July 14, 2009

i will call him poppa for he is my religion

"Sitting is the act of looking in. Meditation is fundamental, you can't subtract anything from that. It's so fundamental that it's been with us for forty or fifty thousand years in one form or another. It's as fundamental a human activity as taking naps is to wolves, or soaring in circles is to hawks and eagles.

Now the completion of this is understood very clearly in the Tibetan tradition when they speak of the three mysteries: body, speech, and mind. The three things that are closest to us--our bodies, our minds, and our language--are the three things we know least about, that we pay least attention to, that we use as our tools throughout our lifetimes to various relatively limited end, including survival, but there's very little attention to the fact of existence of this in its own right. A simple message of the teaching is that much of the pain, suffering, confusion, and contradiction you encounter in your own life is simply caused by not paying attention to what you have closest to you from he beginning and then using it well: body, speech, and mind.

For myself I personally all I would add to that are some very ancient and to me beautiful and useful ways of handling things: attention to place; gratitude to the physical universe and to all the other beings for what they exchange with you; good health, good luck, good crops. Basic old-style religion.

And, proper attention to your dreams, fairy tales, and myths, as a kind of ancient universal, human psychological lore that you can and do contact."

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