Ok, decided I’m going to change the look of the site. Cool. This’ll be fun. So I’m thinking there’ll be a front page, with mostly graphics, perhaps some animation (Max you’ll have to decide on that, though Justin can advise as too how much animation would be wise [if any]). Wow, check that out – a bracket inside a bracket – hmmm very deep.

 

Which reminds me I was just chatting with a great friend this morning and we were talking about that male thing that tends to divide women into two kind of distinct categories: the good girl (Virgin Mary, mum) and the bad girl (stripper, whore). The good girl is the male’s partner to whom he indicates some sort of commitment of longevity (this may be spoken and/or displayed through marriage or children or may just an understanding).  The bad girl is any other women who even remotely appears to fancy him (and that may just be in his own imaginings – I can vouch that us men are GOOD at imagining).

 

So two types – and this is the fun part: the good girl

• isn’t sexy
• isn’t sexual
• isn’t thought of in that way at all really
• in fact she’s a lot like mum
• actually if she is raising my children, she is a mum
• and therefore not at all raunchy, sexy or gagging for it

 

And the bad girl? WHOA, SHE IS!!!

 

• sexy
• sexual
• likes to get down and dirty
• wants me so so bad baby
• even if she is a mum
• she’s a MILF

 

So, there you have it, well some of it anyway. Hmmmm I seem to have sidetracked a little, as I do.

 

Anyway, cha cha cha cha changes.  So a front page, and so far I have this graphic (thanks Max!)

 

 

 

Absolutely awesome graphic, based on the the self immolation of Thích Quảng Đức on June 11 1963 in Vietnam.

 

No swastika I know, and that was a part of the original Sacred Heart image I loved (if you are unsure what I am on about go to sacred heart ). Then again I may just be seeking controversy, more controversy at least.  Strange that cause I’m not really one for controversy. I note Max in his comments on the image says:

 

‘I thought the swastika was too relevant to Buddhism to leave out. That and I’m sure the DevART community is beyond immediately thinking swastika = nazi’ 

 

Well that is the exact disagreement I had with Ebay over some candle-holders I had in the One Dharma Happiness Books store. Ebay’s view was basically if I couldn’t absolutely verify that these swastika candle holders were not designed or used or associated in anyway whatsoever to nazism, then well, sorry pal but we have no choice but to align them with nazism.

 

I prefer to think the other way round. Let’s liberate the swastika from an almost automatic connection with nazism. That connectiion is only a few years old for heaven’s sake, the swastika connection with eastern spirituality has been around for thousands of years! Why would I choose to associate this mandala like symbol with something I understand as hurtful and full of hate and violence and destruction when I have a genuine option of associating the swastika with something I understand as being full of loving kindness, compassion, freedom and happiness.

 

And as I wrote this post, as I became side-tracked, I came across the following vid. I watched it and wept. Thank you Thích Quảng Đức, thank you to the makers of the vid, thanks Max, and thanks to all, yes all of you, who led me here.

 

Thích Quảng Đức was a Buddhist monk protesting the persecution of Buddhists by South Vietnam’s Ngô Đình Diệm administration. He burned himself to death at a busy Saigon road intersection on June 11, 1963.

 

please take some time to watch this

 

 

 

 

 may you all share in my dharma

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

 

 

Everything is of the same importance.  Everything, every little thing, everything that comes across any of the senses- anything I see, anything I hear, anything I touch. The most trivial comment about a tv show that was on last night, or someone expousing quantum meta-philosophy, or perhaps the end of the most wonderful, intense love relationship of my life.

 

 

It is all of equal importance- all very important. 

 

 

What does that mean in terms of the way I live my life? 

 

 

Oscar Wilde ( I love you Oscar!) said life is too important to take seriously. 

 

 

Of course! Now, I realise.  As everything is of equal importance, I can CHOOSE whether I take it all seriously or not.  My ’seriousness’ or ‘playfulness’ [is that the opposite of 'seriousness'?] has no influence on how important something is.  

 

FANTASTIC!  To help me recognise the equal importance of all I:

 

 

• relax as to understand that everything is of equal importance does in effect relieve me of the need to try and work out what something is worth, or its value in any way.
• practice trying to be more and more aware of everything- obviously the dog crap on the sidewalk –  and everything else.  I try and hear as well as listen. To recognise what someone is saying. And not simply what they are simply saying also how they are saying it. How they are saying it, what they look when they are saying it.  What do they feel like as they are saying it?

 

And I guess I could have read Allan Pease and Body Language (or something similar) and learnt the signs, and then if someone looks like that, that means this or that. This grimace means they are lying or not lying or stressed or not stressed. I can learn it like that- that is one way of learning it.  It is a good way of learning it. I think I may actually have read an Allan Pease book.

 

 

Another way to learn it is to simply practice. Practice being mindful.  Keep practising a one-mind focus. 

 

We all have this ability- we CAN all recognise each other. 

 

This is primal.

 

 

We can all do this without having to know what little twitches or sideways glances mean, in any rational analytical sense. 

 

 

We can all recognise

we can all feel

we all have the ability to feel connection

to trust. 

 

 

It is a connection to the importance of our life- that’s what it is- it is about recognising how special and fortunate we are, and being grateful for that every moment of every moment.  

 

 

It is about our lives. 

 

 

our gifts

 

 

the privilege and the blessing of being

 

 

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

 

‘No one can tell you exactly what you have got to be,

You got to stand your ground and practice in your life’  - Jimmy Barnes

 

 

A couple of months ago I read ‘An Interpretation of Murder’ – a mystery thriller set in turn of the century New York, and featuring Freud and Jung. Fascinating and enthralling book, not the least due to the main protagonist’s obsession with Hamlet and the dilemma of  “to be or not to be”.  While the book is long gone, the obsession remains. After all it is one of those enduring questions, one of the most enigmatic lines Shakespeare ever wrote…

 

 

 

 

 

By the end of ‘An Interpretation of Murder’ the main character believes he has it – what Hamlet, what Shaky means in the classic soliloquy- to be or not to be – this is the dilemma that faces us all once we realise that we are acting out – once we get to know ourselves and the discourses that we embody.

 

To be or not to be – not so much about life and death. Not so much about choosing to live or die, but rather choosing either to be what we know ourselves to be or choosing to be that which we don’t know, choosing ‘not to be’.

 

To be or not to be. Or perhaps to be both - ’to be’ that which we are as a discursively constructed self, and ‘not to be’ that self – to ‘be’ something else at the same time. This is the path. This is the tightrope. This is the adventure, the excitement. It is on this path, this tightrope, this line between being and not-being that there is intensity of experience.

 

‘To be’ is to be the socially constructed be-ing.  We are all this, we all are this.  We have learnt a language, more then one, we understand a myriad of signs; words, symbols, looks, associations, movement, gesture. As we sense we interpret.  This is to be – to be that which we are, that which we have BE-COME between birth and now.

 

And what about being MORE than we have become? Or less? What about not-being.  Can we remember who we are? Find our original face before our parents were born?

 

 

What is not-to-be and how is this possible? How can we ‘not be’ who we are? How do we escape from the constructed self? And why would we want to? Perhaps just to discover what is there?  What exists when all that I have be-come is taken away?

 

nothing?

freedom?

the circle of life?

 

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

 

 

 

 

Life is …..uncertain, unsure, ambigiuous and ambivalent. That’s just the way it is.  Yet we, as humans seem to prefer certainty, or at least we have grown to prefer certainty, to need order surrounding us. We have come to need consistency to feel good, feel safe.  Yet life, as it is, does not provide this.

 

Life, freed from the structure and the order that we impose upon it is…..chaotic, undetermined, ambigious. It is full of potential realities. When we experience life like this we are, to coin a phrase, ’spoilt for choice’.  We surely have all been there, that sense of confusion, of indecision when we are faced with so many options.  A menu that is full of things we can order for our pleasure.

 

And we end that moment of indecision, of ambiguity, by making our choice. We collapse the multiple realities that exist in that moment (e.g. the list of possible meals) into one. We create certainty. Through our choices we create the next moment. It is from this understanding that comes that notion of multiple or parallel universes – ones that career of from the many options we do not choose. If we had had a different meal, had turned left rather than right, had turned over in bed and slept in rather than got up early….. life would be different, very different.

 

So we create our worlds – we create, in every moment our futures. We are responsible for all that happens to us. And once we begin to accept this responsibility than we begin to know that our futures, which become our presents, and then our pasts, are exactly what we haven chosen.  And once we begin to understand that we know what we are doing then we begin to understand that our lives are exactly as they are meant to be.

 

Anyway this is not what I was thinking of writing about. I was thinking of writing about those fleeting moments when we delay, when we hesitate, when the decision is yet to be made. In these moments more than one future lies in front of us. More than one reality exists for us. We exist, in those moments, in doubt. Unsure, uncertain – in a place of ambiguity and uncertainty. What I have come to think of as “delicious ambiguity”

 

So what is the ‘benefit’ of being in such a place?

 

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x