“Pursuing beneficial practices brings good kamma, and that can overcome any past unwholesome kamma. It’s not a closed system, it’s not fate; it’s a dynamic process.”
Lynn J Kelly blogpost today reminds us our actions matter every minute of every day. We can improve our lives when we seek the good of others too.
I’m approaching a milestone birthday, and my thoughts today are about aging. Synchronistical, there’s an archived Tricycle article that offers much reassurance on this very topic.
See excerpts below from Douglas Penick’s article. For the full article see: tricycle.org/magazine/buddhism-aging/
Old age as preparation for perfect awakening
There are many discussions of how the young should manage the old, but there is not much discussion of how it feels for the old to find the same mind continuing, its clarity and curiosity.
Buddhaghosa, the great 5th-century Theravada Buddhist investigator of mind, wrote:
Aging has the characteristic of maturing (ripening) material instances. Its function is to lead on to death.
Aging is the basis for the bodily and mental suffering that arises owing to many conditions such as leadenness in all the limbs, decline and warping of the faculties, vanishing of youth, undermining of strength, loss of memory and intelligence, contempt on the part of others, and so on.
Hence it is said:
With leadenness in every limb,
With every faculty declining,
With vanishing of youthfulness,
With memory and wit grown dim,
With strength now drained by undermining,
With growing unattractiveness to spouse and kin,
To [spouse] and family and then
With dotage coming on, what pain
Alike of body and of mind
A mortal must expect to find!
Since aging all of this will bring,
Aging is well named suffering.—The Path of Purification, trans. Bikkhu Nanamoli
If you are reading this, your chances of ending up in a nursing home are just short of 50/50. That is to say, 4 out of 10 of Tricycle’s readers are likely to end their lives in institutional care. But as Meg Federico wrote, people have to make the most difficult decisions, plans concerning the last years of their lives, at a time they are least capable of doing so. Nonetheless, we will age, and something will happen to us. Atul Gawande, a distinguished surgeon and commentator on the care of the aged, describes the likely situation in which we who live in the Western post-industrial world will find ourselves:
The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies of a sliver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions—nursing homes and intensive care units—where regimens, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the comforts they most need. Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers.
—Being Mortal
“Old age. It’s a secret, a kind of hidden magic. It’s right there, this practice, and no one sees it. We’re being shown, given. It is how our lives actually work. What we are told we should not cling to is actually naturally being stripped away. . . . Resistance is not possible or only creates more confusion, pain.”
We see our body as a noun, an entity with fixed properties and functions. And because we tend to look at ourselves this way, when various qualities of our body change during the aging process, this is unpleasant; when our body cannot function as it used to, we are distraught, lost. If, however, we see our body as a verb, a combination of properties and functions constantly in motion, then it’s very different.
Dogen Zenji said: “When the world ends, and the fires blaze unobstructedly through everything, and all falls to ruin, we just follow circumstance.” (Trans. Kidder Smith)
Like light in air, we cannot stop,
Every instant dissolves.
Awakening is not something we make happen
Awakening happens without reference point
Without boundary.
Like light in air
Moments do not stop in one self or an other.
Dissolving
Reforming
Awakening breaks open in the experience of whatever and all.
Here’s Dogen again:
Greatly awakening has no beginning or end, returning to confusion had no beginning or end. Why? It just goes off everywhere, while the worlds are being destroyed.” (Trans. Kidder Smith)
Douglas Penick is a longtime Buddhist practitioner and has published three Gesar of Ling episodes. His books include the recent essay collection T The Age of Waiting, adapted from Tricycle articles, and the upcoming The Oceans of Cruelty.
I haven’t met Lynn J Kelly (yet) but do consider her a spiritual friend and teacher. I haven’t met Martine Batchelor (yet) but consider her, and her husband Stephen, spiritual mentors and teachers.
And so, I can highly recommend the blogpost below. May you be edified and encouraged by it as I have.
Lynn J Kelly reminds us that we have a choice. Do we just read, or do we practice? Our level of sincerity and commitment to our path will be self-evident in our behavior.
Many thanks to Lynn and Martine Batchelor for their words of encouragement and wisdom.
“May we become more sensitive to other people and their needs. If we feel empathy towards others, our generosity is strengthened and our greed recedes, bit by bit.”
“Simply pray for what’s best, realizing that you may not know what that is.”
Below is a repost from a thoughtful Tricycle archive article. Regardless of your personal faith tradition, I hope this article offers you some provocative thoughts on what prayer means to you.
A Tibetan master explains that using deities in prayer is a method intended to eliminate duality. By Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche SPRING 2000
Why do we pray? We might think that if we do, the Buddha, or God, or a deity will look kindly upon us, bestow blessings, protect us. We might believe that if we don’t, the deity won’t like us, might even punish us. But the purpose of prayer is not to win the approval or avert the wrath of an exterior God.
To the extent that we understand Buddha, God, the deity, to be an expression of ultimate reality, to that extent we receive blessings when we pray. To the extent that we have faith in the boundless qualities of the deity’s love and compassion, to that extent we receive the blessings of those qualities.
Sometimes we project human characteristics onto things that aren’t human. For example, if we sentimentally think, “My dog is meditating with me,” we’re only attributing that behavior to the dog; we’re imagining what it’s doing. When we anthropomorphize God, we project our own faults and limitations, imagining they’re God’s as well. This is why many people believe that God either likes or dislikes them depending on their behavior. “I won’t be able to have this or that because God doesn’t like me—I forgot to pray.” Or worse, “If God doesn’t like me, I’ll end up in hell.”
If God feels happy or sad because we do or do not offer prayer, then God is not flawless, not an embodiment of perfect compassion and love. Any manifestation of the absolute truth, by its very nature, has neither attachment to our prayers nor aversion to our lack of them. Such attributes are projections of our own mind.
To understand how prayer works, consider the sun, which shines everywhere without hesitation or hindrance. Like God or Buddha, it continuously radiates all its power, warmth, and light without differentiation. When the earth turns, it appears to us that the sun no longer shines. But that has nothing to do with the sun; it’s due to our own position on the shadow side of the earth. If we inhabit a deep, dark mine shaft, it’s not the sun’s fault that we feel cold. Or if we live on the earth’s surface but keep our eyes closed, it’s not the sun’s fault that we don’t see light. The sun’s blessings are all-pervasive, whether we are open to them or not. Through prayer, we come out of the mine shaft, open our eyes, become receptive to enlightened presence, the omnipotent love and compassion that exist for all beings.
Even if we aren’t familiar with the idea of praying to a deity, most of us feel the presence of some higher principle or truth—some source of wisdom, compassion, and power with the ability to benefit. Praying to that higher principle will without doubt be fruitful.
However, it is very important not to be small-minded in prayer. You might want to pray for a new car, but how do you know if a new car is what you need? It’s better to simply pray for what’s best, realizing that you may not know what that is. A few years ago, a Tibetan woman traveled overseas by airplane. When the plane made a brief stop en route, she got out to walk around. Unfamiliar with the airport, with the language, and with foreign travel, she didn’t hear the announcement of her departing flight and missed it. This probably seemed disastrous at the time, but not long after takeoff the plane that she missed crashed, killing most of the passengers.
We pray for what’s best not only for ourselves, but for all beings. When we’re just starting practice, our self-importance is often so strong that our prayers remain very selfish and only reinforce rather than transform self-centeredness. So until our motivation becomes more pure-hearted, it may be beneficial to spend more time cultivating lovingkindness than praying.
With proper motivation, prayer becomes an important component of our practice because it helps to remove obstacles—counterproductive circumstances, imbalances of the subtle energies in the body, confusion and ignorance in the mind. Even in listening to the teachings, we may mentally edit what we hear, adding more to them than is being said or ignoring certain aspects. Prayer offsets these hindrances.
The mind is like a mirror. Although our true nature is the deity, what we now experience are ordinary mind’s reflections. Enemies, hindrances, inauspicious moments—all of which appear to be outside of us—are actually reflections of our own negativities. If you’ve never seen your image before, looking in a mirror you’d think you were gazing through a window, encountering someone altogether independent of you. It wouldn’t seem to have any connection to you as you passed by. If you saw there a horrible-looking person with a dirty face and wild hair, you might feel aversion. You might even try to clean up the image by washing the mirror. But a mirror, like the mind, is reflective—it only shows you yourself. Only if you combed your hair and washed your face could you change what you saw. You’d have to change yourself; you couldn’t change the mirror. Prayer helps to purify the habits of ordinary, small mind and ignorance of our true nature as the deity.
When we pray in the context of deity practice, we sometimes visualize the deity standing or sitting before us in space as an embodiment of perfection, whereas we ourselves have many faults and obscurations. But praying to the deity is not a matter of supplicating something separate from ourselves. The point of using a dualistic method, visualizing the deity outside of us, is to eliminate duality.
When we visualize ourselves as the deity, we deepen our experience of our own intrinsic purity. Finally, in the completion stage of practice, when the form of the deity falls away, we let the mind rest, without effort or contrivance, in its own nature, the ultimate deity.
Thus we begin with an initial conception of purity as external, only to internalize it and ultimately to transcend concepts of inner and outer. This awareness of the nature of the deity increases the power, blessings, and benefit of our prayer.
If the nature of the deity is emptiness, you might wonder why we pray at all. There seems to be a contradiction here. How can we say, on the one hand, that there isn’t a deity, only the reflection of our own intrinsic nature, and, on the other, that we should pray to it? This makes sense only if we understand the inseparability of absolute and relative truth.
On the absolute level, our nature is buddha, we are the deity. But unaware of this, we’re bound by relative truth. In order to make the leap to the realization of our absolute nature, we have to walk on our relative feet, on a relative path. Because absolute truth is so elusive to our ordinary, linear mind, we rely on an increasingly subtle, step-by-step process to work with the mind’s duality until we achieve recognition. Prayer is an essential part of that process.
Red Tara Dedication Prayer
Red Tara is one of Chagdud Tulku’s root practices, which he and his Sangha use daily.
Throughout my many lives and until this moment, whatever virtue I have accomplished, including the merit generated by this practice, and all that I, will ever attain, this I offer for the welfare of sentient beings.
May sickness, war, famine, and suffering be decreased for every being, while their wisdom and compassion increase in this and every future life.
May I clearly perceive all experiences to be as insubstantial as the dream fabric of the night and instantly awaken to perceive the pure wisdom display in the arising of every phenomenon.
May I quickly attain enlightenment in order to work ceaselessly for the liberation of all sentient beings.
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche (1930–2002) was a highly revered meditation master, artist, Tibetan physician and the spiritual director of the Chagdud Gonpa Foundation.
magnoliagrovemonastery.org/photo-gallery
Sunday morning coming down … the last day of retreat is for final talks and final goodbyes. Some people linger as long as possible while others pack up early and are eager to return to home, family, work, and/or civilization.
The vast majority of retreatants are making promises to themselves and/or others to return again. There are many goodbye hugs and well wishes shared.
Today’s senryu: Last Day of Retreat
renewed spirits and
relief to move forward – yes
impermanence is
The six-hour drive home includes a lot of debriefing with car mates that had similar yet different experiences than you. Since retreatants are assigned living quarters by gender and meditation groups by chance, it’s very likely that each traveler has a different perspective on what was their favorite part of the retreat.
So long, Magnolia Grove.
magnoliagrovemonastery.org/photo-gallery
magnoliagrovemonastery.org/general
A Magnolia Grove retreat includes a lot of silent time. Chatter is discouraged to enhance the collective solitude for all.
However, by the third day, a routine is established and we learn when and where to take mini-breaks. New friendships are made and/or old friendships enriched.
Today’s senryu: Third Day Routine
comfort through structure
predictable peacefulness
barriers come down
magnoliagrovemonastery.org/general/photos-how-to-live
Plants Really Do Scream
all life suffers – yes
even plants feel the pain of
their violation
Inspired by the reposted article below
NATURE 31 March 2023
(Michele Constantini/Getty Images)
It seems like Roald Dahl may have been onto something after all: if you hurt a plant, it screams.
Well, sort of. Not in the same way you or I might scream. Rather, they emit popping or clicking noises in ultrasonic frequencies outside the range of human hearing that increase when the plant becomes stressed. This, according to scientists, could be one of the ways in which plants communicate their distress to the world around them.
“Even in a quiet field, there are actually sounds that we don’t hear, and those sounds carry information. There are animals that can hear these sounds, so there is the possibility that a lot of acoustic interaction is occurring,” explains evolutionary biologist Lilach Hadany of Tel Aviv University in Israel.
“Plants interact with insects and other animals all the time, and many of these organisms use sound for communication, so it would be very suboptimal for plants to not use sound at all.”
Plants under stress aren’t as passive as you might think. They undergo some pretty dramatic changes, one of the most detectable of which (to us humans, at least) is the release of some pretty powerful aromas. They can also alter their color and shape.
These changes can signal danger to other plants nearby, which in response boost their own defenses; or attract animals to deal with the pests that may be harming the plant.
However, whether plants emit other kinds of signals – such as sounds – has not been fully explored. A few years ago, Hadany and her colleagues found that plants can detect sound. The logical next question to ask was whether they can produce it, too.
To find out, they recorded tomato and tobacco plants in a number of conditions. First, they recorded unstressed plants, to get a baseline. Then they recorded plants that were dehydrated, and plants that had had their stems cut. These recordings took place first in a soundproofed acoustic chamber, then in a normal greenhouse environment.
Then, they trained a machine learning algorithm to differentiate between the sound produced by unstressed plants, cut plants, and dehydrated plants.
The sounds plants emit are like popping or clicking noises in a frequency far too high-pitched for humans to make out, detectable within a radius of over a meter (3.3 feet). Unstressed plants don’t make much noise at all; they just hang out, quietly doing their plant thing.
By contrast, stressed plants are much noisier, emitting an average up to around 40 clicks per hour depending on the species. And plants deprived of water have a noticeable sound profile. They start clicking more before they show visible signs of dehydrating, escalating as the plant grows more parched, before subsiding as the plant withers away.
The algorithm was able to distinguish between these sounds, as well as the species of plant that emitted them. And it’s not just tomato and tobacco plants. The team tested a variety of plants, and found that sound production appears to be a pretty common plant activity. Wheat, corn, grape, cactus, and henbit were all recorded making noise.
But there are still a few unknowns. For example, it’s not clear how the sounds are being produced. In previous research, dehydrated plants have been found to experience cavitation, a process whereby air bubbles in the stem form, expand and collapse. This, in human knuckle-cracking, produces an audible pop; something similar could be going on with plants.
We don’t know yet if other distress conditions can induce sound, either. Pathogens, attack, UV exposure, temperature extremes, and other adverse conditions could also induce the plants to start popping away like bubble wrap.
It’s also not clear whether sound production is an adaptive development in plants, or if it is just something that happens. The team showed, however, that an algorithm can learn to identify and distinguish between plant sounds. It’s certainly possible that other organisms could have done the same.
In addition, these organisms could have learned to respond to the noise of distressed plants in various ways. “For example, a moth that intends to lay eggs on a plant or an animal that intends to eat a plant could use the sounds to help guide their decision,” Hadany says. For us humans, the implications are pretty clear; we could tune into the distress calls of thirsty plants and water them before it becomes an issue.
But whether or not other plants are sensing and responding is unknown. Previous research works have shown that plants can increase their drought tolerance in response to sound, so it’s certainly plausible. And this is where the team is pointing the next stage of their research.
“Now that we know that plants do emit sounds, the next question is – ‘who might be listening?'” Hadany says. “We are currently investigating the responses of other organisms, both animals and plants, to these sounds, and we’re also exploring our ability to identify and interpret the sounds in completely natural environments.”
The research has been published in Cell.
Re-reading Power vs. Force by David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D., (c) 2012 Author’s Official Authoritative Edition, I was reminded that it was time to “raise my sights” from choosing joy to choosing enlightenment.
While both joy and enlightenment are in the “extraordinary outcomes” pinnacle, why stop at joy when there are still two higher vibrations levels available?
Today’s senryu: Levels of Consciousness
getting past my self
we perceive a greater truth:
interbeing Self
May we all be happy, productive, without stress and synchronistically extraordinary.
Life Matters 