Dharma Talks from Prarie Zen Center (Joko Beck)

Dharma talks from The Prarie Zen Center (Charlotte Joko Beck) given by Elihu Genmyo Smith who is the current abbot of the center. These various talks are in text format.

Finding Patience

By accepting the agreeable and disagreeable aspects of life, we are no longer limited by our longing for life to be different than it is. We have all the time in the world, in the spaciousness of every moment.

Follow the link:

http://www.tricycle.com/onpractice/finding-patience?page=0,0&offer=dharma

Feeling More and More

We bump up against the fact of change and impermanence as soon as we acknowledge our feelings or needs for others. Basically, we all tend to go in one of two directions as a strategy for coping with that vulnerability. We either go in the direction of control or of autonomy. If we go for control, we may be saying: “If only I can get the other person or my friends or family to treat me the way I want, then I’ll be able to feel safe and secure. If only I had a guarantee that they’ll give me what I need, then I wouldn’t have to face uncertainty.” With this strategy, we get invested in the control and manipulation of others and in trying to use people as antidotes to our own anxiety.


With the strategy (or curative fantasy) of autonomy, we go in the opposite direction and try to imagine that we don’t need anyone. But that strategy inevitably entails repression or dissociation, a denial of feeling. We may imagine that through spiritual practice we will get to a place where we won’t feel need, sexuality, anger, or dependency. Then, we imagine, we won’t be so tied into the vicissitudes of relationships. We try to squelch our feelings in order not to be vulnerable anymore, and we rationalize that dissociation under the lofty and spiritual-sounding word “detachment,” which ends up carrying a great deal of unacknowledged emotional baggage alongside its original, simpler meaning as the acceptance of impermanence.

We have to get to know and be honest about our particular strategies for dealing with vulnerability, and learn to use our practice to allow ourselves to experience more of that vulnerability rather than less of it. To open yourself up to need, longing, dependency, and reliance on others means opening yourself to the truth that none of us can do this on our own. We really do need each other, just as we need parents and teachers. We need all those people in our lives who make us feel so uncertain. Our practice is not about finally getting to a place where we are going to escape all that but about creating a container that allows us to be more and more human, to feel more and more.

Follow the link for the complete article in Tricycle.

http://www.tricycle.com/magazine/columns/relationships-no-gain?offer=dharma

Everyone we Know

It’s easy to feel goodwill, compassion, and empathetic joy for people you like and love, but there are bound to be people you dislike—often for very good reasons. Similarly, there are many people for whom it’s easy to feel equanimity: people you don’t know or don’t really care about. But it’s hard to feel equanimity when people you love are suffering. Yet if you want to develop the brahma-viharas ("sublime attitudes"), you have to include all of these people within the scope of your awareness so that you can apply the proper attitude no matter where or when. This is where your heart needs the help of your head.

Follow the link for the complete article in Tricycle magazine

http://www.tricycle.com/feature/head-heart-together?offer=dharma

The Cause of Suffering: Addiction to Negative Emotions

A wonderfully funny and insightful teaching on the cause of suffering given by Gelec Rimpoche. I love that Gelek comes from a very ordinary human place. We are all suffering no matter what our station or condition is in life and the cause of that suffering is addiction to negative emotions such as fear, hatred, jealousy, self loathing, depression, etc. The list is long but behind these emotions is the ego. Ego gives us the idea that we must be better than another, and certainly different and therefore in need of protection from the onslaught of all the other separate egos out there who also have the same idea based in ignorence.  If we could cut out the ego or at least reduce its hold on us by understanding how it works in our lives negative emotions would be less likely to arise and suffering would be reduced. Follow the link for the teaching in pdf form from Tricycle magazine.

http://www.tricycle.com/files/images/webexclusives/Chapter%204.pdf


You can also download 2 free teachings from Gelek Rimpoche by going to the following link for Jewelheart, his retreat center in Michigan.

http://www.jewelheart.org/tricycle/?utm_source=tricycle&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=newsite

Soul Force (Satyagraha)

Buddhist monk Claude AinShin Thomas said: “As a Buddhist, I cannot think myself into a new way of living, I have to live myself into a new way of thinking.” If we hope to end war and violence, Thomas noted, “we must simply stop the endless wars that rage within.”

The following article was taken from Tricycle magazine archives and illustrates this point with the life of Martin Luther King and his contant commitment to the principles of satyagraha

Follow the link:

http://www.tricycle.com/special-section/satyagraha-special-section-blueprints-freedom?offer=dharma

A Teaching on Dying by Ram Dass

A beautiful teaching on how to die with utter assurance and conciousness of the on-going song of the soul.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S57Gc8PSIO8&feature=player_embedded

There is a Season for Everything

Watch the year go by and the seasons chance from a Norwegian window. A gentle reminder that everything is constantly changing always and everywhere even if we can't perceive it. Only the eternal observer behind the senses waits changeless and patiently to be unveiled.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdE38IbLTyA&feature=player_embedded

The Cause of suffering

The Cause of Suffering

The point is that we need to find out where these sufferings are coming from. Why are they happening? We have a tendency to say, “Oh, that is reality; that is life.” But that’s not the answer. Yes, it may be life, it may be reality, but why do we need to know about it? Because if we want to make changes, it does no good to make them at the symptom level, the result level; we have to make changes at the causal level. At the result level, the only changes you can make are like plastic surgery.
Change the cause. When you change the cause, you can change the result. In fact, the result can only be changed at the causal level. When Buddha first went out of that palace made especially for him, wherever he looked he saw miseries. Then he asked, “What can I do?” He wanted to get free himself, to help his family to get free, then also to free his subjects, and finally to free all living beings connected to him. Buddha realized that you can change all this only at the causal level.
If a third person could really create the cause [of suffering] for us, it would be terrible! Then you would have found a true enemy, one who really created suffering for you. If an enemy like that existed, then you would take hold of that enemy and do whatever you have to do, cut it, kill it, or whatever. But it’s not anybody else! It’s me. I did it. This is my responsibility. That’s what it is all about.



- Gelek Rimpoche, "The Four Noble Truths"

Celebrating Life at 88 (Marie Ponsot)

Listen to Marie Ponsot read several of her poems and watch a short clip about her life in New Your. Inspiring to see how liberating 88 years old can be.

Why Regret

Beautiful poem and music by Galway Kinnell. Clich here for an audio file og the poet reading the poem.


Why Regret?






Didn't you like the way the ants help

the peony globes open by eating the glue off?

Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers

sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,

in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe

baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?

Wasn't it a revelation to waggle

from the estuary all the way up the river,

the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,

the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?

Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice

clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old

Webster's New International, perhaps having just

eaten of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?

Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren

and how little flesh is needed to make a song.

Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph

split open and the mayfly struggled free

and flew and perched and then its own back

broke open and the imago, the true adult,

somersaulted out and took flight, seeking

the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,

alimentary canal come to a stop,

a day or hour left to find the desired one?

Or when Casanova took up the platter

of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff

out the window, telling his startled companion,

"The perfected lover does not eat."

Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs

what seemed your own inner blazonry

flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?

Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy

hinged beings, and then their offspring,

and then their offspring's offspring, could

navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,

to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,

by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors

who fell in this same migration a year ago?

Doesn't it outdo the pleasure of the brilliant concert

to wake in the night and find ourselves

holding hands in our sleep?



~ Galway Kinnell ~



(Strong Is Your Hold)

The Story of Cap and Trade

Follow the link to find out the truth about cap and trade and the unintended consequences inherent in this type of "solution" to the CO2 rise. Annie Leonard's informing and engaging animated explanation is a great way to start understanding the issue for any age. Many links provided for further study and action.

In particular, I recommend The New York Times article Cap and Fade by James Hanson which proposes a more sensible plan called Fee and Dividend which actually rewards people for going greener.

http://www.storyofstuff.com/capandtrade/

E.F. Schumacher and The Religion of Economics

E F 'Fritz' Schumacher, author of 'Small Is Beautiful' talks about his philosophy in the midst of an Australian eucalyptus forest Made by M B Oldfield & Sons, 1978. Shortly after this film was made, Schumacher died in Switzerland on September 4, 1977.

In this film, Schumacher talks about how the religion of economics (making profit the only raison d'etre) ends up destroying everything that humanity really cares for; beauty, sympathy, harmony, nature, balance. With the backdrop a forestry operation in Western Australia, one sees how this idealogy has led to a battle with nature which ultimately puts us on the losing side. We have become even more of a rapacious society in the intervening years (this film was made 32 years ago!) and it has become painfully clear that  "we have become far to clever to survive without wisdom" given the power of technology and the potential (even likely) abuses of that power if placed into the hands of people who have not developed the requisite wisdom to use it. Schumacher argues that a society that uses precious non-renewable resources (oil, soil, the forest) without regard to conservation does so at its own peril. We must never lose sight of the fact that we intend to be permanent inhabitants of the planet and act as a conserver society.  We must insure that ...the asset never be destroyed and that its use is adequate to its value. Using 400 year old trees from a virgin forest for pulp wood to make paper which often eventually ends up on the side of the road as litter is not morally conscionable.

Watching this film gives good insight into Schumacher's thinking and is as timely now as ever, even more so given the state of the environment today.

Follow the link for the 43 minute film

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8588539436919289072#

What it takes to flip on the light

It takes 1 pound of coal to run your bed side light for 2 nights. It takes another pound to run the tv for 4.5 hours. The average household in America uses 9.5 tons of coal per year. According to the EPA (using a study by Abt Associates which was used in the Bush administration) there are 23,600 premature deaths contributed to coal pollution. There are 38,200 non-fatal heart attacks. There are 554,000 asthma attacks. 52% of all energy in America is produced by coal.

 Follow the link for a short Frontline video about the coal conveyor belt that we hardly even see that furnishes the coal to the big production plants in the east. It will make you turn out those lights when you leave the room.