H I M A L A Y A N • D I A R Y of AN AMERICAN BUDDHIST MONK • ( 5 ) An Epic Tale

Om Mani Padme' Hung ~ Aum    ( 5 )
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" The Greatest Risk
 is Not Taking One ! "


Himalayan Journal Notes of an
American Buddhist Monk
at Kopan Gompa Monastery
Bodh’nath, Kathmandu, Nepal
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" Eighty percent of ‘success’
is just showing up ! ”      ~ Woody Allen

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Remember, Dear Reader....

" The Journey IS the Destination ~

Success is a Journey, not a Destination.

Whatever the motives, good or bad --

If you do not change directions,

you may end up where

you are heading."            ~ Lao Tzu

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Foolish Nasreddin's Lost Keys ~

One late evening Nasreddin is walking home.
He can be seen to be upset about something.
Just then a young man comes along
and sees the Mullah's distress.
"Mullah, please tell me - What is wrong? "
"Friend, I seem to have lost my keys.
Would you help me search for them ?
I had them when I left the tea house.
So he helps Nasreddin search for the keys.
For quite a while the young man is searching
here and there but no keys are to be found.
He looks over to Nasreddin and sees him
searching only a very small area around
an old oil street lamp.
" Mullah, why are you only searching over there ? "
" Because there's much more light over here.
Should I foolishly search where there is no light ? "
The Mullah Nasreddin never found his keys.
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" We shall not cease
from exploration,

And the end
of all our exploring

will be to arrive
where we started

And know the place
for the very first time."  ~ T.S. Eliot

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Dear Reader ~
This same never-ending story in every human culture
always repeats itself, always begins with a 'Search' -
through the Unknown with beginner's skills
that are barely known to a beginner's mind.
Spiritually speaking, that's a very classic way to start.
At one's Core, something got lost - and one goes out
to try'n find it.  Don't we all kinda' relate with that ?

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The Road Not Taken / The Road Less Traveled 
Robert Frost, 1926

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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And I'm sorry I could not travel both.

And so being only one traveler, long I stood

And looked down each road as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth.

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Then I took the other road, just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim

Because it was grassy and wanted wear.

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equal

in leaves no step had trodden black.

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Oh, I kept the first road for another day,

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this tale with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence -

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,

-- I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Early 'Contributing Factors' and 'Conditions'
Himalaya Lama ~ The Road Now Taken
Karma arrived, showing up as a series of
many 'Non-Ordinary' Human Influences,
Impressions and Impacts were consistent,
yet unusual 'Contributing Factors' - early
magical 'Conditions' called the fine Arts,
layered onto this little receptive person
and that has made all the difference -- 

Each chapter of this site is concluded

with theme-related quotes and poetry.

Be inspired with your own enjoyment.

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UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

MYSTERY of  MYSTERIES

I lost my Mom to breast cancer when I was seven. My whole future relationship with women’s souls and the sweet softness of Yin changed. So did my relationship with Death. The young potent power-filled Son with no Mother to come home to proudly protect. A dark home where everybody’s clothing had the salty smell of tear soaked tragic dampness. For now, I’m keeping all that good ole' Freudian stuff for me to explore with Doctor Max Zugger, the Don Rickles of insult psychiatry. His office was where I heard it for the first time -- 'Shit Happens'. The unarguable, ever changing, unstable, absolute 'Impermanence' of it all. Buddha's Dharma ( teachings ) is sort of the Reality Science of ultimate Loss - The What Is of The Way It Is. This IS It. The healthy, not morbid, wisdom that is experientially developed directly out of insecurity is a prominent cornerstone of Buddhism's acceptance teachings on Impermanence. "Unfortunately for human beings" - said The Dalai Lama giggling, "Buddhism has no Savior, only still an ongoing desire for one -- but they have TV ".    

At the time though, I  experienced a suddenly new phenomena very few kids get to have: Real ‘Death’ up close. Death lived with my family by the beach in Far Rockaway, New York. Death had a room upstairs. Death ate at the table, Death sobbed along with everyone else sobbing. No alternative weekends with a divorced parent. There wasn't any. No back-button. No click Undo. No relief from broken hearted stories told half in English, half in German about “How talented… “How gifted… your Mother was… Ahh, Beatrice was the maestro Rubakian’s best piano student. She had radiated a young painter’s delight with our little farm up in Woodstock… and of course, the eminent reality of a recital in Carnegie Hall and all. I sat on the floor and watched. I sat on the grass and watched. I was a sullen kid - and overcame the tedium by taking an uninvolved, yet steady interest in what I was watching since that was " IT " for what was currently available in that moment. I was conscious. So I just watched. Not much content. No ‘story’ line with it. I just watched. Watching was all too real for me to be a voyeur. It was enough for me just to be in the presence of all that. Death by Default -- Whew !  I was sorta' like Peter Seller's character in the film "Being There" ~ I was a passive Watcher, not a Doer, a Watcher. I'm a llife-long meditative, mindfulness trained 'Observer'. I like to simply watch.

I developed a child’s un-informed notion that - So maybe there were bona fide resurrection ‘Miracles’ out there. That would bring Mommy Beatrice back and stop the random outbursts of continual sobbing. So at ten years old I began to practice and perform stage Magic, to see if there was such a thing. Anyway, I didn’t like the reedy clarinet or the clarinet teacher who smelled funny. God forbid, I should turn my back on the oh so sacred piano. It was  funny how all the music teachers had really flakey dandruff and smelled funny - and no store-bought, standard hobby took my interest or my heart. I was very good at being critical, complaining and k'vetchy. Surprisingly, this was the beginnings of an oddly developing Wisdom - if’ the ability’ was apprehended in time. It usually isn’t and the kid becomes a ‘crank’. If it is, the kid learns that ‘Wisdom’ Really Likes ‘Wisdom’ - and the kid will search the world over for confirmation that he ‘Knows’ - and that he is highly desirable and is worthy of being loved for that. He soon found that nobody gave a shit.   Unfortunately the wounded, narcissistic, gifted kid had become cynical, contemptuous and disdainful - and could simply get lost out there - go downstairs for a pack of smokes and never return.

Just around the corner of my beingness, as a Pre-Bar Mitzvah Boy, with a smelly Hebrew teacher, I started hanging around with some older boys who were local amateur magicians and a few performing stage 'pro's -- after my Dad would really check them out first. But wait, there’s more ! Besides being the son of an extraordinarily talented, almost worshipped, deceased classical pianist and painter -- I was also the physically undeveloped, seemingly talentless, disinterested, chubby son of an athletic, muscular NYPD police officer who sang German and Italian opera on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour on TV as The Singing Patrolman ( back in the 1950’s you’d never say ‘Cop’ ). Through Whitey the antique dealer who was a magician, I met my first real teaching ‘mentors’ in the City, where they clustered at Harry Houdini’s old shop upstairs near Penn Station. My God, the company I kept ! I never saw it that way. What I saw was that these guys, they kinda of 'knew' stuff - stuff that ‘ordinary’ people didn’t know. Esoteric stuff. I found that I genuinely, thoroughly, wasn’t ordinary. Uncommon or Non-ordinary it was called. Back in the 50’s I was pretty alone in all this -- all of us magi still are. Soon, as the teenage Mr.Magic, I got booked to do children’s birthday parties on weekends, earning pocket and later, gas and date money for college at SUNY  Running In the background to all this was, of course, a Certified Wicked Witch of the West Jewish Stepmother that Doctor Zugger has already reserved for a water boarding in Milton’s Purgatory. I’m currently attempting to share the dharma teachings with my less resistive clients, students and myself: on boundless appreciation, unconditional acceptance and the authentic magic of continual forgiveness. Keep forgiveness mindfully in front of you, and keep try’in ….. 

At the movies, James Hilton’s 1939 "Lost Horizon" jump started ‘something’ really serious buried deep in my soul when I was sixteen. My first 'contact' with The Dalai Lama. It brings a slight swelling behind my eyes even now as I write this. Weekly, I soaked in a young Jean Shepard’s heady late night, late 50's WOR jazz/talk radio show in the Village ( New York City ), where he read from the "Amazing Adventures of Doctor Fu Manchu" and lots of Tao and Zen poetry. I started to grow a tiny teenage goatee, hung around the Art Room crowd, explored the social dangers of wearing black and read Kerouac. Forget high school sports, me and The Exotic Esoteric were off and running! In 1959 I concluded high school with Paul Reps’ "Zen Flesh Zen Bones", the Buddhist-theories of D.T. Suzuki and lots of Alan Watts "The Wisdom of Insecurity". There’s ‘wisdom’ in insecurity ?  Why that title of all things ? It really made me ‘question’ it all. I learned that Buddhists laugh a lot and are still willing to give voice to ‘impermanence' and 'uncertainty in an Age of A-Bomb Anxiety and devastating Hollywood Blacklisting. In 1959 the winter snows were just melting as the young Tibetan Dalai Lama and a small horseback party began the final crossing into exile in India. His Holiness has never been home since.

SUNY, the State University of New York in the heating-up Sixties, revealed to me the tight-assed academia, the ill-conceived struggles for misunderstood meanings of Western philosophy, that I didn’t ‘get’ anyway - and the permissive, easy-going spaciousness of Eastern ‘emptiness’. Emptiness is the ‘joy’ of uncertainty 'realized’. Living in Greenwich Village after being a journalist in the U.S.Army ( Desert Storm: First / 81st Armored Division, PIO information specialist 63’-65’ )  I was right there with another generational shift I witnessed at the poetic heroic wane of the Beat-era -- and my ‘Self’ becoming ‘consciously’ reconstituted with my own beginnings, of my own authentic Hippie soul. The birth of a fledgling Bodhisattva - a few old ones still here - new stock arriving all the time.

My personal archetype was as ‘The Outsider’ - that was quite clear. I was / I still am an acquired taste for a few - but the Wunderkind me was soon making expensive visual magic at a TV commercial production company directing pilot spots. It so happened that I smoked some outstanding weed one day in ’68, and left for a long sojourn in Europe and points unknown. "Freedom From the Known" as Krishnamurti deliciously and disturbingly called it. In Israel I just kept meeting people coming back from India - and they said “India Man, You gotta go, Man - You gotta go ! - That’s the ‘real’ Holy Land!.” Further East, the compass pointed the direction I needed. I met lotsa’ helpful Indiana Jones- types along the Silk Route when it was still archeologically intact. 

I wasn’t aware then, that I was traveling with a spiritual ‘dedicated purpose’, a mission, a holy 'intent' as Lama taught me later. I traveled in an old Russian mini-bus, overland thru the thick snows of Eastern Turkey, the Shah’s Iran and many months of a restorative, recuperative layover with the Jewish community in Herat, Afghanistan during the brutal winter 1972-73. I kept observing a subtly different, ‘alternative’ cultural paradigm out there. Asia was not Kansas anymore, Coney. It certainly wasn’t the South Shore of Long Island where I was raised W.J.M., either. Here, people looked right into your ‘mind’. They can read you.  In India they had a legacy of deeply observing and comprehending the human mind - a very complete, ancient ‘science-teaching’ about the true nature of mind. No ‘churches’ that suppressed it.

At the Eastern Pakistani/Indian border in Amritsar, a seasoned ex-patriot American yogi said to me, unsolicited - “Hey Man, Just skip Hinduism altogether, my friend, and go straight to Dharamsala and hang around with the Buddhists” - “You’ll end up a Buddhist anyway, from what I see in you...” He gave me the address of a very special ‘Teacher’ to visit there, and literally vanished. Weeks later I ambled down a crooked little street high up in the thick pine covered foothills of Northern India, past a flock of laughing Tibetan Buddhist monks full of horseplay, back from their visit to The Dalai Lama’s residence up the hill -- and ‘Lost Horizon’ became a reality.

After a plate of mo-mo dim sum, I went to pay, and discovered the teacher’s address deep in my shoulder bag. As described, I found an alley, then a door, knocked - and a voice said “Come in”. Sitting in full lotus on the floor nursing a single-burner propane stove and tea, was the same yogi guy I met at the border ! He looked up at me, smiled, then laughed and said “You made it!” - “Good, I have some people for you to go up into the hills here to meet”…

I said to myself, "Well, Mr. Magic, let me praise you -
Way to go !  You ‘showed up’ for yourself again… Whew ! "

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Each chapter of this site is concluded

with theme-related quotes and poetry.

Be inspired with your own enjoyment.

________________________________

“ Whatever the Question ~

Love and Kindness is the Answer ” 

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“ If you wish to experience peace

- provide peace for another.

If you wish to know that you are safe

- cause another to know that they are safe.

People ask me - What is your religion?

I respond: My religion is ‘Kindness’.

Kindness is my religion.”

~ H.H.The Dalai Lama ~

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“ There is more hunger

for Love and Appreciation

in this world than for bread.

Loneliness and the feeling of

being unwanted is the most terrible.

If we have no Peace,

it is because we have forgotten

that we belong to each other.

We can do no 'great things' –

just many small things

with Great Love.”     

 ~ Mother Teresa  ~

_________________

"Good timber

does not

grow with ease.
The stronger the wind,

the stronger the trees."  ~ Willard Marriot

Grandfather Bearheart, a Creek Elder said:

" Destiny is every step we are  

going thru right now to get there."

“ La vraie générosité envers l'avenir

consiste à tout donner au présent.”

“ True generosity towards the future

is to give everything to the present.”  ~ Albert Camus

" It is not how 'much' you do – but how much

Love you put into the 'doing' that matters --

People don't care how 'much' you know,

until they know how much you care."  ~ Cavett Robert

" Kindness" is more important than 'Wisdom' -

and the 'clear-recognition' of this -

IS the beginning of Wisdom."    ~ Theodore Issac Rubin

" If there is any kindness I can show
or any good thing I can do for a fellow being
Let me do it now - and not deter or neglect it,
as I may not pass this way again."   ~ William Penn

“ Seeing our lives as a ‘Force’

for bringing on happiness

and peace to ourselves and others.

Do we trust enough

to surrender our separateness ? “   ~ Anna Douglas

“ If you do not see Godliness

in the next person you meet,

you need look no further.”       ~ Gandhi

 “ Every man is guilty

of all that Good

he didn't do.”       ~ Voltaire – 1750

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... and

the children

listen best

to sunshine

and the whispering

of the wind, 

they understand

the flowers

the clouds

and they pray

you and I

will find
a better way.  ~ Nick Rath

The End is Insight

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BREAK THE SILENCE WITH LAUGHTER !

_____________________________________

" I am astounded by people

who want to 'know' the Universe –

when it's hard enough to find

your way around Chinatown.    ~ Woody Allen

Remember...

" The Greatest Risk is Not Taking One ! "  

Appreciation,
unconditional acceptance
and the authentic magic
of continual forgiveness.
Keep forgiveness mindfully
in front of you, and keep try’in


Early 'Contributing Factors' and 'Conditions'
Himalaya Lama ~ The Road Now Taken
Karma arrived, showing up as a series of
many 'Non-Ordinary' Human Influences,
Impressions and Impacts were consistent,
yet unusual 'Contributing Factors' - early
magical 'Conditions' called the fine Arts,
layered onto this little receptive person
and that has made all the difference -- 

 

" The Greatest Risk