The Worst Assumption...

...that there is always tomorrow. Most of the time we live our lives right up to our last moment assuming that tomorrow we can be happy or at least happier than we are right now.  Meanwhile, our bodies and minds fall apart.  This makes it ever more difficult to change our perspective and we end up banging our heads against a wall. “It worked in the past, so why doesn’t it work now?” or like the old man I found on the street after having experienced a stroke who I helped home said, “Age creeps up on you fast!”

I find myself examining my life and actions now with greater and greater frequency. Trying to move towards lightness, instead of darkness. Sometimes, I am lucky enough to be aware right in the midst of engaging. Then I can fast forward to an outcome beneficial to others and myself, and cut my reactive mind out of the equation. I do find that most all conversation instigated by me is a kind of ego based expression. The equivalent of saying, "Wait, I am here and alive and I matter," rises up. If I remain quiet, I seem to run up against the real fact that I don’t really exist. That this life could very well be a dream, with only one or two important distinctions from the ones experienced when I lay down. I can feel the weight of my body affected by gravity, and tastes are usually more enhanced and detailed. I can usually exist in silence for quite sometime with ease given my difficulty with speech.

Saturday, I went to a Satsang with Bentinho Massaro, and was quiet except during lunch with my friend who accompanied me there. There was one time when he spoke with one woman, guiding her into feeling her own pain which she had mistakenly tied in with feelings for the sufferings of animals …and I felt that what she really needed was a hug. Coming from the loneliness and misplaced anger that was her vegan path. I almost spoke about this, but caught myself. Also she was intelligent and aware enough to see the pain when Bentinho pointed it out. Bentinho was clear and mature enough in awareness to feel her pain but not get swept up in it. The whole exchange was so beautiful to watch and made me appreciate our precious human existence that we often forget.

Before I went to see him, my friend did a brain/bone hearing test from his Mozart Brain lab equipment, and found that my last Vipassana, it left my emotions open and we would have to work to close it back up enough in therapy when his has time. ( it is charted based on frequencies) I do have emotional lability left over from my severe brain damage, that in a good way is liberating, because I cannot keep emotions hidden in my gut, and when I feel emotions I express them at the time the cause manifests. I rarely cry in out bursts that is embarrassing or out of place now. This allows me to be more compassionate and makes my path evolve naturally. I find that when I speak it ties me in to my past ego demands and more old self faster. I find that friends that are more comfortable with my former self, are now pulling away which is natural for them. They are scared of silence, which seems like a mirror of their actions and way of being. The people that are “on board” appreciate the move from my old ways.

Meanwhile, my partner has come to some maturity and self-awareness of his being and the effects on others, just in the past 4 months that has brought him great clarity and joy. It was a natural evolution from seeing where he was creating some of his misery. He has been rewarded at work, and everyone there comments about his change. He is one person that was born into darkness and is moving towards lightness I can model on. And really all he needs is my love and not my advice, so I can be quiet on this front. With one hand touching the earth.


Crying is one of the highest devotional songs. One who knows crying knows spiritual practice. If you can cry with a pure heart, nothing else compares to such prayer. Crying includes all the principles of yoga.

— Swami Kripalvanandji

Bagan Boys

I am pretty sure the boys are chanting Pali with a Burmese accent. They were herding goats after school and I gave them a Buddhist calendar for their pocket from Thailand and they took a break from the goats to come up and show off. I have one more of them play fighting.

I have been busy since my return from Vipassana, where I almost had three days of clear body scanning followed by more deep sankaras coming up. At that time, I felt bright, awake, and very clear, and still feel it now. Yet, if this clarity leaves, naturally ...I will not be surprised. It makes me want to return to serve, and work towards the 20-day requirements.
I still reflect about Bagan, and feel it was a sign of the intercon-nectedness of everyone, when I met the young man there and his family. What unfolded there is pulling towards a desire to short term ordination.
Let life unfold naturally, like nature does. You can't force open a flower.

Was It Ever Real?

As my ego developed as a child, I came to the realization I will die at some point. I can’t remember what triggered this. What’s that mean? Me as a body or Me as in what I thought? Looking back this is where my “I” sense had firmly established itself and was scrambling for attention. When it first happened, I was lying on my bed at night and felt a dropping out of all my ideas of who I though I was. This continued to happen for about three weeks tapering off as the drama of life overtook and displaced my sign of what “I” was or in this case… what “I” was not.  

This may mean that self-awareness was still in flux before this time, and I may not have beed involved in stories of my ego. So, it meant that after that, I was and am now totally caught up in labeling the world and my experience as good or bad.

I( the character known as Was Once, in more a correct term) got a feeling that the difficult circumstances of the flood in Bangkok, that caused me and my partner to be separated when his work got flooded actually propelled me to look at how I see the world. The flood even cancelled my Vipassana while there, leading me to the other Thai temple with a very realized abott. When I did a course here upon returning, I got to experience solitary cell meditation, working on my ego and anger. I look forward to another 10 day Vipassana, furthering weeding out of desires of the way things should be. I will look at pulling back further from a personal involvement with the world’s events. It doesn’t need me to label to continue the course of nature and it never did. I am really not that important, and it was only my ego that got it all confused.


I will re-examine in my meditation over the 10 days to see if the experience in Bagan was out of pure natural compassion or the ego wanting a new or a better experience.