Feelings arise from a mind not at peace....

A person close to me sends me a letter today:

"Last couple of days have been very bad here for me. I have known 'hell'. I was tired and resentful. And everything kept going from bad to worse. A vicious circle. I have known 'heaven' too (as a figure of speech). I have felt free, joyful, abundant, with an expansive, quiet and reconciled energy. But the last two days the 'ego' struck me hard. Made me evil, desperate, despondent. I only wanted to ESCAPE. And I couldn't. I have known the 'peaks of ecstasy' and the 'depths of despair'. Such contrasts! Today, not in its grips any longer, I see that FEELINGS control us. That they arise from a MIND not at peace. That the only real escape rests in the mind, nowhere else."

Like a good doctor she made a precise diagnosis, and pointed to the root cause of the illness....

What is a mind at peace?. It cannot be one part trying to control another part.....that would not be peace.......so, what is it?

(dedicated to E.)

sense of humor

Two things I have read this week that made me laugh:

- "if you beleive you are so enlightened, go and spend a week with your parents" (Ram Dass, quoted by Eckhart Tolle in his book " A new Earth")
(My own particular version: "If you think you have progressed a bit on the spiritual path, go and have twins"....).

- "The only opinion that really matters to me is my own" (Karl Lagerfeld, fashion designer)

"continuum"

Yesterday I was swimming in the sea, and an "strange" feeling came to me: "what if the mind is a continuum with the blue of the sea, with the ocean or with some more?"

Context II

The other day something happened that could perfectly have made me irritated.
But it did not. And I realized I was not irritated because the morning that it happened, I was feeling good and relaxed......So the mental environment, the context, with which we receive the stimulus, makes a big difference in what we feel...if we have a mental environment of dissatisfaction, or of anxiety, etc, it will influence very much how we react to things, how we perceive life....

Sometimes this "mental environment" comes from a far away past, and has stayed, it has become part of the regular functioning of our brain.....it has become "chronic", a "chronic mental environment".....a part of what we call "personality".....

Is it possible to feel, to be aware of this mental environment, mental context?.......could we have a kind of "propriocepcion" to it?...... could we try right now?......

irritation and compassion

How easy is to react with irritation and anger....
and how difficult is to react with understanding and compassion.....
.....a sign of a shallow mind?

Education VIII

Can we see the limitations of a shallow mind?.....

And can we have a feeling for a mind that has space, a big space....that is not narrowed by spinning continously around something, that is not full of worries and fears about security, that is not narrowed too much by the sense of "being somebody"......that can see all the limitations, that can see its own space....

But can one educate to have such "big space" mind?...... How?.....

(picture: "Shallow Water" (6x8") oil painting by Todd Bonita)

The shallow mind

What is a shallow mind?

A shallow mind is the mind that has very little energy to go into the religious aspect of life....(although it has plenty of energy for other things....)

to be special

I am spending time near the sea, and I see many people with tattoos.

We all want to be special, different....

There isn´t anything as ordinary as wanting to be special.....

Impermanence I

Today I was walking with H., we looked at the sky and we were wondering if in the millions of years of existence of our planet, there has ever been two identical clouds.....

In the millions of years of the universe existence, has there been two moments in which the universe has been identical?

Does this continuous change anything to do with impermanence?
If there are not two moments in which the universe was identical, that means that there is no permanence.....not only it does not exists now, but there has never been....
That means that from the very beginning of the universe, impermanence has been a constant feature......how could we expect it now???

And is there a relationship between impermanence and infinite potential (or it could be called multiplicity)?. They seem related to me. If there haven´t been two identical moments in such a length of time, that means a tremendous capacity to generate diversity......so, maybe, after all, impermanence is related to creativity......

Only our mind tends to want to put everything in a continuity, in a changeless state......by putting this total multiplicity into patterns.....

Education VII

Last night I saw a beautiful and inspiring film: "How to cook your life" (2007). Zen cook and monk Edward Espe Brown explains how to prepare bread and other foods.

But it is not only about food. Brown interlaces the preparation of food to topics as anger, anxiety, the mind and suffering.

This is how education has to be understood, and Edward Espe Brown acts as a real educator. He takes a seemingly simple act (as cooking), and uses it to go to very real and deep subjects of everyday life.

Watching the film several points popped up in my mind:

- A real teacher is not the product of many clever courses about (alternative or wholistic) education. It is the depth of the person who is a teacher that makes a difference.

- What is the role of religious people in a new kind of education? Should they come out of their monasteries and get more involved in education?

- Education cannot be just passing information-knowledge. Edward Espe Brown takes one subject like cooking and explores the relationship of the student with the subject, the relationship between the people in the class/group, the relation of the students with their own mind and the relationship of the student´s mind with life in general. And still learning something technical, like bread making, in a highly skilled way. One highlight of the film is when he refers to the bumps that have the metal tea pots, and he says they are a symbol for a person, as life inevitably produces bumps on you, but he refers to the dignity of the tea pots still serving its function.

- Another thing that popped in my mind, a bit unrelated to the film, was that if we want to send our children to a school, we should know the school really thoroughly, not just by references. In that sense, schools should offer some classes to the parents, so one could know firsthand the school and the teachers.

You could see a small clip of this film here.

Education VI

I am observing how my young twins develop. Since they are 3 month old, something happens that I did not understand at the beginning: when they are laid down they cry ferociously.

They calm down when you pick them up and show them things or when they are contemplating a new thing.

And the idea came to my mind that their brain (at this stage, at least) needs this stimulus to develop. Lines, textures, flavors, colours, not only feed information, but make the brain develop.

It is a kind of hunger. Same as the body is hungry for food to develop, the world is the food for the brain development.......

So, at this stage, we do not have to give any education, only to allow their exposure to the world.