Awareness and Sexual Engagement

Ezra Bayda. Practicing with Sexuality. Turning Wheel Magazine. Spring 2009 Buddhist Peace Fellowship

As sexual fantasies arise, can we meet them with the question, "What is the practice here?" Are we even willing to practice in this area? From a practice standpoint, we have to see our fantasies for what they are. Most often they're a cover, almost like sucking our thumb. We'll do anything to avoid experiencing the hole of painful longing and loneliness that lies beneath these juicy thoughts. We need to see how unwilling we are to give them up. The more clearly we see our attachment, the more workable our practice is. pg. 18

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Truth vs Hope

Chogyam Trungpa. The Truth of Suffering: and the Path of Liberation. Judith Lief, editor. Shambhala Publications 2009

If there is a strong desire to achieve a result, that will push you back. You could relate to hope as respect for the dharma, or the truth, rather than a promise. It is like a schoolchild seeing a professor: one day she too might become a professor, but she still has to do her homework. pg. 71

Life Purpose

Thomas Merton. Love and Living. Naomi Burton Stone & Patrick Hart, editors (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jonvanovich, 1985).

The mature person realizes that life affirms itself most, not in acquiring things, but in giving time, efforts, strength, intelligence, and love to others. Here a different kind of dialectic of life and death begins to appear. The living drive, the vital satisfaction, by "ending" its trend to self-satisfaction and redirecting itself to and for others, transcends itself. It "dies" insofar as the ego is concerned, for the self is deprived of the immediate satisfactions which it could claim with being contested. Now it renounces these things, in order to give everything to others. ...This "dying" to self in order to give to others is nothing more or less than a higher and more special affirmation of life. Such dying is the fruit of life, the evidence of mature and productive living. It is, in fact, the end or the goal of life. pg 102

Death is, then, the point at which life can attain its pure fulfillment. Death brings life to its goal. But the goal is not death-the goal is perfect life. pg 105

Reflections on Grasping

Thomas Merton. Asian Journal

Reassessment of this whole Indian experience in more critical terms. Too much movement. Too much "looking for" something: an answer, a vision, "something other." And this breeds illusion. Illusion that there is something else. Differentiation - the old splitting-up process that leads to mindlessness, instead of the mindfulness of seeing all-in-emptiness and not having to break it up against itself. Four legs good; two legs bad.