108 Temp.BACK UP !)*...108Temtp.. AKASA LEVI ♦ PROFILE

108 Temp..108 AKASA LEVI ♦ PROFILE / SITE INTRO ♦ Akasa Levi ♦ S.R.Levy --:¦:- P R O F I L E Back Up
  

_/!\_

with

palms joined

Nama'ste

-:¦:- P R O F I L E
  AKASA MAITREYA  LEVI, DhMA
• The Laughing Buddha Sangha Meditation 
• The Seasoned Wisdom Old Timer's Sangha 

•  1-on-1 Counseling and Mindfulness Therapy
• guides "Mind-FULLY" and the ZEN•MEN 
  Santa Monica CA 90405 • 1-310-450-2268  
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AKASA  MAITREYA  LEV- DhMA ( D.Min )

♦ About this Home-made Blog-site collection:
I promised I'd make some more empirical, more tangible 'Works in Progress' in my own progress.
I've never done this 'memoir' thing before ~
So here goes... plz read patiently.
Concern carries me forward as I know Time
is fleeting-- this thrown about tale, this loose
exploration , an awkward accounting of an
investigation -- but it's dear to me, my personal story, so I''ll top it off with really bad grammar --it jumps tense recklessly, irresponsibly.
Worst of all, it's all about me. Solipsistic as self-obsessed you can get --especially when others say-- "Here, please read my work..." --- Oiy ! 

Apologia --:¦:- P R O F I L E
I Give Thanks and Grateful Appreciation
to several friends - and of course, myself,
that this Journal of my journey even got
assembled -- as I've got more pressing
considerations, so they say, to give my
attention to at 76 -- like the # 1 item in 
our home is composing my Advance
Health Directive, Living Trust and other
grown-up gravitas stuff like that to do --
maybe 'cause I'm still in Stage One 
foot dragging in Denial / Anger about
 my recently diagnosed Parkinson's Dis-at-ease.
~ Surprise, Blindsided, I didn't see it coming ! 

It's brought the whole felt-notion of 'Death' so truly close as a 'supreme inevitability' that in of itself , it pales in it's very own presence.

 


"Existential" metaphorical metaphysical experimental experiences seek n' find me --and ask. I did mention that it was all Metaphorical. Business machinations never were my forte'-- yet the 'creatives' find me and ask. Deep inquiry into the Unfamiliar does provide sustenance for the Non-ordinary, Uncommon person. Literally, it's been a wonder-filled esoteric Life gone by --right here in amongst the ordinary dharma of the everyday world shopping mall as it's always been. "Buy Low, Resale Higher, Feed Your Family, Then Feed Your Mind," feeling Asian textures, pondering long visual contemplations on the details of thought  Sutrastories and folk-tales  seories craft Buddhist art, academics and the sacred words of the Heart. Like the Tarot's Fool card true to the role of a Dharma Bum -- just an Old Hippie and kinda' loving it ! Nowadays I meet with new people drawn here by their own soul-felt needs. I am Poor yet Blessed. Odd, Huh... 
Akasa Maitreya Levi    
My Big Bro Bio • To Go  



Akasa Levi’s original motivated intention to visit with a passing, endangered 'spiritual species'-- a sincere aspiration was to be Directly With the Last Living Asian Buddhist Meditation Teachers of the Pre-Global Era. Off he went in '68... 

Influenced by the 'Search' explored in Gurdjief's "Meetings with Remarkable Men" 1927, and Paul Brunton's "Search In Secret India" 1931 -- innocently and romantically motivated Akasa’s sincere aspiration in going to get caught up in Indra's Net in the first place...
To Be Directly With the Last Living

Buddhist Meditation Teachers
of the Pre-Global Era !
------------------------------ 

   

Given Akasa's  atill
askew True Being:
A Bogus n' Rogue
Buddha Nature for 
Fraudulent Tricksters.
So someone thought
this cheeky Big Bio is
supposed to be banal,
slightly self-effacing,
affected and funny.
So it is.

-------------------------

:¦:- P R O F I L E
  AKASA MAITREYA  LEVI, DhMA
• The Laughing Buddha Sangha Meditation 
• The Seasoned Wisdom Old Timer's Sangha 

•  1-on-1 Counseling and Mindfulness Therapy
• guides "Mind-FULLY" and the ZEN•MEN 
  Santa Monica CA 90405 • 1-310-450-2268  

Big Bro • Bio Profile • To Go
--------------------------------------------------------------

PROFILE • AKASA LEVI ......... page copy
Akasa Maitreya Levi    
My Big Bro Bio • To Go

-------------------------------------------

-:¦:- guides "Mind-FULLY" and the ZEN•MEN   
• The Laughing Buddha Sangha Meditation
• The Seasoned Wisdom Old Timer's Sangha 

•  1-on-1 Counseling and Mindfulness Therapy 
• Santa Monica CA 90405 • 1-310-450-2268  

-:¦:- AKASA  MAITREYA  LEVI - DhMA ( D.Min )

Akasa Levi guides a ZEN•MEN peer group
• The Laughing Buddha Sangha -- 1-on-1 
• The Seasoned Wisdom Old Timer's Sangha
• Dharma Counseling and Mindfulness Therapy 
 • Santa Monica CA 90405 • 1-310-450-2268 

---------------------------------------------------------

♦ About MY "SELF"

I'm A Construction,

Fabricated
Out of My Own
Wounded 'Idea'

of A "Self"
---------------------
-----------------------

" I Didn’t Get

Enough Love

As A Child "   

---------------------
How Come ?
---------------------
Everybody
Elsewhere,
Everyone
Everywhere,
---------------------
Knows About
Certain Dreadful Things 
of
"The Undesirable Deficit"
Everyone Else Knows That 
To Be Undesirable is
Not Desirable.
Not Lovable.
------------------------
Actually, Maybe
Wanted A Little Bit -- 
Just 'Not Enough'.
And  That Left Me
A Very Needy
Little Kid.... 
---------------------
The Curse of 
'Rejection' and 
'Not Enough',
-- It Strikes
Any One
Any Body
Any Where  
Any Which Way
Six Ways to Sunday

Any Damn Way,
ANYWAY -- Needy,
Angry and Confused.
Loba, Dosa, Moha
--- Sad, Huh ?

--------------------------
'Cept If You Teach 

Yourself To Love
Yourself, First --
But Buddha said: 
" t's Gotta Be
YOU First ! " 

---------------

So I asked -- 

"Which way
is The Way ?
The Way
Outta' Here ?"
You Mean
The Real Deal--
Self-Realization.

------------------------ 

Someone Pointed
n' said confidently
"That-a-Way" and
He Pointed East.
---------------------

NOTE ---WHAT FOLLOWS BELOW is UNFINISHED notes, sketchy IMPRESSIONS, and SCRAPS etc... enjoy other tab reading sections, or be welcome to continue to read here too...



Phenomena Come and Go and Ebb and Flow
as Centuries of sometime Time Lines pass
-- and Monks with Exotic Spiritual Names 
having honest to God ancient mystical
incarnation lineages that never ever died---
as I deeply soak into kind, loving eye contact
with a smiling little nut brown forest dweller
who's been happy almost for ever -- and 
that's the Way in some Pacifica place
they're monastery-made in a gracious 
silent flurry of a hurry as they scurry
like a happy house full of enabling
Bubbies and Aunties.
----------------------------

-- then I was stuck on the freezing Beach 34th Street boardwalk with a hot potato k'nish in what's now become greasy cotton gloves solidifying in the bitter cold bite of a Far Rockaway NY snowy winter....

--as I write this Leonard Cohen just died today at 86 -- Thank You so much, Sensei. Nov 2016

Kubler-Ross's 5 Stages...   

( please see the readings tabs on either side-bar columns for Journal Notes of an American Buddhist Monk )

the living spark, weaving eternally integral


" Profile / Sch'mo-file,  
I told you to tell 'em
Absolutely Everything

-- and did you ?...
Now you go back
in there and...."

------------------------

NOTE ---WHAT FOLLOWS BELOW is UNFINISHED notes, sketchy IMPRESSIONS, and SCRAPS etc... enjoy other tab reading sections, or be welcome to continue to read here too...

-- then I was stuck on the freezing Beach 34th Street boardwalk with a hot potato k'nish in what's now become greasy cotton gloves solidifying in the bitter cold bite of a Far Rockaway NY snowy winter....

--as I write this Leonard Cohen just died today at 86 -- Thank You so much, Sensei. Nov 2016

Kubler-Ross's 5 Stages...   

( please see the readings tabs on either side-bar columns for Journal Notes of an American Buddhist Monk )

the living spark, weaving eternally integral


" Profile / Sch'mo-file,  
I told you to tell 'em
Absolutely Everything

-- and did you ?...
Now you go back
in there and...."

NOTE ---WHAT FOLLOWS BELOW is UNFINISHED notes, sketchy IMPRESSIONS, and SCRAPS etc... enjoy other tab reading sections, or be welcome to continue to read here too...

NOTE ---WHAT FOLLOWS BELOW is usually way UNFINISHED notes, sketchy IMPRESSIONS, site SCRAPS and SNIPPETS etc... enjoy other tabs up top here, reading those  sections FIRST.... or be welcome to continue to read here too...

111111

♦ Once upon a time, long, long ago, even before digital time you were again reconsidering some kind of exasperating reincarnation -- back in the great unrest feral state of the late 60’s  ♦ Akasa Levi ( a nice Jewish mensch of a man from Far Rockaway NY ) was in the U.S.Army 63-to-65 -- and full of Sixty's protest anger, he abandoned 'Madison Avenue' for Asia - and by 1975, he became an officially ordained Buddhist Bhikkhu Monk, six years a mendicant Sadhu in “beggar-man’s” orange robes with an alms bowl in mid-70's back-country rural Asia • Trained and ordained into the Buddhist Theravada senior monastic Amarapura Order of The Triple Gem by the beloved and revered Bhante NyakaThera Balangoda Ananda Maitreya and Kassapa MahaThera in Kandy, Sri Lanka's lush Bamboo Forests. My novice robes were given under the Bodhitree in Bodhgaya India itself. (ordination story)
♦ At the precise moment of ordination -- in the most sacred Buddhist vortex on Earth -- I was so Here ! -- At-one-ment for a timeless moment amidst a 25 hundred year old back-story running in tandem with Them for a moment, alongside all the Buddhas that have ever been -- as the karmic parallels just keep eternally narrowing and narrowing -- I was so There... I almost wasn't anywhere. I almost didn't exist !  Yup, So here I was... (more ordination story)
• Previous to this final 'anointing' ( only two tiers - novice junior and bhikkhu senior ) which all monks enter into with the Maha-Sangha only on the basis of Seva/service 'time' in sangha, not with 'attainment'. Akasa Levi was a Gelugpa Vajrayana initiate and temple gardener to Geshe Lama Thubten Yeshe and Thubten Zopa Rinpoche at Kopan Monastery, Kathmandu in Nepal during the early 70's • "Big Love" - Digging holes with Lama, urinating on tomato plants with Lama, moving giant rocks with Lama • Much later on, a sabbatical resident Vipassana student to learn Mindfulness practice directly from the renown Anagarika Munindra Barua, the leading teaching-master of Satipatthana Mindfulness in Bodhgaya, India where the ancient Bodhi Tree still stands giving Refuge to all newbie Bodhisattvas to come • Akasa relished his annual monsoon seasons of non-duality practice in satsang under the wild and notorious ‘Bede Baba’ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj in India's Mumbai slums in Old Bombay. 

• The Bhikkhu monks and lay teachers of Sri Lanka were very, very good to Akasa-- Nyanaponika, Kassapa, Godwin, Lilly -- and the precocious Henri Van Zeyst up in Kandy's Bamboo Forest.• Bhante Piyadassi gave him lots of singing lessons • Back then, practice--sojourns with teachers took the gift of long stays of Time at the right time - mid 70's •  BTW, all these special teachings may take several lifetimes to comprehend --and one can still be a jerk • Akasa’s sincere aspiration: To Be Directly With the Last Living Buddhist Meditation Teachers of the Pre-Global Era --most passed on now. "That's the last of 'em, Luke -- Yoda was for real.

• For his BA, Akasa attended SUNY Harpur College, State University of New York, Binghamton University • Returning from a whole 70’s decade abroad, Akasa studied 'Why' and 'How' -- Who's on first, What's on second - through the overly aloof, intellectual intricacies of Western psycho-dynamic analytic intersubjective therapy at UCLA, yearning for something simpler • He currently guides Insight Awareness Mindfulness Meditation at The Laughing Buddha Sangha on 14th Street's Zafu Row • Coaches a ZEN•MEN peer group • and offers Buddhist-based Individual counseling and Insight therapy • Akasa's Sri Lanka affiliate in LA is Dharma Vijaya Buddha Vihara under his decades long old friend from Calcutta, Bhante NyakaThera Walpola Piyananda.

• Akasa now a feisty 76 - finds himself just not a proper academic, but more of an out on a limb improper 'experience provider' -- he has an odd, sort of awry, happy Doubter's Joy in his altruistic, aesthetic, atheistic approach to the Dharma. At heart, Akasa is a vulnerable old school Bohemian from a NYC art-based family, that can be a perpetual nud'nik to the gravitas of established Buddhist composure. At times, truly without a clue about his own genuineness, a fragile identity, an authentic 'Not knowing' What he is, maybe play acting the curmudgeon, or maybe the Fool card - in that he didn't like the other lay-life choices offered anyway. Maybe he was the original Zelig.
• To counter his delusive Bewilderment, he's continually serving up generous Seva ( service ) by creating lots of pro-bono available time for basic heart to heart and hand holding of people in pain. He’s really funny, an eccentric Grandpa Dharma - and a respected BuJu tribal elder. K'vetchy by genetics, but not too creepy, a flamboyant old rogue, he's definitely an acquired taste like Thai shrimp paste.

• Seriously: Akasa is into nourishing the many 'contemplative' vocal aspects of the emerging 'heart-wisdom' poetry revealed in a student's use of developing dharma vocabulary words -- mentoring a maverick “iconoclast intelligence” in the students and people he treats, teaches, counsels at his little meditation shrine room near the beach, filled with Dharma books, tribal masks and ritual objects, and cool calm statues of the ancient Buddha.

• Akasa Levi, an emeritus-level senior meditation teacher in the Theravada lineage, guides us into the cognitive/empirical Felt Sense Awareness of a Sati-awakening present moment -- fully self-caring, fully self-aware training in his mindFULLY approach. Akasa knows that by building on Self-inquiry and meditation practice skills, you can effect a calm, fearless and loving, meaningful, noticeable difference in yourself. Akasa is known for his spontaneity, wise ready warmth, and wry unpredictable humor. 

 -----------------------------------------

" Kindness " is more
important than ' Wisdom ' -
and the clear recognition of this -
IS the beginning of Wisdom "  
~ Theodore Issac Rubin

----------------------------------------

" You don't get enlightened -- 
it is 'enlightenment' itself 
that gets enlightened." 

...if anything:
The Enlightened Get You !
---end---