Daily Meditation:

Play your part in the comedy, but don't identify yourself with your role! - Why Lazurus Laughed by Wei Wu Wei
Such is life. comedy or tragedy. Those things that occur to us make up who we are but we are not those things. Divorce, death, desertion don't make us bad or worthless or unlovable those things happen and make us human. Love, relationships, and family do not make us strong or whole or complete they do contribute to that who it is that we are. I am different in various situations. I play a role that fits a group or situation. It is not that I am not myself in each situation it is just that I am not my whole self. Parts remain buried or hidden and unseen. When the whole of who I am is exposed then I am vulnerable and scare and that fear holds me back. Learning to open the whole self is a task and in safe places with safe people it can be done. We all need safe places to really be who we are. So the role I play is not the whole or real me but the role is necessary to keep going.
I need to think more upon this.

Eternity

Lyrics: Willie Dixon

Music: Bob Weir, Rob Wasserman

Played by Bob Weir with the Dead, Ratdog and Weir/Wasserman

I'm lookin' out my window

I watch the clouds go by

I look to see eternity

The endless rolling sky

You cannot think of eternity

Think of it like time

You try to think, you try to count

You just mess up your mind

Eternity, eternity

Honey, I love you, you love me

Let's love each other through eternity

Since before man could see

There was eternity

After man is come and gone

Eternity lingers on, eternity lingers on

Everything crawl, creep, or fly

Just live until they die

I love you, honey you love me

Let's love each other through eternity

Eternity, eternity

I love you, you love me

Let's love each other through eternity

Through eternity

Well I think about life, we don't know

Whether it all could be in vain

Look through time, it's for sure

It's the greatest gift to man

Music and Love, you can't explain

Try and understand

The greatest thing could ever be

We make love through eternity

Make love through eternity

When the world think our defeat

Think that we are gone

We'll still have our place of peace

Our love will linger on, linger on

We won't care just what who said

If it's truth or lie

We'll still have our greatest gift

Our love won't ever die

Love won't ever die

Love won't ever die

Daily Meditation

By means of meditation we can teach our minds to be calm and balanced; within this calmness is a richness and a potential, an inner knowledge which can render our lives boundlessly satisfying and meaningful. While the mind may be what traps us in unhealthy patterns of stress and imbalance, it is also the mind which can free us. Through meditation, we can tap the healing qualities of mind. - Tarthang Tulku
This it seems is what it is all about. The state of being calm and balanced and in touch with the spirit of the universe. Going with the flow and letting the waters wash over us and carry us forward with complete trust in the process. Letting go of all those things that plague daily living and just accept where we are, who we are and where we are going. When this happens it just seems all is right with the world and our relationships within it. There are the times when I do step in and the ego takes over. Fear takes over. The lies I tell myself are there and come to the surface and the unhealthy thinking, acting and reacting take over and no longer am I centered and free and at peace. Those thoughts that lead to feelings that lead to actions that are all based on lies and misconceptions lead not to a place of understanding and growth but instead lead to a empty place. It is then necessary to change. To look at these things, yes to meditate upon them. To understand where they are coming from and thier nature. Evaluate the impact of them on daily living and be willing to either give them up altogether or change them or to keep them and keep going the way we have always gone. Through the meditation upon those forces I believe we will be able to make the changes that will help us to become that who it is we are supposed to be today.
Peace.
A

Daily Meditation:

Live your life in happiness, even though those around you lead lives which are unhealthy, and wish to spread their illness to you. Be Happiness itself. - Buddha
Happy happy joy joy. Be happiness. Be the ball. This is a difficult one. after the melancholy of yesterday happiness is like a great oasis in the middle of the dessert of emotional vastness. Happiness is a retreat, a place to go inside for healing and peace. The Oja Cliente of the soul. We do not have to accept today everything coming from other people, that is when someone is in pain and suffering we do not have to take on all those things personally. Those things from another person are theirs. Empathy, care, listening, compassion yes; codependant, unhealthy, caretaking, fixing no. So as we do not contaminate ourselfs with the emotional garbage of the other. We are happiness.

Daily Meditation

Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you. - Aldous Huxley
That is what it is. We are the sum of our experiences. Walking through life events, situations, adventures, people, places, things, all manner of who we are comes from these encounters; these things are what make up the whole. Little bits of the other transferred into me. So I have all of these things within and what do I do with them. Typically nothing. but then I listen to others. Learn from their experiences? Is everything I am and believe just from experiential learning. That is to say and I wanted to get into this yesterday...
I believe that the relationship with creation is one that must be experienced. Our communion with the universe requires of us action. It is not just thought and prayer and listening to another; it is the active role we must play in order to fulfill our destiny within the whole of being. That is to say without action - faith without works is dead. The whole - if you are going to pray for potatoes you best have a hoe in your hand. Our being requires action. I did take little to no action for a long time. I am ready for action today. Maybe not ready but at least I am willing to do something different and willing to grow and willing to change and willing to accept the things that are necessary for that change. Preparing for the changes that are coming and trying to keep an open mind and heart and spirit to those changes and implement those into life. Implement. That is the application of those experiences into my life. to really apply the belief to my daily being and activity. Possible indeed. ready I am to go forth into the world and become the man I am supposed to be today. Ready to cast aside all the thinking and being that holds me back from the journey the walk to the center.
Thank you all for coming and reading and communing.

amidabuddha.org - Daily Meditation

amidabuddha.org - Daily Meditation
Faith. Oppertunity knocks? The door is open the voices are calling and all that is needed is the faith to get up off the couch. What happens when faith is converted to knowledge. It is not longer necessary to have faith in existance when we know that existance.

Daily Meditation - Sept. One

And just as men depend upon A boat for traversing the sea, So does the mental body need The matter-body for occurrence. And as the boat depends upon The men for traversing the sea, So does the matter-body need The mental body for occurrence. Depending each upon the other The boat and men go on the sea. And so do mind and matter both Depend the one upon the other. 'Visuddhimagga' (XVIII, 36)
Reading today the Visuddhimagga is the Path of Purity. Straitforward and simple. There is a place we need to get, to achieve. We must take a path to get there. The boat as a vessel. Man inside the vessel on his journey. The body as a vessel and the mind inside. just as man controls to boat, the boat is also controlled by the sea, the waves, the movement, the moon and tides; and so it goes the mind controls the body controlled by lies, faith, knowledge, feelings, and others. That is to say our minds need to be cleansed.
Speaking of cognitive restructuring. The situation leads to a thought, the thought leads to a feeling, with that it is necessary to examine the evidence both supporting or destroying the thought, change can then occur. The evidence. That is the boat is it not? The evidence is outside my head. the physical proof needed to disway the lies. In my head, in my head. The thought is trapped and rolls around and grows and looms and is buried and the seeds were planted. There in my mind the thought does not escape. it is like a tarreium where the plants grow and grow and the soil is fertile and the moisture good, and the dark. Contained. On occasion those thoughts of negativity will effect others but for the most part just effecting me. Well it is not true it does not effect others. My negativity toward myself does in fact reflect me in others and colors the relationship. Switching metaphors does not help. So the mind in the boat of the body. The water has come up over the edge and spilled into the baot. The feet get wet. a coffee can is needed to scoop out the waters. Restructure the thoughts and the feelings and grow once again. That water of long ago has become stagnate. It must be removed and fresh clean water can flow in and take the place to old. Change.

Daily Mediation

Detachment is a state, it is not a totalisation of achieved indifferences. - Fingers Pointing Toward the Moon by Wei Wu Wei
I looked up Totalisation not being familar with the word. "Totality and Totalisation are concepts used by Georg Lukács and Jean-Paul Sartre to refer to the objective and subjective processes whereby an entity, composed of a multiplicity of parts, constitutes itself as a totality or thing — either a thing-in-itself or a thing-for-itself. Sartre uses the example, in the first instance, of a painting, which is made as a thing (or totality) by a single act of the imagination, which makes all the bits of paint, etc., exist as a single painting. As soon as it ceases to be looked at and maintained as a single thing, it ceases to be a totality."
In reading the statement for the first time I did not absorb it. It is easy to be detached from something or someone. Just simply stop careing. Sever the cords. Yes, indefference. No matter what happens either way just simply stop. In giving up caring about these things, these outcomes it would seem like a state is achieved of detachment and in essence that has been achieved. But yet that is not detachment. It is simply not having a stake in what goes on in our lives and the world around us. That is the lonely and difficult place. For indeed we limited our connections and communications and communion with others thinking it would lead/take us to a place of nirvana or bliss. Without those attachments then certainly life would be much easier to take. What a paradox.
Detachement may be something totally different. We must care, we must love, we must commune. In being, in living we must commit ourselves to take an active role in our lives and the actions, thoughts, feelings, and words we produce. We must be ready to let things come and go follow the ebb and flow of the universe and in that sense not hold onto. Detached through love not through indeference. Detached through peace not due to anger. I like this one.

Todays Meditation

Today's Meditation:
If there is only empty space, with no suns nor planets in it, then space loses its substantiality. -Buddha
I read this and wondered what was known about space and planets and whatnot at the time of the Buddha. Interesting. But then I thought about the empty spaces inside. Those spaces in the heart and the mind. Spaces left empty thru losses. Those places in our souls which were ripped out and open wounds formed scars around the edges never truly mending. Those spaces are the ones then filled with things of destruction and simple grew or were not allowed to lose their shape and vastness. So then the suns and planets are the things which filled those spaces. Pick a poison, an emotion, an event that substituted out our pain. And then change occurs. We begin to know that in order to grow. In order to heal. In order to become who it is we are to be we had to be released from those suns and planets of our destruction and open those wounds. We had to debris the wounds through talking with others, through introspection, through communion with the nature of the universe. Like washing with sterile waters we pour out the contents of our souls and washed clean those spaces and then begin to close, to knit, and to heal. Those spaces have lost their substantiality once we have removed those blocks of growth.

Today's Meditation

Todays Meditation :
Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes. - Buddha
You know of endurance perhaps better then others. Pick a point, stay the course. Journey of 1000 miles and the start with a single step. It does no go if we do not take that first step. Ed Foisey would say the end is just around the next bend. Around that bend was another and the end would be just beyond that bend, and the next. Maybe it is the pursuit. the movement the going forward and sliding backward and going forward. it is in the backward movement that we also see where we have been and hopefully become willing to move forward out of that place. That is to say. We are moving forward and then we don't. If we are standing still they say we are really sliding backward. There is nothing wrong with this. If however we slide backward and pick up speed our feet often come out from under us and we spill out and crash and burn. Getting up and truding forward again that road to happy destiny. So yes, that is it again.

Driving along the road in South Dakota the water washes the ground. There is an old road that is washed out, next to it the old center is the left wheel lane, a huge wash out, and then the right wheel lane. Bouncing and speeding and running forward just a simple twist a over compensation and wham the truck hits high center. Dead stop. no movement. No backward, no forward except for the momentum of the thrust of the stop. Dead Center once again. A great place, steady movement forward to the goal and then nothing. The world does not stop just my progress in the world. Always carry the right tools for the job. Two by fours, plywood, shovel, handyman jack, tow line, come-along, dig our way out and over the high center mark. Move forward once again. Slow and steady wins the race and at my current pace of no movement forward for many years I am so far behind I am in the lead.