My mental circus, inside and out.

The Dalai Lama has made a very important statement onwomen in Buddhism, at a conference on the question that he organized.  Given his stature, and the role Tibet has as the "central land", this is quite remarkable since it declares the spiritual, social, and political  *necessity* of an equal role for women in Tibetan Buddhism.  

Posted by: EmmaPele at October 29, 2007 01:07 | link | comments (1)

Emma may have time to blog again.   Everything just went crazy for about a month.  Nothing terrible, just an avalanche of stuff to do.   Emma also felt like building a fortress around her writing after the intellectual property fiasco, during which she had to examine her *attachment* to ego.  So much a part of the writing process, ego, even if you write about yourself in the third person.  You only care about someone stealing from you if you are attached to what they're stealing.   So Emma was having a Go-Away! sort of month during which she went in and examined the inner struggle. 

And then she was given a new staff person in the office.  Her name? Patience.  Patience looked into Emma's tiny, disheveled office and said:  "I am going to help you with that."  Emma would have renamed herself Gratitude right there.

Gratitude seems to have been given an icon.  What is it? Jason from Halloween? A tribal fetish?

So the Burmese monks.  Emma felt that pain roiling across the planet.  The meditation she practices now came from a Burmese meditation tradition.  There are monasteries in Burma that have maintained certain practices, said to come from the Buddha himself, for thousands of years.  To destroy those monasteries is to destroy something very precious, something of planetary necessity, the kind of practice that would allow you to chant metta (loving-kindness) while soldiers are beating your friends' brains out against the cloister walls.  Where have they all gone now?

One time, a Buddhist monk told her, those dictators die horrible deaths.  Leave it to nature.  Leave it to dharma. It's not necessarily true, though, as Emma was watching a dramatization of Pinochet's arrest in Britain, and how the old man outfoxed the lawyers while he was kept under luxurious house arrest in some mansion and then lived to be 91 as an elder statesman in Chile.  Oh they die well enough, these dictators with all their shiny medals--they always have terrible taste-- that comes with the territory.  Emma's mother often told her that the worst sort of taste was eating with gold forks and knives, and how deeply right she was.  One wants the universe to take revenge--so much that entire systems of belief arise out of that wish and our feelings of helplessness when someone behaves so unskillfuly and destructively that everyone suffers.  They are so un-evolved or de-evolved  that there is nothing to do but have tiny  negotiations and endless patience that they will eventually disappear.  And eventually they will.  And eventually we will have a world consciousness that does not give a context for dictators to arise.

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at October 06, 2007 20:04 | link | comments (3)