Cool passage from As it is

This is a really cool passage from As it is by Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. Came across this as I was reading it, and hopefully any of my friends into Vajrayana will dig it, and maybe anybody else, it will at least intrigue.
Here it is:

"Actually once you have realized the genuine state of wakefulness, samsara is no longer the problem it usually is. In the normal state of thinking we experience joy, we experience sorrow-- there are all these thoughts, all our worries and plans. But in the very moment of recognizing this thoughtfree wakefulness, there is no problem at all. At that moment, samsara is quite delightful, with a sense of great equality, expansive, and quite open. You may experience happiness, but if recognize your essence, you don't get too overjoyed and caught up in that. You may experience pain, but if recognize your essence, you don't get totally depressed and caught up in that. That is why it is called the great equality.

Usually, when everything is going well, people get so overjoyed that their hat falls off their head--- they just can't keep it on! But if in that moment you recognize the essence, whats the big deal about being happy about fleeting phenomena? Everything is equalized. At other times people get depressed and weep miserably. But if recognize your essence, what is the big deal to be depressed about? This recognition is your best friend in both joy and sorrow. If you continue training in this, you will get very good results. If not, well, it is not too much fun in this world. Everything changes, there is not too much we can rely on. Samsara has a fickle nature and nothing remains.

We need to recognize the unchanging natural state of awareness. Life is not that great if you have to remain as a totally samsaric person. Everything changes; there is no steadiness anywhere in the world, among sentient beings, or what is experienced. Second by second, everything changes. In this essence, though there is no thing that changes."

Om Ah Hum Vajra Guru Padme Siddhi Hung 

Found this over at the Arab News......

This is from an editorial in the Arab News, the English version of the main newspaper in Saudi Arabia. The recent bombing in Egypt, I believe shows , that the Islamic extremists are pretty much going after , or taking on the world.(not just theWest) Most all those killed in Egypt were Egyptian Muslims. How does this further getting the west out of Iraq? Evil times.
At least the Muslim world is waking up to the evil spawn nutured within their world.
Here is the link for the full editorial: Editorial: Pure Evil

"Yesterday’s barbarity follows a pattern — a pattern of pure evil, so evil that most people find it difficult to believe that human beings could do such things.
How can anyone justify the killing of innocents? No religion condones it. Yet that is what the militants do. What is that justification to target Egyptian workers at a downtown cafe? Why did they merit death?
Most of those killed yesterday were Egyptians. It is impossible to fathom the terrorists’ warped thinking, but they clearly think that ordinary Egyptians, like ordinary Londoners, are disposable.
Theirs is not just a war against the Egyptian economy and government, it is a war against the entire Egyptian people, as it is against all the people of Britain, of Spain, of Lebanon, of Iraq, of Indonesia, of the US — of everywhere. The terrorist is at war with the entire world.
It is not enough to hunt down and destroy these men of evil. The thinking that drives them must also be destroyed. That puts a special responsibility on decent human beings everywhere. These fanatics claim to act in the name of Islam. That has to be shown to be a lie.
Their vision of the faith is so warped, so twisted, that it has nothing to do with Islam. They pollute it, they make it feared, even hated elsewhere in the world, they bring shame and humiliation to the faithful. They have departed from Islam. Muslims here and elsewhere must tell the world, not just once but again and again, every time the fanatics attack, that they have nothing to do with Islam, that they have been cast out.
Until the message gets through the world, Islamophobia will continue to grow. Until it gets through to the fanatics themselves, unless they realize they are damned, the slaughter of the innocents will continue.
No major city in the world will be spared — not in the West, not in the Muslim world, not anywhere. In their minds, we are all disposable, we are all potential victims of their all-encompassing hate."

I would gather that if you were an ordinary Egyptian who lost someone in the Sharm el-Sheik bombings, you would develop a less than favorable notion of Al Queda.

The Year 1000

(St. Mark the Evangelist - -from the Gospel of Ebbon, 9th Century.)

The following is one of my favorite quotes, from a book by the art historian Henri Focillion entitled, The Year 1000. Will post this and add a little more commentary later:"


History is made of a threefold cluster of activating forces--- traditions, influences, and experiments; and every civilization perhaps every epoch of every civilization, stresses one or the other of these forces in turn. Tradition resembles a vertical force rising out of the depth of the ages; but at times it loses its cohesion, its vital drive, and then fictions and disorting myths appear in its place. perhaps this must be so if tradition is to adapt itself to the new times. Tradition is only seldom unalloyed. In fact there are traditions that are out and out inventions, to serve this or that cause, and they are of no small interest. But diverse as the facets of tradition's internal ferment may be,the ferment represents the working of the past in the historical present. Influences, in turn, represent the technique of interchange and cross-fertilization. Peoples communicate with other peoples by such influences; the foreign influences which they bring are
accepted more or less passively- - -by way of infiltration, or by a shock, because they answer a profound need, or because they are disturbing. They are like a horizontal level of water rippled by diverse currents which establish a kind of changing harmony, a more or less stable consensus within the human community.

But the enrichment and renewal of history clearly come from the experiments that are quickened by mans urge to inquire and create. Experiments, one might say , dig into the future. They may be groping, insecure and full of mistakes; they may not always be fortunate; but without them the substance of history would quickly be exhausted, without them there would be no history but merely a hopeless round of lifeless forms of conservatism.
Periods bereft of the genius of trial and of risk lend truth to the brief and terrible phrase of the Merovingian writer, mundus senescit. --
(the world grows old)

To comment further: Using Focillions measuring stick, if one looks back over the last 50 years of the 20th century and on up to now, we see a period of extended experimentation in this country; the 60's and early 70's and then two periods of intense conservatism, the Reagan era and then the new Bush era. Not forgetting that the 1950's ,the I like Ike era was one of harking back to tradition taken to the max.

To have lived through and been a bit whipsawed by all the change during this time period, one can understand, why there might be a clinging to tradition as an anchor , or shelter during a storm of change.

On the other hand if one wants to appreciate a hopeless round of lifeless forms of conservatism try taping say, 3 hours of Dick Chenry giving speeches on Cspan or CSPAN2. and watching him for 3 hours.

Now as we enter the 2nd half of the first decade of the 21st century, I would say we are seeing most experimentation staunched in favor of another hopeless round of lifeless forms of conservatism.

And we are also having to deal with the influences of the West's encounter with Islam and the Islamic world. Whatever the outcome of the Iraq war, each Iraq war veteran will bring back a small bit of influence with them; of being in a culture very different from ours, and of experiencing events very much outside their frame of reference of usual American life.

At this point it is hard to say how this will all play out. Whoever chances to read this, I do suggest using Focillions measuring stick as it were and apply it to history on your own. See where it takes you, and what it reveals for you. Okay enough of this extended commentary for now. Selah.

Tulku Jigme Rinpoche, Lama Namkha Drimed Rinpoche and Lama Jigme at the Yeshe Tsogyal Retreat back in May 2005. Thanks to Michael K. for the photo. 

Offerings 

Time thoughts

Haven't added much to this blog recently. Well, there are other things in life besides blogging. Maybe thats a heretical statement to add to a blog.
I read where there are some 8 million blogs out there in the blogosphere. Well, some of them amount to nothing more than infomercials, while others have an incredible amount of links, small ads, sidebars, etc.
I just don't have 'time' to do all that stuff. Perhaps why I never got around to having a web page.
At any rate I do find 'time' to do a fair amount of net surfing, and I was surfing the other day for something else, and came across the blog(web page), that has this long extended rant, which is out there, for a lot of it, yet philosophically, is intriguing, though the author gets carried away by his own rhetoric at times.

His post is called:"No equivalent term for dumbing down of individual and collective memory" by Andrew McKillop, a Venezuelan oil industry commentarist.
Here is a passage from it more exclusivly saying something about the time of our eternal present of this post-industrial age. I thought I could fit it in since this blog is entitled along the Time Coast.

Here goes:"
Time, as the astrophysicists and cosmo-chronologists will tell you, can go backwards, forwards and sideways, and accelerates and decelerates. At the centre of big astronomic masses, like huge solar systems with very heavy suns, time goes slowest, and fastest right on the edge of the spinning masses formed by millions of suns and planets arranged into nebulae. Various rates of spin, a now obligatory part of any politician’s slogan gargling to the consumer mob, are comparable to spin effects on gravitational events in deep space. Essentially, the past gets sawn off from and totally dissociated from the future. The boundary -- called the present -- is in no way like the Eternal Present of Tunnel Society, but becomes a wafer thin line as the past and future, pursuing their own and separate existences, generate fantastic energies, squashing the present to nothing.
All becomes either past or future. The present becomes porous, wavers, and then disappears completely. The spin then accelerates, and a novae or supernovae will form – a gigantic explosion, sometimes visible to the naked eye on this Earth. Later, a black hole will emerge, sucking everything, even light, into it and grinding all to subatomic dust.

Through Tunnel Memory, it is fervently believed, we are protected from both the past and future: both have been euthanized and only the Eternal Present exists. Time, like History, has been ritually and mythically stopped, dead in its tracks, the New Economy and Globalization prove this! Yet the spin of fake events, real wars and instant crises is ever-accelerating, and has to be accelerated each and every day. We are building not only peace-through-war but Universal Prosperity. No shortage of anything, except occasional shortages of munitions for our heroic frontline troops, can be allowed to affect this. This is official. "

Whew! Heavy duty, but intriguing. The entire post can be read here:
http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=39846