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Tibetan Incense This is where I get mine. For some reason just the scent of this amazing incense puts me right into a meditation space.
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This book will help people reduce harm to themselves and others. Here’s an excerpt from the book explaining why we might take sacred vows: Why Vow? The Truth of Suffering We might take a vow, such as the vow not to harm, because we understand that we suffer. The Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths. I’ve written about this elsewhere, as have many others. The first of these is the Truth of Suffering. Suffering happens on different levels. We suffer when we get a little bump on the head. That’s the suffering of, well, suffering. We also suffer when things change. This is called the suffering of change. We get a good feeling, but it doesn’t last. We find the perfect lover—they find someone else. We’re young and virile at one point in life. Then we get old and flabby. Any time, without warning, we can be healthy, and then get sick. We can be alive, then not alive.
But like me and my inability to even read the news, we tune out the suffering. We tune out our awareness of the infinite sufferings of infinite beings. But all of us are connected to all of the sufferings of all of the beings who have ever lived, who have ever suffered, who have ever died and who are alive and suffering and those who will live and suffer and die. This is our interdependence. This is all happening within us. We’re currently in one of the safer periods in the history of our planet. We have more medicine, more tools, more travel, better communication, more education than ever. There have been plagues and slavery and abuse and insanity and it’s all been going on since the beginning of time. The horror show continues. It’s not just the latest shooting that we should be concerned about. I think about this stuff every day. I think sometimes people look at me and see the look on my face and in my eyes and wonder, “What the fuck is going on in this guy’s head?” I’ll tel you what’s going on.
My sponsor told me that since my disease is progressive, my recovery needs to be progressive. I think we can practice the fundamentals without becoming fundamentalist.
The problem with the addicted state and our fixation on it is that we refuse to accept that it is not real, not permanent and not what we have convinced ourselves that it is. However, as anyone who has lived through teenage heartbreak knows, this too does indeed pass. But there’s knowing it on a mental level, where we tell ourselves that we understand the concept of impermanence, and there’s a deep, experiential knowing of this Buddhist principle, where we feel it at the core, at the root, at inception. That’s where delusion dissolves and we begin to break free. My Zen teacher used to say, “A little crack opens up..and the light comes in. That’s the beginning.” But the beginning of what?
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This book will help people reduce harm to themselves and others. Here’s an excerpt from the book explaining why we might take sacred vows: Why Vow? The Truth of Suffering We might take a vow, such as the vow not to harm, because we understand that we suffer. The Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths. I’ve written about this elsewhere, as have many others. The first of these is the Truth of Suffering. Suffering happens on different levels. We suffer when we get a little bump on the head. That’s the suffering of, well, suffering. We also suffer when things change. This is called the suffering of change. We get a good feeling, but it doesn’t last. We find the perfect lover—they find someone else. We’re young and virile at one point in life. Then we get old and flabby. Any time, without warning, we can be healthy, and then get sick. We can be alive, then not alive.
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