Focus

Flower whispered, I don’t like sleeping alone.

Easy to remember Flower’s soft deep tactile sensations. Practice the Middle Way  ... The Middle Way is deep breathing and mindfulness  ... The Middle Way is loving kindness. Metta. It is wisdom, patience and gratitude.

Discover harmony between detachment and sentimentality. Eat the world with your blind eyes. Yes, my Flower, yes. Dead or blind, there’s no difference. People who cause you difficulties are valuable teachers. They give you the opportunity to develop patience, said Omar a blind mystic amanuensis.

Q. What else did you experience during the massage?

A. All explanations have to end somewhere. An explanation is a well-dressed mistake.

What is a spotlight focus? A spotlight is on a specific. A breath. A flame. A sound. Pure sensation. Give me an example. Spotlight: the universe reflected and refracted in a single drop of water on a pink lotus flower.

Floodlight is the big general picture: sunlight reflects off a single drop of water on a pink lotus flower petal membrane veined with green umbrella fan leaves caressing cool fresh air growing from a pink lotus in mud below gray clouds near mottled moldy white streaked paint on yellow Khmer walls wearing brown, green, white shards of glittering glass to keep out cunning thieves and devious land pirates as tall singing palm trees dance below white cumulus clouds flying across blue skies above green forested mountains and jungles teeming with beauty, leopards, wolves and 232 species of butterflies.

Question? How much does silence cost? Depends.

Deep silence = deep bliss.

In my silence only my voice is missing, said Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet.

Money buys silent bribes.

Bamboo Nomad said, Open your head, heart and mouth if you want to practice speaking tongues with me, I am a facilitator.

I am a storyteller, said Zeynep from Bursa, Turkey. We communicate telepathically. A-dolts don’t get it.

Q: How many types of people are there in the world? Three: people who make things happen, people who watch people make things happen and people who don’t know what the fuck is going on.

Funny sad true unpleasant facts. Like exploding galaxies, a meaningless universe and orgasms. Reality is the funniest thing happening. It’s difficult to take any of this seriously. People should play more.

How did I grow?

The bigger the fear the bigger the defense. Can you hear yourself think? Yes, it’s important to keep a running monkey mind dialogue going to express emotions, ideas and awareness of illusionary sense details, distractions and existence.

You are critical mass expressing art.

Socrates asked the big question: HOW TO LIVE?

Establish character nuance with emotional honesty and a sense of the fantastic. It’s essential to establish a conte\x/t. Give me an example of compression.

They came, burned, raped, pillaged, trussed up their loot and gone. Excellent.

I know everything and can say nothing.

I know nothing and can say everything.

Tell me about hanging out. Travel writing uses novel techniques. It explores a place, discovers and/or invents characters, selects and tailors experiences and arranges the action to give the narrative shape and motivation.

Time is history.

Space is geography.

Book of Amnesia V1

monkey mind

After climbing Qinchengshan mountain in western Sichuan where Taoism began 2,000 years ago he introduced meditation concepts to his Grade 8 Chinese students.

“Mediation is sitting quietly to develop a calm mind,” he said.

“You sit tall with your hands on your knees, gently lower your eyes and focus on a single breath, ‘in, out, in, out.’

“If your mind becomes distracted by past or future thoughts you bring it back to your breath, ‘in, out, in out.’ Your single point of awareness. Be your breath. Do it for yourself. Not your friends, parents or teachers. Meditation allows you feel a harmony and balance.

"You will feel more peaceful and happier than other people busy rushing around. Your goal today is just to sit for five minutes. Sit and practice for five minutes every day before school. Eventually you may want to sit for twenty minutes every day, whenever and wherever you like.”

He wrote Chinese words on the board. Jing — quiet, stillness, calm, and Ding — concentration and focus - so they’d see the linguistic connection in Mandarin.

“When you begin to sit in meditation your mind will be very uncooperative. The ego or emotional mind will fight against it’s extinction by the higher forces of spiritual awareness. The ego loves the day-to-day circus of sensory entertainment and emotional turmoil. This game depletes your energy, degenerates your body and exhausts your spirit. We call the ego the monkey mind.”

They laughed.

“When your mind is calm and focused in the present it is neither reacting to past memories or preoccupied with future plans. No regrets, no fears. These are two major sources of chronic or long term health problems. People suffer because their monkey mind is busy regretting the past or afraid of the future and it drives them crazy, this little monkey. Do you want to try it?” 

“Yes.” 

“Great! No books, papers and pens. If you don’t want to try it, it’s ok. Please just sit quietly respecting others sitting in meditation. See how it feels. Let’s begin. Adjust your posture with shoulders back. Relax. Focus on your breath, ‘in, out, in, out.’ He dimmed the lights.

After five minutes he rang small Tibetan bells.

“How did it feel?” 

“Beautiful,” said a girl. “I was flying.”

Memory & Tibet

Greetings,

Here are a couple of new reads for you.

Moonwalking With Einstein...by Joshua Foer. 

..."Before writing was common, human beings had to use their own brains for information storage, and before books were indexed — making it possible to gain access to them in a nonlinear way — people labored under the “imperative to hold” books’ contents in their own mental hard drives simply to find particular bits of information. Poets in the oral tradition, like Homer, relied on repetition and rhythms and other patterns to recite their work from memory, and in the ancient world, exceptional memories were both exalted and widely known."

Colin Thubron a travel writer and novelist has published To A Mountain In Tibet. He has written about the Near East, Russia and The Silk Road.

“You cannot walk out your grief,” he tells himself. “Or bring anyone back. You are left with the desire only that things not be as they are.” This is the reason he has resolved to go “walking to a place beyond your own history, to the sound of the river flowing the other way.” 

Metta.

Doing the Mango tango

 I go, we go, you go.

Mango. Super Fruit. Buy one, peel it down. Savor the succulent mass of alfa bet your sweet antioxidents.

A, C, E.

Ace a mango.

The humility of a mango. How the skin releases it's interior dally daily dialogue.

Being unknown. Practice flowing sensations, this dancing mango simplicity. 

Mr. Mango said, "Remember, there are two kinds of people in the world."

"What are they?" wondered a child.

"There are people who want to blame you and people who want to distract you."

"I see," said the child. "You mean, according to the philosopher, Damon Young, 'distraction is chiefly an inability to identify, attend to what is valuable, even when we are hard working or content.'"

"Yes," that is what I mean," laughed Mr. Mango doing the tango with some Taoist monks.

Metta.