after the tempest

I have been reflecting upon Master Sheng Yen's saying "To transcend the suffering of death, keep to the three principles: never seek death, never fear death, and never wait for death to come." I have wondered, is the Buddhist view of death only related to one's physical death, or is it referring to all forms of loss in general? The more I reflect on it, the more I feel that this principle of "never seeking, never fearing and never waiting" can apply to many things. They even seem to correspond with modes of being that look upon objects as separate things: to be desired, to be feared or simply to be waited for.
     I am particularly interested in the third part of Master Sheng Yen's statement, because it seems to be a balance for the other two. Whereas the first two parts of this adage seem to refer to seeking and avoiding, it's the third that is the most subtle form of attachment, in the sense that it relates to despair. Once I think that some big loss or death is on the horizon, I begin to lose hope for all other parts of the life around me. There is even a subtle aversion to all experience. I was reading a passage from Shakespeare's Othello where Othello reflects upon how the tempest he had just survived only accentuated the loving contentment he felt for his wife Desdemona. The idea is that he starts to fear the ensuing moments, hoping that death would come quickly over him...for fear that he could never again feel or even recreate that absolute contentment he felt toward Desdemona, in that special moment. The problem is that Othello takes that one moment of contentment and develops another desire of wanting it to last forever. Not only this, but he even develops a wish to die after suspecting that things will never be as happy as he was in that moment.
   Grim food for thought, but always intriguing.

Journey of redoing

Today, I had to redo the fonts and formatting for my blog assignment pages, due to discrepancies in the fonts sizes and colors. I felt a lot of frustration in having to redo the whole page, but in another sense, the opportunity to redo something often yields a better result than if one simply tries a touch-up here and there. I think one of the interesting aspects of having to repeat something is that it allows a person to revisit something with much less frivolity. The repeated project tends to gloss over the unnecessary details and offers a more sleek version of the original.
   Another good thing is that I didn't have to do everything 'from scratch', since the text of my blog was intact. Here again is another opportunity to look at things from a spiritual lens; that is, is there ever any point where we are ever doing something 'from scratch'? Or is what we do the result of previous conditions?
  With vows, it's a similar principle: I know that I have to 'redo' life in some format or another, and death is an inevitable part of that process. However, there is a continuity across those existences which relates to what one sets out to do in each lifetime. If one limits their scope to 'this onw life' , they will grow very despondent if their goals are not reached by the end of it. But if one's focus is on the way the mind is cultivated across a given life, then nothing is truly wasted under that view. Redoing always carries the residuals of the previous doings.

non duality

 Non-duality is often considered a way of being in Buddhism. One of the ways it is experienced is through meditation itself, especially where the notion of a separate 'subject' and 'object' start to disappear. I think that there is a lot in human conditioning that is somewhat stacked against non-duality, and I have found in my own personal practice that it is difficult to sustain. One example of a dualistic approach that is encouraged in modern life is advertising. Walk into any movie theater these days, and you will find that there are enough commercials (esp. car commercials) to fill an entire two hours! But what advertising relies on is the belief that one's own body and personality are limited by circumstances and in need of the newest gadget or accessory. Without dualistic notions of self and other, the advertising industry might not do so well as it is doing today, because there wouldn't be this sense of a vulnerable self that 'needs' something beyond itself to be special, happy, etc.
   I feel it is very important to cultivate a neutral approach and not to succumb to the notion of subject and object. How is it possible to do so? One way that has worked well for me is to realize that I won\t die from not having certain possessions or recognition from others. If I have this approach of not taking things to the extremes of a subject 'acquiring' an object, I can learn to live peacefully without craving (or secretly craving) some recognition or attention from others around me.

technology as self-reflection

 Today, I did encounter the frustration of having to align parts of my poems and photographs to my blog on the Six Paramitas. It turned out not quite as I had wanted it to be, and I started to realize how fickle the whole process is. At times, learning to navigate blog creation is a kind of art which requires a lot of situated practice.
  I think all of this suggests to me that the process itself is more important than the result. When I can rest in the lesson that difficulty and frustration can present in a situation, then there is no longer any pressure leaning on the result itself. I can try a few different approaches and leave things as best as I can create them if worse comes to worse. I think this approach leaves room for mistakes and even for the imperfections of creation to arise.
   Technology is not something that is foreign to a person's mind and humanity, for that matter. I have heard the argument that technology is but an extension of people's facilities. So why is it the case that at times technology seems so alien? I think it's because there is something unrelenting and uncompromising about machines and how they break down in very unique and special ways. Whereas humans allow for a certain negotiation, machines just break down when it's least convenient. However, now that I am thinking more into it, I wonder if machines are really as 'soulless' as we think them to be. Is it possible that by learning to see the unique soul in our technologies, we might end up constructing a much more fruitful connection to it?

is even 'connection' somehow an empty concept?

I was doing a connections mapping exercise tonight for my media class, and the idea behind it is to find all the ways in which I am connected to others. As I was doing this exercise, I realized both the ‘reality’ of interconnection and its fundamental emptiness. For instance, there are so many ways in which we can be said be connected to others that the question becomes one of : how to narrow down one’s ideas regarding how they are connected? As soon as I define how ‘you’ relate to ‘me’, I am describing a kind of connection that seems hard-lined, but actually it is a kind of mental label which describes only one of many ways of seeing things and people.

I think it’s important to understand that even the concept of interconnection entails a grid-relationship which doesn’t necessarily actually exist anywhere. That is, what I consider to be ‘our’ relationship may look very different from your side, and vice versa. This whole exercise has lead me to wonder: could the very notion of being interconnected be a kind of oversimplification of sorts, designed to connect what might be deeply divergent in nature or opinion? I think the danger of being too glib about the idea of interconnection is that it might cast a false net over everything, not realizing that even the net is the product of one’s thinking which changes over time and perspectives.

Is life a school?

I currently reading a book by Christopher Bache called Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life (1991). This book is interesting because even though it supports the idea of reincarnation, it rejects the idea that humans can reincarnate into 'lower beings' such as animals. Bache remarks:


Some cultures even constructed an elaborate system that tied specific moral failings to specific animal incarnations. This may be an effective method for teaching moral behavior to children and for reinforcing it in adults, but it is not a philosophically adequate concept of reincarnation (p.58)


Bache furthermore goes on to explain his remarks, stating "Once one is operating within the context and resources of human consciousness, all of one's lessons will take place in that context" (p.59). This is very different from Buddhist teachings, which have always suggested that life itself is a circle, where beings can always regress to animals or ghosts. I tend to wonder, which account is correct?
    I am not too sure at this point if I can safely say that I will be a human in the next life. Many Buddhist traditions describe how difficult and rare it is to even achieve a human form. Not only this, but I am also inclined to suspect that all the sentient beings are on a spectrum. While I can say that there are elements of me that are human, there are also aspects of myself that are ghostlike and animal-like. To say that these forms have been transcended by human forms seems a bit of a stretch. It also subtly anthromorphizes, by holding the humans as a privileged class of beings.

Bache, C.M. (1991). Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life. New York: Paragon House.

YouTube Creations

  I found that the prospect of making YouTube videos goes through many different phases. The first emotion I had upon realizing that I am required to design YouTube videos for my course is one of 'shock' and horror. "Me", I think..." I hardly even know how to use a TV remote, let alone upload a file to YouTube". But once I forced myself to go through the process, I realized how strangely easy it is to upload videos on YouTube. The fact of the matter is that there is only one click of a button needed to upload videos, and then there it is, in a matter of two or three minutes.
   Of course, what happens next is the 'honeymoon phase', where I start to believe that any and everything I publish on YouTube has some magic in it. This is similar to the time when I received an electric typewriter when I was 16 years old, and marvelled at how the lovely font on the typewriter made everything I wrote look like a 'classic'. I suppose that the handsome font on the typewriter made up for my many years of poor penmanship, but nonetheless, I think I took my enthusiasm much too far.
   Now, I am starting to develop a bit more discernment, realizing that what I am doing is rather amateur compared to the wonderful stories and narratives that are out there in the YouTube world. This period of 'comparison' seems to follow any honeymoon phase. Think about the married couple who tries to compare the color of their curtains with those of their neighbours across the street. Is there any need to compare, for that matter? But such seems to be a natural tendency: as soon as a person gets over the fear of not having the capability to create something useful or meaningful using a certain medium, they no sooner start to evaluate themselves based on how they perceive others are doing! It seems like human beings just love to make themselves suffer, no matter what kinds of fortune besets them.
    What will be my future feeling with YouTube? Well, to be honest, I do believe that this medium has opened up a door for me, because I am suddenly realizing the implications of it. Not only am I capable of taking pictures and making videos, but now I have the ability to combine them and upload the result to one site. This encourages me to be a bit like a storyteller, who takes whatever he can find in the way of sound and images to create narratives. I think it's for sure very exciting, but I have to wonder for how long I will be able to creatively endure, considering the time that is consumed in making a video. I suppose time will tell how far I will go into this new creative venture.