My mental circus, inside and out.

Emma had not planned to travel this summer.  She was going to stay home, putz around in the garden, be a grandma.   Act her age.  But then this friend of hers, an engineer, is building a water tower for a rural community in Honduras, and Emma is going to lend a hand, help out with her rudimentary Spanish.  (Not that she has that much hope of translating complicated directions for plumbing systems.)  Emma believes that people are born with personality traits,  and she was born always needing to see what was on the next block, across the next field, over the mountain, in the next country.   maybe because of  traces from whatever stream of consciousness led to this birth,  maybe because one side of her family was always on the frontier, at least until Kansas when they reversed direction.   Most people seem happy staying in one place.  Horsh wants to know why Emma doesn't stay home and spend her dollars in the American economy.

And speaking of the American economy, a friend of Emma's has suggested that everyone take $10 from their tax relief money and give it to a democratic candidate.  Just so the Republicans don't get back into office with their wars and their imperial strategies and their creation of global food crises and their screwing of the middle-class and the poor.

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 28, 2008 20:37 | link | comments (1)

Dalai Lama

Emma spent time with the Dalai Lama this past weekend, attending his lectures on "Engaging Wisdom and Compassion."  He was mostly covering the teachings of Nāgārjuna on emptiness, with the idea that compassion comes with the recognition of emptiness, including the emptiness of the self.   There were many subtleties that Emma doesn't yet grasp.  The Dalai Lama presented the classic story of the ro.pe-snake:  a situation in which one  encounters a snake on a dark road and recoils in fear, but on closer inspection, the snake turns out to be a coiled rope.  The surface lesson is that much of the fear and other kinds of suffering that we experience are a result of these misconceptions.  Some of us see snakes everywhere.   But what about the rope?  To what extent can we say that the rope has more of an essential reality than the snake?  There is a conventional reality that we navigate, negotiating the validity of phenomena like ropes, so in some sense they are more "real" than snakes.  However, the intrinsic reality of ropes doesn't hold up under close inspection, and some of the great sages have said that if you don't want to see snakes everywhere, you also have to get rid of the ropes as well.  The Dalai Lama seemed to be telling the rope-snake story again to emphasize how the reality we experience is the result of dependent relationships. .. for example, the validation process of separating rope from snake is an interdependency that comes out of "dependent origination": the idea that all phenomena arise from causes.  And if everything is a result of causes, than nothing (including the self) can  be said to have a separate, intrinsic reality. . anyway, Emma can't go on explaining this so she will simply point to Nāgārjuna  so that you can see for yourself.

And yes, there were Chinese protestors, a few hundred of them, standing outside of the arena, waving the Chinese and U. S. flags and chanting "One World, One Dream."  Like something out of a Heinlein novel, the eerie fascism of it.   But perhaps Emma sees snakes instead of ropes.

Posted by: EmmaPele at April 21, 2008 19:46 | link | comments (3)