#17 KENTUCKY!

"Buddhist practice is the freedom to control ourselves,"   mentioned Geshe Rapgyal, teaching by zoom to all seven of us this Saturday afternoon from the Drepung Gomang center in Louisville, Kentucky.   It is quite the center, founded 20 years ago by three American practitioners who met Tibetan monks traveling from the original Drepung Gomang in India, established after the Dalai Lama's flight from Chinese oppression and genocide which began in 1959 and continues to this day. 

Geshe was teaching today from the Seven Point Mind Training of Chekawa Yeshe Dorje (1100's).    "The Buddha cannot cleanse us; we must learn, engage, contemplate and reflect," said Geshe, we can, through daily meditations, make the mind more stable and strong.   As is often suggested in Tibetan practice, a good preliminary step is to understand how precious this impermanent life is, which isn't a BAD fire alarm, it represents the opportunity to do many good things. 

Geshe suggested that we meditate on the reality of mind; which includes the fact that all phenomena are dreamlike.  As he added, the senses are in the present, but the mind (we might distinguish here between the discursive subject/object mind and the trained mind) runs about in the past and the future.    As for our afflictions like anger, Geshe suggested that we may think we need them, when in fact we need to study them.   

"Take adverse conditions into the path of enlightenment,"  seems a most reasonable course of action.  I often think of myself as a jellyfish in the sea, when in fact I have been running around building a rapidly crumbling world of my own making.  With that kind of energy, why not try working with my mind, building a solid base I can finally see clearly from?

I'm very thankful to the Director, Anne Walter, for inviting me to the group.    It changed my day, and days are what life is made of. 

As Shantideva writes in Entering the Way of Awakening: 

What troubles there are in the world,
How much fear and suffering there is.
If all of these arise from ego-clinging,
What will this great demon do to me? 

For hundreds of lives in samsara
He has caused me trouble.
Now I recollect all my grudges
And shall destroy you, you selfish mind