17 July, 2003

14 July, 2003

Will my web log actually publish? It has been off line or schizophrenic for over a week. Sorry!

Time just keeps on flying, fast, faster, blurrrrrrr.

11 July, 2003

Here in Nepal, only in essence, only in the most fundamental way do I live within my "normal" lifestyle. I mean, day to day, everything that I do, the way I do it, is different, and only the essence of things remains the same. .I am being introduced to new arts, ancient and beautiful. They keep me rapt and content reading them each day, and I can't remember days that have ever passed so quickly. These studies go straight to my heart. They seem important and primary to who I am. This is the essential sense, the only continuity that I have maintained here. These new arts are rooted in the same truth I have spend so much of my life, my work, my play contemplating. They are the same and so they fascinate me and fit comfortably in whatever it is that is me.

Right now I am only dipping lightly into them, that seems always to be my habit. What is so fantastic about Eastern religions is that they are inseparable from eastern philosophy and medicine. Each claims the other. Ayurveda, yoga, tantra, Yin/Yang, many of the primordial gods, Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu; they cross all country lines, philosophic lines, and religious lines. The East is a great mosaic, no, a melting pot of cosmologies, ideologies, and mythologies. In fact, Ayurveda is influenced by China, through Tibet, Nepal, India; and through Persia all the way to Greece. The ancient silk trade was also a trade in medical knowledge. Doctors travelled and translated Sanskrit and Greek. I think this is quite amazing.

One reason it all is so captivating is because it is personal. At first, it is not about memorizing anything, but about learning your own constitution: who are you? Where Western medicine is distinctly prescriptive, Eastern medicine is much more preventative. It is living a healthy life that is sought, - more than a cure, a way of life. This is the tie to Buddhism. The Buddha is considered the first doctor. His dharma is meant to cure suffering. This is also Ayurveda's connection to Yoga. Yoga is a sort of vehicle to health. Yoga and meditation are considered nearly essential to health and happiness. Yoga is integrated more with the Indian Hindu tradition, not the Buddhist tradition so much.

I have spent more time writing and less time reading the last few days. I am trying, struggling to find, a structure for my thoughts, a form I can use will communicate something that I need to write. It is hard and I feel I may do it in the next six weeks or maybe the next ten to twenty years; it's a flip of a coin.

I still haven't cured my allergies, but Wendy sent me a fine email which has me quite cheerful and anxious for the fall. I am so blessed with all whom I share my life with. I feel so lucky, too lucky; how could a man get down or sad. It would be an insult to the memory of you all I think - and my Mom. Also I talked to Blon and my Dad yesterday - that is grand. Thinking about all these people almost makes me wonder how we can be so sad sometimes, when there is so much beauty. I really love you all an awful lot. I realize that I am being damn mushy and I am going to stop this now. I hope you read this today, because I will likely erase it tomorrow. (For now it stays).

10 July, 2003

What is so amazing to me write now is how valid things can be that are far, far from our ability to reason. For instance accupuncture and acupressure, the I Ching, homeopathy, and astrology. My point, check this out. A friend got this for me off of www.asto.com. It is pretty interesting for lack of having a precise word. This is very long and I haven't read it all myself - don't bother. But cool it is.

Blogger is having problems so I don't even know when this will actually get online. Honestly, the essay and last couple entries are much more personal.

Tropical method report of birthchart for Jonah Manning.

Sun in Virgo, Moon in Sagittarius

You are happiest when tending to chores that demand meticulous
attention to detail. The active Sagittarian influence on your personality
inclines you to hurry around, doing many different jobs.

It is often difficult for you to reconcile your love of freedom and
your liberal spirit with the caution and orderliness of your inner self.

Your practicality and innate curiosity coupled with the philosophic
bent of Sagittarius, creates the potential for profound scholarship. You
are a fact collector. Your quest for knowledge and love of exploration
makes you fond of travel.


Ascendant in Virgo, Mercury in the Twelfth House

At the time of your birth the zodiacal sign of Virgo was ascending in
the horizon. Its ruler Mercury is located in the twelfth house.

This indicates that throughout your life you will assume a reserved,
quiet, analytical, critical, and receptive attitude.

Some selfishness is noted. However, if you are able to counteract this
trait with your natural helpful and sympathetic attitude and address
your positive qualities to resolve the problems of others then you will
accomplish your highest spiritual duties and your degree of
consciousness and perception will be expanded.

You are not afraid to work but you like to do things where you can use
intellectual resources rather than mechanical ones. There is some
independence here but don't try to be forceful about it because Virgo's
natural habitat is one in which the person is led by some powerful
authority and where the important decisions are best made by others.

You have a desire for purity and though you don't mind
relating to others there is something that you do dislike: continuous
intrusion of your privacy.

Life will find you in many situations in which you will function as
advisor and counsellor; make use of these opportunities to project the
power of your creativeness.

This position denotes a life that has you cast in rather obscure and
inconspicuous roles. Your intellect is peculiarly subtle. Your life will
be very much motivated by your love for risk and your various
activities of a secret nature.

Try to emphasize your conscientiousness in all the things you do.



My blog is doing crazy things. My entries are publishing but not publishing. Why is this?

08 July, 2003

Since yesterday, I have started singing. I don't know why. It is a lovely feeling, having tunes arrive into your ear as you walk through the puddles and the rain. I have a truly terrible voice, but the stupa empties at night and in the rain, business is rapped up, or people are not encouraged to linger and stray.

I have felt oddly vibrant - and also more aware of all the time I spend sitting. I sit all day. I exercise well, intensely, but the day is spent entirely in my mind. This is new for me. I am used to biking to school, running errands, moving back and forth, often racing or timing myself, pushing, never still - even in study I am distractible, uneasy and ill at rest. I think late into the night – often three, and wake up late and tired.

When I had only recently arrived to Bouda, a senior monk, after hearing my cause for coming and living with them, commented that our very culture breeds quick-minded, ill at ease people - people who eat on the run, work while eating, drive, talk, and apply make-up all at once, can hardly sit still - we never slow down. I agreed with him but noted that there are plenty of dim witted slow people as well. I didn't feel a particular affinity to the comparison and was more interested in dealing with my problems personally.

Now I see more clearly the validity or relevance of his observation: I am now immersed in a lifestyle that moves at a geologic slowness. Movement is invisible, inaudible in my day to day life. Consequently, perhaps my mind is absorbing, cooling, softening, and becoming, at last, malleable to the influence of yoga and meditation.

I hope this is so. This is the first step in the most important process I have attempted: the control of my mind. I have so long had trouble sleeping, struggled with memory debility - it is a part of me that is wild, untamed, and therefore not being used as productively as I would want and will need it to be. It is an expression of myself; I want it to be wild, but wild like a wave - I want to learn how to ride it and use its power to a greater benefit than I am capable of now.

In the last year, a few luminaries have shown me what a beautiful mind is really capable of. Limitless almost, certainly beyond any shallow limits my reason would propose. I believe, and now, at last, I am learning; I am beginning the road that long I have been eager to walk, but the time was not ripe or ready. Now, once started, I will take the work, this joy, to my old age and the grave. It is an expression of spirit, as real as any I have experienced, even with the inner mental rebellion.

My life will be shuffled, rearranged. I haven’t the time to entertain all that I love and cherish. In a temporal world we must let go, say goodbye to things that were once our all, our soul’s expression. (I should be saying “I� here.) But my soul sheds its skin and morphs into new shapes with new needs for health, for sustenance, for life and love. So what will shift, what will become dusty on the shelf until I have the time and will to meet it again and enjoy a fond reminiscence?

This will only be sorted in time and with a certain patience.

07 July, 2003

I am at a loss for inspiration. I should be quite pleased because I finished the story, but not the “posthumous writings,” of the Glass Bead Game. This has been a jewel of a reading experience. With a little support from B.B. I hope to devote an independent study to the book next year. But I am low on energy today and not in a terribly celebratory mood at the moment.

I had a computer problem which worked out – that’s good. I participated, though weak as I am today, in a fiery and profound conversation with a friend over lunch. It was unexpected, even confrontational, but since the both of us share the same desire to learn, we laughed and commented on the essential nature of the conversation and the ardor with which we fought our sides. It was one of those “fundamental” sort of arguments. Beautiful and unexpected. He thought we should have recorded it on my computer. He gave me a little mic so that when I get the software working we can.

I enjoyed more a conversation we had over dinner the night before. We defined sound, noise, and rhythm – all in terms of the creation of the universe, and noted with a smile the dualistic, creative nature which I so love to find in all things. Dualism implies unity because if two things rely upon one another then they don’t exist independently of its opposite. Therefore the dualism is a singular entity – a unity.

That’s shotty work, but just think of the yin-yang, two opposites transcending to a unity. This is the sort of thing I am encompassed by right now – or forever, as long as I can remember. Now, studying all these new disciplines, I am so happy to see my same elemental truth always there, always essential. I have found a beautiful Buddhist symbol for unity that I am captivated with as well. It is a symbol using sexuality to connote unity. Beautiful. Also, unity and solidarity is the very nature of Hesse’s Glass Bead Game.

There is a marvelous continuity to things right now. Just writing to whomever may read this has cheered and energized me. I think I will go have a piece of apple pie at the Double Dorjee.

06 July, 2003

The past few days have been interestingly dualistic and dynamic. They have been restful in that I haven't had to work. Today was the Dalai Lama's birthday. Since Tuesday I haven't worked actually. They were study days. Friday all the students had examinations. Then we had holidays for the birthday today. Everyone was so excited, like a Nepali Christmas.

However, the Chinese government influenced the Nepali government to prohibit any celebration. Police were around the stupa all day to make certain that no Buddhist was causing trouble by singing or dancing or any other form public nussence. It was very sad for me to see. I had taught my students the meaning of the word 'repression' and now I was experiencing it with them. Imagine having Christmas cancelled and the only reason given was that the authorities just didn't think Christmas was a good think to celebrate because they didn't believe in Santa. Regardless of the damp quiet of the day, I saw many smiles, and many people reminded me, the foriegner, that today was his Holiness' birthday with apparent joy and mirth in the revelation.

All day I sat alone and through myself blindly into a new book. I nearly covered, superficially, the entirety of the book by jumping from here to there, following different shards of thought and interest. The book is called Ayurvedic Healing and is an amazing work that in twenty years I will still be learning from and incorporating into my life. Ayurveda means the knowledge of healing. The knowledge it contains has been tested and improved for the last 5000 years and comes directly from the tradition of the Veda's, ancient Indian books of wisdom. It is so holistic and natural and personal. There is no general prescriptions - you must be the student of your own body, you make your own medicine, which can be as simple as the herbs found in the back yard: add water. Really it is a beautiful mirror for learning about your own state of health, learning yardsticks for how to grow and also recognize illness. Like yoga, it is another eliment of health. Yoga also comes out of the Vedas.

Eastern philosophy is so enticing because of its subjective nature. It is at once religion but transcends religion. The Vedas, Yin and Yang, the I Ching, Taoism, Tantra - all of these are claimed and understood, assimilated into one or numerous religions, but they all predate the religions that claim them. Taoism was already old before the Tao Te Ching was written. The I Ching was already written but was improved on by Confusius and was then assimilated; the Yin and Yang practically permeates all world philosophy. Unlike the west, the east lives in this state of religious practice, regardless of the title. The Vedas are a shining, and to me glorious, example.

Today the practical application is getting control of my allergies. This is the opposite pole of the dualism that I began by mentioning (now, way back). Happily my allergies have gone haywire and given me great motivation to learn about medical self-practice. So I have been diligent. I have a friend who is an expert and in the next few days we will make some herbal teas that help my nose and itchy eyes. Dust has long been a burden to me and I am excited about this road to a new level of health.

My other program is my stretching. I am indescribably tight and it hinders my overall physical health and also my ability to sit comfortably while meditating, making meditating in a seated posture impossible. So this is another long term comitment and goal, a path just started that will likely be carried to my grave.

These are two elements of my life here that are only seeds recently planted but are wholly rewarding in their beginnings, and promising in their futures. It is so absorbing, these days fly past me and nothing has been done - I have read; I have talked; I have written, but most of all I have absorbed, learned and begun a process that is invigorating and decorating my path. It is the same path as before, but now stregthened. Or at least the process is begun.

Enough about that. But it brings me joy so I willl share it. I will also include an essay I wrote while reading some form of criticism last semester. The criticism was about the nature of experience and reflection. I don't remember the details but this was written in disagreement. It dissgressed into a statement of the value of journalling. I attach it because I believe in it. It is a statement of the obvious, but from a deeper perspective that has some amnount of insight into the nature of how we grow as spiritual beings. It is rough. Nothing more than a sketch on an idea. Nothing more. Take it for what it is.


Experience vs. Reflection:
the importance of journalling

Experience is sensual by nature. We percieve the world by various feelings, images, smells, sounds, ect.

However, if we are to learn from our experience, thus reflection, then we must reflect on them after the fact. I stress the "after the fact." If we are having good sex, it is our sensual data that informs us. We do not pause, and think, "Wow, this is great sex," because this reflection would take us out of our sensual experience and the caliber of the experience would be tainted.

It is only after that we should look back and reflect on our experiences - think about what it was about the sex that made it so special, ect. If we do not later reflect on our daily experiences, then the learning that we should gain is mostly lost. There is a heightened point of view with retrospection, a detachment of sorts, that can stimulate understanding that would not be available at the point of the experience. This is congruent with dialectical thought. Reflection is a revisiting of an experience. As seeing an important film twice inevitably heightens your understanding of the themes, so to does reflection heighten your awareness of your own experiences.

In this way, a journal is invaluable. It instigates the thinking about and writing of daily experience. It promotes questions and thought. Inevitablely, we all reflect on experience when we are confronted with similar experiences and look back for assistance with the present. In many ways, this is only marginally effective. Time skews memories in a biased way, and often the things which we should be wary of are the very things our memories erase. This is not necessarily true for all of us. Reflection, early on, marks or flags these possible pitfalls that we might like to forget otherwise.

Journals also preserve the reflection and the experience for later days. Looking back at a journal awakens the sensual experiences of the past with the questing of the mind’s reflections to understand them. Recollections of the past cannot serve to awaken the past in such a lucid way as the reading of your own hand with all the pain and pleasure that was present in that now historic moment.

Dreams are an example of sensuous experience that we can have limited understanding of without prolonged reflection. How quickly dreams can fade from our memories. It seems they are stored in the most temporary lodgings of our brains. By writing them, we are free to reflect whenever the time presents itself. Oftren, days and weeks may pass before the key to a dream will become available. With that key, and the dream still at our access, we now are able to unlock secret sectors our our being that were previously inaccessible to us.

I feel that this is powerful learning, the most important, the self-growth which is essential to our own well-being and peace.

I have neglected to discuss the like-value of solitude. Solitude offers similar opportunities for reflection and growth of understanding. Alone, one is free to ponder questions of all kinds. Often, the questions of the day’s tribulations arise and confront us: was this right?, what could I have done better?

Solitude is healthy and wonderful for many other reasons that I won’t here pursue, but for self-understanding it is of premium importance.
The past few days have been interestingly dualistic and dynamic. They have been restful in that I haven't had to work. Today was the Dalai Lama's birthday. Since Tuesday I haven't worked actually. They were study days. Friday all the students had examinations. Then we had holidays for the birthday today. Everyone was so excited, like a Nepali Christmas.

However, the Chinese government influenced the Nepali government to prohibit any celebration. Police were around the stupa all day to make certain that no Buddhist was causing trouble by singing or dancing or any other form public nussence. It was very sad for me to see. I had taught my students the meaning of the word 'repression' and now I was experiencing it with them. Imagine having Christmas cancelled and the only reason given was that the authorities just didn't think Christmas was a good think to celebrate because they didn't believe in Santa. Regardless of the damp quiet of the day, I saw many smiles, and many people reminded me, the foriegner, that today was his Holiness' birthday with apparent joy and mirth in the revelation.

All day I sat alone and through myself blindly into a new book. I nearly covered, superficially, the entirety of the book by jumping from here to there, following different shards of thought and interest. The book is called Ayurvedic Healing and is an amazing work that in twenty years I will still be learning from and incorporating into my life. Ayurveda means the knowledge of healing. The knowledge it contains has been tested and improved for the last 5000 years and comes directly from the tradition of the Veda's, ancient Indian books of wisdom. It is so holistic and natural and personal. There is no general prescriptions - you must be the student of your own body, you make your own medicine, which can be as simple as the herbs found in the back yard: add water. Really it is a beautiful mirror for learning about your own state of health, learning yardsticks for how to grow and also recognize illness. Like yoga, it is another eliment of health. Yoga also comes out of the Vedas.

Eastern philosophy is so enticing because of its subjective nature. It is at once religion but transcends religion. The Vedas, Yin and Yang, the I Ching, Taoism, Tantra - all of these are claimed and understood, assimilated into one or numerous religions, but they all predate the religions that claim them. Taoism was already old before the Tao Te Ching was written. The I Ching was already written but was improved on by Confusius and was then assimilated; the Yin and Yang practically permeates all world philosophy. Unlike the west, the east lives in this state of religious practice, regardless of the title. The Vedas are a shining, and to me glorious, example.

Today the practical application is getting control of my allergies. This is the opposite pole of the dualism that I began by mentioning (now, way back). Happily my allergies have gone haywire and given me great motivation to learn about medical self-practice. So I have been diligent. I have a friend who is an expert and in the next few days we will make some herbal teas that help my nose and itchy eyes. Dust has long been a burden to me and I am excited about this road to a new level of health.

My other program is my stretching. I am indescribably tight and it hinders my overall physical health and also my ability to sit comfortably while meditating, making meditating in a seated posture impossible. So this is another long term comitment and goal, a path just started that will likely be carried to my grave.

These are two elements of my life here that are only seeds recently planted but are wholly rewarding in their beginnings, and promising in their futures. It is so absorbing, these days fly past me and nothing has been done - I have read; I have talked; I have written, but most of all I have absorbed, learned and begun a process that is invigorating and decorating my path. It is the same path as before, but now stregthened. Or at least the process is begun.

Enough about that. But it brings me joy so I willl share it. I will also include an essay I wrote while reading some form of criticism last semester. The criticism was about the nature of experience and reflection. I don't remember the details but this was written in disagreement. It dissgressed into a statement of the value of journalling. I attach it because I believe in it. It is a statement of the obvious, but from a deeper perspective that has some amnount of insight into the nature of how we grow as spiritual beings. It is rough. Nothing more than a sketch on an idea. Nothing more. Take it for what it is.


Experience vs. Reflection:
the importance of journalling

Experience is sensual by nature. We percieve the world by various feelings, images, smells, sounds, ect.

However, if we are to learn from our experience, thus reflection, then we must reflect on them after the fact. I stress the "after the fact." If we are having good sex, it is our sensual data that informs us. We do not pause, and think, "Wow, this is great sex," because this reflection would take us out of our sensual experience and the caliber of the experience would be tainted.

It is only after that we should look back and reflect on our experiences - think about what it was about the sex that made it so special, ect. If we do not later reflect on our daily experiences, then the learning that we should gain is mostly lost. There is a heightened point of view with retrospection, a detachment of sorts, that can stimulate understanding that would not be available at the point of the experience. This is congruent with dialectical thought. Reflection is a revisiting of an experience. As seeing an important film twice inevitably heightens your understanding of the themes, so to does reflection heighten your awareness of your own experiences.

In this way, a journal is invaluable. It instigates the thinking about and writing of daily experience. It promotes questions and thought. Inevitablely, we all reflect on experience when we are confronted with similar experiences and look back for assistance with the present. In many ways, this is only marginally effective. Time skews memories in a biased way, and often the things which we should be wary of are the very things our memories erase. This is not necessarily true for all of us. Reflection, early on, marks or flags these possible pitfalls that we might like to forget otherwise.

Journals also preserve the reflection and the experience for later days. Looking back at a journal awakens the sensual experiences of the past with the questing of the mind’s reflections to understand them. Recollections of the past cannot serve to awaken the past in such a lucid way as the reading of your own hand with all the pain and pleasure that was present in that now historic moment.

Dreams are an example of sensuous experience that we can have limited understanding of without prolonged reflection. How quickly dreams can fade from our memories. It seems they are stored in the most temporary lodgings of our brains. By writing them, we are free to reflect whenever the time presents itself. Oftren, days and weeks may pass before the key to a dream will become available. With that key, and the dream still at our access, we now are able to unlock secret sectors our our being that were previously inaccessible to us.

I feel that this is powerful learning, the most important, the self-growth which is essential to our own well-being and peace.

I have neglected to discuss the like-value of solitude. Solitude offers similar opportunities for reflection and growth of understanding. Alone, one is free to ponder questions of all kinds. Often, the questions of the day’s tribulations arise and confront us: was this right?, what could I have done better?

Solitude is healthy and wonderful for many other reasons that I won’t here pursue, but for self-understanding it is of premium importance.

05 July, 2003

Well, perhaps I have come to a minor sort of realization, or possibly a test, but after recieving a passionately well written email about the imporatnce of fully immersing myself in my joural, I may try something different. It is not even that I haven't been immersed in it, I have; but I have been aware and controled; I have been more occupied with the style than the rhetoric.

My experience here has slowly turned. The sensual features of Bouda have become my air. This is my home. I am comfortable and seated in routine. I have taken on the habit of the monks. I don' leave. I read; I write, I eat and drink; I do yoga; I teach, and I learn. And I sleep. This is all and it pleases me to no bounds.

But what does that leave me to write about? My experiences are not now of mountains or trails, or the sights and smells of a new and vivacious city. I am through with those days. I love Bouda. When I do go out to Thamel to go to the book store I am so pleased to arrive back at the stupa. Things are right and proper here. The flow is as I need it now for my work and my passions. My experience has become internal, philosophic, and spiritual.

I have till now refrained from writing about it. It seems to me more crude, more subjective. Will you believe that this is what I would truly write to myself, that I am not intentionally being pedantic? That I am writing for me, not you? Now I suppose I will take the chance.

So, I may start by taking short essays that I wrote for myself on various issues of the mind and putting them in occationally. I will resist for a time proselytizing. But if I run out of sensory experiences and short essays I may give that a shot too. So long as any reader believes and understands that this is how I write to myself - however strange.

With all this said - I almost feel ridiculous. I am qualifying my own journal. So I am sensitive. You try being naked for the worlkd to read.

02 July, 2003

I had an experience today, nothing too special really, but with it came the realization that it was beautiful, but also tragically fleeting. I was sitting in a cafe with a friend and several new friends. One of them, a Brit named Lindsey, had brought a kid in from the street for some food. I had just talked to his gilrlfriend for an hour about her last twelve years of travel. Another girl, a girl from Austria named Danielle, sang a beautiful song she knew.

I had been trying to get up and leave to do some work and then I realized. I saw how spectacular this instant was. Who were these people - they were strangeers. A kid from the street. Where were we? Nowhere. But we all were gathered, us from everywhere and nowhere in common - and we could get on like we were old comrades. We laughed as though it were the good old days being remembered.

I sat back a little easier and thought, "What work is so important now? Isn't this why I travel, to be in just such an atmosphere?" These days and these times, these moments won't last forever. I was participating in mystery. Those surrounding me were surprising and strange and vivid and talented, and we all were their together enjoying one another.

The kid got hold of my lighter and had a field day with it, like a magical toy, putting it to his ear to hear the gas wiz out. Lindsey was constantly laughing deeply, heartily (he had worked as a clown in Spain); Tenzig was fixing glasses and discussing his karma - I sat back and took it all in with a grin.

01 July, 2003

For the first time I actually get to use my own computer online. Finally got it all worked out.

The highlight of a very peaceful day was a serenade that was played for me and a friend at dinner. It was great. I haven't heard anyone play a guitar in such a long while. He was so passionate about the singing. He was from Wales, a friend of my dinner partner. We all sat and ate together. We laughed long and often. He must have been drunk, but he was so pleasant and cheerful.

Today I had a handstand competition with the younger monks. We did numerous cartwheels - until it turned violent. I was attacked by three twelve year old monks. I tryyed to gather all three into a pile but was unsuccessful - but it was great fun. I love the young ones. We bonded. They weren't very good at cartwheels.

What would it be like to be a monk at the age of twelve? Could you even understand? Do you know anything?

I studied well today. No class. It was a glorious day.