The meditators forum I recently launched, http://www.vipassanaforum.net/ with a good spiritual friend from America called Joe and inspired by another good spiritual friend from Sweden called Anders is making a good start.

We want a sane space in which as meditators we can delve into the issues we meet on the path and find others who can shine a light for us. We want a slowly growing Sangha which is happening already.

Five days after launch we have 20 members and today hit our 100th collective post. We have asked and answered questions from the need for retreats to being a meditator who smokes and how meditation affects sleep.

We have started building our library and resources collection with links to online meeditation texts, audio Dhamma talks and embedded youtube videos of teachings and meditation instruction.

We’re not even listed on google yet and did not exist at all one week ago yet in the last two days we have enjoyed visits from in excess of 100 individuals each day and growing. Today 27 of the 139 visitors were repeat visits and visitors loaded an average of 4 pages each when removing the site staff activities from the log which is not bad going for a new forum with relatively little content right now.

My appologies for being busy “over there” … I promise I will return here soon and write something really interesting or funny or clever.

No I can’t promise that … not everything I write meets one of those criteria. But I will write something substantial here soon.

vipassanaforum.net has launched as a forum for discussion of practice and path issues, sharing of online resources, book reviews and more.

http://www.vipassanaforum.net/

:)

your body is your sole supply
stop looking to the mind
the mind follows the body
did you think your leg into being?
of course not
your mind realised there was a leg
the mind follows everything
finding feeling in the body
letting go of thoughts in the mind
breathing deep and long and slow
first find all of your body
this may take a very long time
before again turning mind on mind
to untie the final knots that bind
wherein that certain answer that you seek
you will find

I’d go for meditation every time. Except at parties then I’m strictly an MDMA man. The electric kundalini buzz, high’s and lows of meditation, sorrows, profound understandings and misuderstandings of life need all to be explored. There is only one question one needs to ask and only two outcomes as to how one travels and where one arrives.

Why are you meditating? If your answer is “to become a Buddha”. Then you have understood why the Buddha bothered. If your answer is not then you may have misunderstood why the Buddha taught and what he taught.

There was an early distinction in Sangha during the Buddha’s life. There were members of the Sangha who were renunciants and lived the life of the Buddha and there were lay persons. The renunciants were all definitively answering “to become a Buddha”. Some of the lay persons also answered in this way and practiced with diligence and attained the goal.There were several hundred Arahants (goal winners) in the Sangha at the death of the Buddha. Several hundred Buddha’sThe main difference between being a Lay and Monastic Buddhist that each person is more likely to more quickly attain the goal in the monastic community.

So if you really really want to be a Buddha, the whole point of following his way, you need to just sit and eat a bit o rice pudding every now and again, when offered, untill you let go enough to be who you really are. And that probably means no drugs, realistically. The Pali cannon certainly has numerous texts where the Buddha makes reference to intoxication so one can assume it isn’t helpful on the whole. Were he here today he might be an advocate for LSD or Heroin or who knows what. But I doubt it. They had most of that stuff or something similar in his day anyway.

So how about you? Do you want to be a Buddha?

My Shrine

Mortido and Libido, Freud said, ruled our lives. These ad-hoc structures are but points on a scale, limits within which one finds all aspects of self. Habits of perception and being dictate patterns that assume control. Parts of a whole, a system of control. A little commitee.

There is now. There is a collection of past experiences. There is a collection of habits. There are feelings, perceptions, stories, body, movement and change.

Where am I?

White Snow Clings 

White snow clings to the roofs of the cars.
Fresh daisies on my windowsill.
Every moment is perfect.
My zen teacher told me.
Even his death.
Dying trying to save.
His baby daughter Maya.
Drowning in a lake in Switzerland.
Which held so many perfect moments.
And was so deep as never known.

(in honour of Kobun Chino Roshi And His Daughter Maya) 

Love, falling in love, loving, being loved, beloved. What is love? What is attachment? What relation do these have to habit? How do these things operate as forces in our lives? We need to ask ourselves such questions. If you were looking for answers, I am sorry, but you have to look within.