Settling in at what looks to be a home for at least a few months. Peaceful, quiet and conducive to meditative calm and insight.
4946 Vanalden Ave, Tarzana, CA
|
||||
|
Left Wat Thai for good. I apologize to those who have been offended by my weblog; it was never my intention to make people unhappy reading it, and I am to blame for thinking my audience smaller than it is. Next time, please let me know in advance if I post something you find [...] Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it’s not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. it’s whether you let it harden [...] Meeting today accomplished a few things. First, I managed to confuse the board members as to why I wouldn’t want to wear day-glow robes. Crazy Farang, I know. But they are supportive, and confident that they can figure out a solution to our dilemma. On the plus side, it sounds like by May there [...] At the Suvannabhumi airport in Bangkok, waiting to board the first of my flights back to the West. This flight may mark the end of my residence in Suvannabhumi in general, as I begin to settle in my new North Hollywood environment. Thailand has been a great place, in retrospect, but I’m looking very [...] Cynicism sucks, really… I mean, if you’re always expecting the worst, you can’t ever really be happy, even when things turn out for the best. On the other hand, optimism doesn’t really accomplish anything useful either, since the optimist has little or no reason to effect real change in their life and tends to [...] Buddhism is certainly the hardest pill to swallow. Everything about us screams out against the middle way, trying always to find some way to make things permanent, satisfying or controllable. We push and pull, trying to make things go our way, never realizing that we are but dust in the wind, tossed about by storms of our own making. The middle way forces you to give up everything about who and what you are. This is the hardest pill to swallow. It is hard not because it is wrong, but because you are wrong. Everything you cling to is painful, everything you stand for falls over, everything that has meaning to you is meaningless. It is the ultimate test of selflessness. All of that is very dramatic, I suppose, when relating to the events of today… we did manage to compromise on the issue of opening a new center in North Hollywood under Wat Thai. I think the solution is really the best… it didn’t seem right anyway to make such a young monk the head of the meditation department at such a big monastery with such big and powerful monks, and a couple of times at the meeting I suggested that the best thing for me would be to just leave and find a place more suited to my way of practice. So, we swung back and forth, me trying to explain how difficult it is to run a meditation center when you are nothing more than a resident teacher under the authority of people who know very little about meditation centers in general, and they trying to tell me that everything would be just fine doing exactly that. A perennial favourite, this question. Last year, I said I wasn’t going to stay at Wat Thai, any Wat Thai, and now here I am in Thailand about to go to a Wat Thai board meeting to talk about starting a meditation department at Wat Thai. See, they bought a piece of property near [...] Here it is; the next generation in meditation huts: Just a little update, what I’ve been up to for the past three months with my weblog down, for those of you who haven’t been following me on Twitter or Facebook (my twitter links to my facebook; either one will get you the same info). Apart from fighting off a ridiculous court case on [...] |
  |
|||
|
Copyright © 2010 Truth Is Within - All Rights Reserved |
||||
Recent Comments