It's never too late (to awaken)

Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart (Shambhala.com); Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly COUNTDOWN (TO EXTINCTION) CLOCK: -15

Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream (onmarkproductions.com tenbu-montage).

Dreams of nightmares (fortytwotimes.com)

When I was about ten, my best friend started having nightmares:
 
She'd be running through a huge dark building pursued by hideous monsters. She'd get to a door, struggle to open it, and no sooner had she closed it behind her than she'd hear it opened by the rapidly approaching monsters. Finally she'd wake up screaming and crying for help.
  
One day we were sitting in her kitchen talking about her nightmares. When I asked her what the demons looked like, she said she didn't know because she was always running away. After I asked her that question, she began to wonder about the monsters. She wondered if any of them looked like witches and if any of them had knives. So on the next occurrence of the nightmare, just as the demons began to pursue her, she stopped running and turned around.

Q: Where The Wild Things Are? A: the library

It took tremendous courage, and her heart was pounding, but she put her back up against the wall and looked at them. They all stopped right in front of her and began jumping up and down, but none of them came closer. There were five in all, each looking something like an animal. One of them was a gray bear, but instead of claws, it had long red fingernails. One had four eyes. Another had a wound on its cheek. Once she looked closely, they appeared less like monsters and more like two-dimensional drawings in comic books. Then slowly they began to fade. After that she woke up, and that was the end of her nightmares.

Awakening

There is a teaching on the three kinds of awakening:

1. awakening from the dream of ordinary sleep,
2. awakening at death from the dream of life, and
3. awakening into full enlightenment from the dream of delusion.

Deva in garden (WeGoTwo/flickr.com)

These teachings say that when we die, we experience it as waking up from a very long dream.

When I heard this teaching, I remembered my friend's nightmares. It struck me right then that if all this is really a dream, I might as well spend it trying to look at what scares me instead of running away.

I haven't always found this all that easy to do, but in the process I've learned a lot about maitri [metta, the Buddha's teaching of loving-kindness, friendliness, and altruism].

American Vajrayana nun Pema Chodron on "Fearless Nontheism"

• HELP WANTED: Jobs waiting in Dharamsala
• The Pema Chodron Foundation
  

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Mayan Prophecies and Crop Circles (video)

UFOTVstudios; Pat Macpherson, Xochitl, Wisdom Quarterly MAYAN 2012 WATCH

(UFOTV.com) The film MAYAN PROPHECIES AND CROP CIRCLES is a sensation. Why are people talking it? New night time surveillance footage of a crop circle formation appearing in a matter of seconds is one reason. 

 

Discover the stunning connection between the crop circles and Mayan prophecies that go back thousands of years. 

Special issue on the Maya

Wait. Everyone knows crops circles are hoaxed using a string and a few paddle boards to bend and break crops grasses that continue to appear in farmlands in the English countryside. Right? 

No, real crop circles are much stranger: The grasses have not been bent and have not broken. They metamorphose, knot, and suddenly grow sideways to reveal a formation usually visible only from the air. Other anomalies exist in the area after forming, which are rarely mentioned.

Viewers speak. Scholars and researchers have discovered an extraordinary connection between 6,000-year-old Sumerian symbols, symbols from the mysterious Mayan calendar, and a group of amazing signs found among crop circle formations believed to be of extraterrestrial origin.
  

Maya (archaeology.org)

What are these symbols collectively trying to say? Scientists believe we are looking at a great symbolic message system, covering vast expanses of time and space.

However, only now with the aid of advanced code-breaking technology and the work of brilliant researchers have we been able to connect the dots of antiquity. The unlocked result reveals a detailed set of messages that foretell a great prophecy about the time to come on our planet and confirmation of humanity's extraterrestrial origins as recorded in sacred spiritual texts from all over the world.

• Now on DVD in a Special 2-Part Double Feature, Cat. #U690.
• Three-time award winner: International UFO Congress EBE Awards, Best Documentary, Best Historical Documentary, and Peoples' Choice Award.

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The World to Come? (cartoon)

Wisdom Quarterly (UPDATED FROM JAN. 1, 2011)

Our World

It's clear which world we got. Or is it? It seems we have both. We are like donkeys pulled along by a carrot dangling from a stick. And if we do not fall for the trick, we get hit by the stick.
  

The economy collapses because of banking and housing "crises." (What crisis? It's banksters stealing homes in a coup and a collapse based on bad loans). But that was planned. Anyone who did not greedily go in for an unrepayable loan voluntarily had new terms inserted by deception or simply suffered as the market sank. One did not have to do anyting to get burned.
  

It was no accident. This was a great money-making scheme that has worked just as planned. Bankers are richer with interest-free government loans to bail them out as well as the houses they get to foreclose on.
  

Why do things like this happen to us?
  

There's an interesting answer, even more interesting than bank plots and high finance conspiracies. We have things the way they are because of who we are. Who are we?
  

 
Ordinary Worldlings

Most of us are "uninstructed worldlings" (puthujjanas, literally "one of the many folk"), that is, ordinary unenlightened persons. What does it mean?
  

A puthujjana is any layperson or monastic who still possesses all ten fetters (samyojana) binding one to the ceaseless Round of Rebirths (samsara). Such a person has not yet reached any of the stages of enlightenment (ariya-puggala).
  

"Who is neither freed from the three fetters [personality-belief, sceptical doubt, attachment mere rules and rituals (as a means of gaining enlightenment], nor is on the way to shaking free of these three, such a being is called a worldling" (Pug. 9).
  

According to the commentary to MN 9 (Sutra 9 of the Middle Length Discourses), a "worldling" may be:

• (1) one outside (a non-Buddhist) who, if believing in moral causation, may be said to have right view at least to that extent, but has no "knowledge conforming to the [Four Ennobling] Truths," as has
• (2) the "worldling inside the Buddha's Dispensation."

A worlding who professes to be a "Buddhist" may either be a "blind worldling" (andha-puggala) who has neither knowledge of, nor interest in, the fundamental teachings (the Four Noble Truths, the Five Aggregates of Clinging, etc.) or one is a "noble worldling" (kalyāna-puggala), who has such knowledge and earnestly strives to understand and practice the Teaching.  

• See Atthasālini Tr. II, 451 (tr. by "average person"); commentary to MN 1, DN 1.

Going Beyond

(Walteradyar/flickr.com)

Our aim at Wisdom Quarterly is to find our way out of this endless round of suffering and death known as samsara to awaken by enlightenment (bodhi). Many Buddhists (of the Mahayana school) may insist, "But enlightenment is already here!" Fine. Most of us have yet to notice it, to dwell in it, to live it in full happiness and security from suffering and disappointment of all kinds. This year we will focus on reaching enlightenment more than ever before.

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Art Beyond Reason (video)

Art by Octavio Ocampo, RasMarley/Flickr.com (photographs); Wisdom Quarterly

"Buddha" by Ocatvio Ocampo

  

"Woman and Mountains Shiva"

The artist Octavio Ocampo was born in Celaya, Guanajuato, Mexico. He studied art from early childhood. In high school, Ocampo painted murals for the Preparatory School and the City Hall of Celaya. 

  

Ruth Rivera, daughter of artist and muralist Diego Rivera, and Maria Luisa Mendoza encouraged him to attend the School of Painting and Sculpture of the National Fine Art Institute. Later in art school, he constructed papier mache figures for floats, altars, and ornaments used in carnival parades and festivals.

  
Ocampo's talents are not limited to painting and sculpture; they also extend to acting and dancing. At the Art Institute of San Francisco, he studied all of these disciplines then pursued both a film and theater career. But in 1976 he began to devote himself solely to painting and sculpture. Octavio Ocampo is one of Mexico's most prolific artists.
  
He now works primarily in the metamorphic style -- using a technique of superimposing and juxtaposing realistic and figurative details within the images he creates.
 

   
Metamorphic Style
Ocampo is known for several famous works in his sometimes wryly sardonic, sometimes evocative paintings.
  
Detailed images are intricately woven together to create larger images. The optical illusions fade back and pop forward as one studies the pieces, notices the details, and finally recognizes the large scale intention. This is what he terms "metamorphic."
  
The Visions Fine Art Gallery in Sedona, Arizona, represents Octavio Ocampo in the US.
  
Several collections in Mexico contain his work, and individual works of his have been commissioned for Pres. Jimmy Carter (as a gift from Pres. José López Portillo of Mexico), Jane Fonda, Cher (for the front and back covers of her "Heart of Stone" album), and César Chávez.

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Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Released from House Arrest!!

(PHOTO CREDIT: REUTERS)

YANGON, Myanmar — Myanmar's military government freed its archrival, democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, on Saturday after her latest term of detention expired. Several thousand jubilant supporters streamed to her residence. Suu Kyi has been jailed or under house arrest for more than 15 of the last 21 years.

James: You would think that after all the abuse Aung San Suu Kyi has endured at the hands of the military dictatorship in Burma, that she'd be a broken spirit. Yet, she has weathered house arrest extremely well. She even went so far as to say that she has no ill feeling toward those who detained her. How could that be possible? As it turns out she has credited Buddhism with helping her survive house arrest. It seems likely that she was able to put into practice the Buddhist teaching of "no-self" which teaches that there is no unchanging, permanent "self" that exists separate from everything else. We don't have to travel through samsara alone because we are interconnected and interdependent with all people, things and phenomena. Nothing ever exists independent of all other things.

A tree exists because the sun exists. Suu Kyi was only imprisoned materially but since there is no "self" to imprison, she was always connected with her supporters as long as she remained aware of that essence. She could travel above those confining walls in concentrating upon the unbreakable connection with family, friends, teachers and fellow citizens. Thus, rather than sinking into feelings of loneliness and bitterness, Aung San Suu Kyi probably rested secure in being aware that she was never alone. She was interconnected with all Burmese (and the world) and therefore could weather the storm of personal imprisonment with greater ease. Because she understood these teachings it is very likely that she survived her imprisonment better than the junta leaders.

But, you might say, "How are the junta leaders imprisoned?" They are imprisoned by clinging to the delusion of "self." If one believes that there is a permanent "self" that is separate from everything else then anything that maintains the delusion of that "self" is "good" and anything that doesn't is "bad." This creates suffering when the "good" isn't around because the self is attached to the "good" in order for it to feel important. And it creates suffering when the "bad" is around because the drug-addicted self isn't being given what "it" thinks is necessary for happiness.

But it isn't lasting happiness because a dictatorship is based on the delusion that there is a "self" that is perceived to be better than everyone else. But, in order to keep that delusion inflated the "self" must constantly be on alert for threats to its fragile existence. Therefore, in order to keep this elaborate charade going the dictator (self) worries and ruminates with paranoia about losing this delusional sense of "specialness." This creates a lot of suffering inside. The dictators may not show it but they're not happy inside. A person who is at peace doesn't need to go around and control, manipulate, oppress and murder people as the Burmese junta is doing.

So, if Aung San Suu Kyi was able to over-come the quagmire of the the "self" then she was free to be at peace with her situation regardless of the house arrest. Because her sense of worth and happiness wouldn't be dependent upon if the "self" was happy, or even if it existed at all. And, while the dictators remain physically free, emotionally they are in one of the darkest, deepest prisons known to existence in samsara (self-importance). Maintaining that heavy burden of self-importance means wherever you go, your prison travels with you. Yet, Suu Kyi will always be free no matter where you try to lock-away her body. Her example helps us to remember that if she can survive decade after decade of imprisonment by dictators, then surely we can survive our daily lives. May her freedom spark a softening of relations between the junta and the strong and noble people of beautiful Burma.

~Peace to all beings~

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Waking Up to Oneness.

-Special thanks to my friend Jamie over at Progressive Buddhism for showing me this video.

~Peace to all beings~

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