for his 100-syllable mantra was Diane Krall’s. I was moving on wings of white light through time and space… . ”Okay, for that one. You all right?”

There were two more sessions. And that jack hammering tried to get on my nerves by getting louder and more insistent. I tried harder to pay it no attention, to distract myself. I summoned Guru Rinpoche, the archtype of accomplishment, beseeching him to bless me that I could sail through this whole torn knee episode without a glitch or a panic. I mumbled his mantra as though my life depended on it because...well, you just never know.

I gave the last one to Chenrezig, the lord who sees all suffering and sends white light in all directions to purify it, the way my time in that MRI was purified into Dewachen, the pure land of no suffering. My wanting all suffering to be as pacified as mine put extra resonance in his famous six syllable mantra: Om mani padme hum. “Okay dear, you’re all done. That wasn’t too bad, was it?”

“No, no, not at all,” I said, giving her back the huge headphones. “It was actually fun. And I got a lot accomplished.” Short sessions, which is exactly what Dharma teachers prescribe.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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All That's Cracked Up to Be

Spring has sprung. Crazy color has burst all over. Explosive hot pink rhododendron, waving yellow iris, ice blue Johnny jump-ups that seem to shout "surprise!" Plants are rioting in the staidest city neighborhoods, their festive red, white and purple hues springing like geysers behind tended fences or meticulous stone walls. They're crazily painting the town. Party time. We're here!

What a joyful fling is their spring! What a bright show of manicured wealth and health in the tended part of town, where every flower is carefully controlled like the manufactured poise of debutantes. It's so rich. But yellow flowers are popping through the cracks at makeshift parking lots, around the edges of abandoned factories. And that affluent white alyssium under all those landscaped hedges somehow escaped to burst like fireworks from a seedy curb.

And I am thinking: look at that. What flaring flair! They're blooming their fool heads off-- as though this rundown corner were a palace. No difference do they see. Nor do they know they look here like weeds, untended and unloved. They're just being fully alive while they can be. Vive la difference to me. These vivacious flowers know I need their cheer right here and now at this red light. Thank you.

And I am thinking: look at that. Transcendence. They're glad to be here too, and not just in the richer part of town. They're as bright and melodic as the ones ten blocks back in those expensively elegant gardens. No petal of difference in their performing art. How bravely they shove upward to bloom through these forgotten concrete cracks. What joy to not care a whit where they are or who should pass by or cast an eye or render an opinion. Look at that. They are just there abloom with utter happiness, whatever, so what and all that jazz. Just the way the Buddha says the sun shines on everyone everywhere without conditions. And we should ourselves be wherever we are with whoever may be there as readily cheerful and magnificently unselfconscious as all that.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Bin there, dun that

In the raucous din of the glowing and crowing about the thrilling John Wayne commandos killing Osama Bin Laden, I keep hearing my teacher softly speaking the Buddha's advice: killing a body solves nothing if you haven't killed the hatred and aggression in your own mind. In fact it only makes matters worse. Rinpoche likes to point out if you have an enemy and you harm or destroy that enemy, you automatically multiply enemies: that enemy's friends and family, people who also think they're right. So you still live with the cold fear of vengeance and retaliation. Nothing changes. It's like punching down Bozo the clown: Bozo springs back up again. It's just another episode in a shaggy dog story going on and on. And thus it was, true to his teachings, that news of the assassination was instantly followed by alerts to be extra careful this week on trains and airplanes and in US compounds around the world. For sure somebody will be out to get us.

The sad truth is we've already been had. Bin Laden was a heat seeking missile who achieved his devastating goal to destroy America. We are no longer the shining cohesive country we were before he blew up our buildings, Navy ships and moral high ground. We let him do that to us as his enablers. Our childish, panicky reaction to him was to drop everything we stand for and go native, to give ourselves up and shamelessly adopt his paranoid mindset. It's not just that assassination--which we resorted to-- is an Arabic word, meaning an Arabic concept. We blew ourselves away by truncating our democratic freedoms, subjecting each other to criminal like pat downs, destroying our economy with war profiteering, wrecking the lives of half our citizens while pouring billions of their tax dollars into the pockets of Pakistanis and Afghanis insidiously joyful at the prospect of turning our funding against us for their gain, degrading our standing in the world, creating more enemies and enmity, attracting more aggressive attacks and sacrificing our moral worth.

Having no firewall against his hatred, we absorbed it as our own. Instead of looking at what caused him to be our enemy-- what aroused all that violence and vindictiveness-- and dealing forthrightly with it, we merely decided to erase him, as though hating somebody back that much could stop the terror straphanging in our psyche and let us live happily ever after. By screaming our hatred is bigger than yours, we could move on without bothering to change our lives or behavior, without caring that not changing anything would inevitably cause more of the same problems that produced Bin Laden and thus merely create more like him. Our stuck mind, our warped perspective, our refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of our own actions made us our own worse enemy. Compared to the profound destruction we heaped on ourselves, Bin Laden taking down two towers was a piker.

My teacher has on several occasions told us his story of fleeing the horrors of the mad Chinese communist legions wiping out Tibet in 1959. He, his family and devoted monks were fleeing for their lives on foot and on horseback as the Chinese fired from behind. Rinpoche says at some point a Chinese soldier got out in front, near to him, and Rinpoche had a perfect moment to shoot him out of the way. But the teachings rose in his mind: to kill was to create a mountain of bad karma that would devour any merit gained for lifetimes. And it would achieve absolutely nothing in the end. There would only be more people to kill, more aggression, more hatred, more bang bang you're dead. So Rinpoche goaded his horse and flew as fast as he could. A bullet came at him, right at him and should have smashed through his head or chest. But before his eyes, he saw it deflected into the ground behind the horse, and a shimmering chimera like image of his protector deity in front of him.

"I didn't kill anyone," he says. "I didn't create any bad karma or more hate. I rode on to safety. I had absolutely nothing but it all worked out rather well." Yes indeed. By virtue of his virtue, he has magnetized thousands of devoted followers in Chinese lands and ours. He oversees six enormous monasteries filled with monks and nuns, and a boarding school for about 400 penniless children. In person he has spread the Buddha's teachings beyond Asia to four other continents and published more than a dozen books. Six charities are in his name.

So now Bin Laden is dead at the bottom of the sea. Did this ancient equation of an eye for 3,000 eyes really change anything? Did abandoning the high ground make us high and mighty? Are we safer now? Freer? More united? As we ponder the terrifying duplicity of the Pakistani government and the horrifying depravity of the one in Afghanistan-- whom we have enabled with our treasury, is today the start of happily ever after that turns out well for us? Or did, as Buddhists like to say, nothing really happen?

~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, ReligionThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.
Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy GarsonAll rights Reserved