2018.06.18 - Day 96

Thanks for the booklink Riddle. I downloaded and will read.

Alma, I think I agree so long as we try to practice the teachings and don’t just find teachers who say what we want to hear. And I remember the warning (think it was in Christianity) –that when you dig a well you don’t dig lots of little shallow holes, you have to dig deep.

The last 10 minutes of an Eckhart Tolle video really struck a chord with me. He talks about how life will constantly throw challenges at us until we learn how to go with the challenges and how not to suffer from them. We always get taken out of our comfort zone. He gave an example of how, in a Zen Monastery, you have to sit facing the wall all day and it is cold.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVFu3Utq1nk

I remember being so cold at Zen sesshins and someone would open a window as well. It never dawned on me that it was intentional. Something I really need to work on in my life. Even this morning I was annoyed at the way careworkers leave the bathroom door wide open and I feel so cold when I am wet though they complain it is too warm. I often wonder how they would cope in a hot climate like Florida or Australia, but they don’t appreciate me telling them about that 

Long dentist appointment today, to be followed up on tomorrow. Very groggy. I've been through the same procedure before (crown, etc.) but this one turned out to be more complicated than I expected. Boo.

Feel like I'm missing these last few days, and do not want to. At the very least, I can add some more days on, after 99, as extras for us. How about 108? (done)

Even this is 'path' somehow. :) edited 21:21, 18 Jun 2018

Feeling very low in energy today, and having trouble motivating myself to do anything purposeful. After the last week or two, it's probably good for me to take a day to just flop and do nothing in particular.

Zen, I think the metaphor of digging a well is a good one, but I would add that digging a single hole is no guarantee that one will go deep. One can work within a single tradition and still be shallow. One can cherry-pick teachings and teachers within one tradition as easily as across multiple traditions. Following a pluralistic path might amount to digging many shallow wells, but it could also mean using a variety of tools to dig one deep well.

The problem seems to be, how to avoid getting stuck within our comfort zone and failing to work through the difficult and painful stages of the process. For those of us who have not made a connection with an accomplished teacher, perhaps we must rely on life itself (or our dreams) to nudge us in the direction we need to go.

Aha, found something to offer, related to blooming practice (formerly known as morning practice).

THE UNSEEN FLOWER

Compassion is far more than emotion.
It is something which springs
Up in the emptiness which is when
you yourself are not there
So that you do not know anything about it.
Nobody, in fact, knows anything about it.
(If they knew it, it would not be compassion);
But they can only smell
The scent of the unseen flower
That blooms in the heart of the Void.

Sangharakshita

Something spooky.

On Friday, Jobe and I were discussing the wall surface of the house where I used to live in Scotland. (It's done with an unusual technique called shelldash, which is like pebble dash but with huge numbers of tiny shell fragments embedded in cement rendering rather than pebbles.) I checked out what it looked like using Street View.

While I was looking, I thought I'd see whether my old favorite Indian food take-out was still there. It was, and I showed this to Jobe. "Where was that place," she said, "in the center of Glasgow where there was that really good all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet?" We set out to find it. The name search pulled up the wrong location, so I navigated down the streets as though I was driving there, and sure enough there it was.

But it was only yesterday, when I saw aerial footage of the Glasgow fire, that I realized that the restaurant was in the same block as the Art School and had obviously been damaged too. o_O

It was as though we'd said goodbye to the restaurant moments before it was destroyed. Or maybe - surely not - we had influenced the start of the fire by poking around the ethers, like some kind of modern-day voodoo doll. ("Like we're that important!" said Jobe.) But it was still spooky. And it definitely influenced the poems I wrote in bed last night, one of which turned out to be rather dark.

Read Eliza's comment as adding 1087 and agreed.

Hahaha. Genuinely laughing, Riddle. :)

But um... still 108. ;-)