Ta Som & Preah Khan

Greetings,

Ta Som is a compact temple, with a laterite enclosed wall, well preserved gopuras or entrance buildings. The feeling is intimate. I wander quiet and peaceful. I evaporate into deep meditative silence. Birds sing through shadowed light. Pure magic.

Preah Khan, constructed in 1191 is wonderful. Inscriptions refer to a lake of blood; a story about a battle when the Khmer people killed the Cham king and expelled them. It became a religious university with 1,000 Buddhist monks.

It is one of the largest and most lightly visited temples at Angkor. It is a fusion temple - Mahayana Buddhism features equal sized doors and cardinal directions. The Hindu deities, Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma are present and it feature successfully smaller doors emphasizing unequal nature. It has four main long corridors, a central shrine, ancient columns, libraries, numerous hidden treasures, delight light play, and apsara dancer carvings.

I am a dust collector. I wander quiet and peaceful inside ancient stone stories. Where people made their life, using their energies. Sacrifice. Prayer. Celebration. Ceremony. These carved dancers, dancing images transported by inner visions. Perceiving beauty, celestial serene wisdom. The nature of the process.

Integrate the unconscious into your life.

See more...Ta Som and Preah Khan...enjoy.

Metta.

Feel with camera

Greetings,

How many tourists see only through their camera? Millions. They feel the experience of 8th century artistic splendor with only their cameras, these cold impersonal little tools. Their entire experience is defined by their camera. It's not about knowing, understanding the people, culture, food, art, music, and language. It's about feeling with a camera.

They've learned through hard fast lessons to trust the machine. It is their weapon against mediocrity and boredom and shallow emptiness. They don't comprehend the intricacies of the machine. They believe it can and will save them. The machine controls them. They gratefully accept this reality.

They press optical machines against their faces, piercing retinas, flickering lids. Point and shoot. They lower the device and stare with hard lost eyes at the image, their memory. They judge it. Evaluate. DELETE!

Shoot again. Point. Shoot. Delete. Repeat. A snapshot. Snap a shot. Preserve this moment forever. Quick! They must go. They must move to the next great big thing. They are in a hurry. The tuk-tuk driver is impatient. He wants more money for his time. He waited when they slept. He waited when they stuffed eggs, watermelon and soft bread into tired faces. They ate like animals. They point and shoot. They delete.

Hurry! They have no time to see with their obscurity. This loss, this sense of amnesia envelops them. It is a dark cloud of forgetting. They remember to forget. 

They are on a Homeric quest of infinite proportions and infinite magnitude. 

Their memory card is full. They attach electrodes to a cerebral cortex and press, ever so lightly, the Down Loadswitch. Memories of Apsara dancers, elephants, monkeys, celestial deities flicker and play on a screen behind their eyes.

Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion smiles.

Metta. 

Interior, Banteay Srei, 9th C.