The world we imagine is the world we manifest: don't blow oxygen on the spark of death

USIP Youth Leaders' Exchange with His Holiness the Dalai Lama
(Image by U.S. Institute of Peace)   Details   DMCA

We watched the documentary "Wisdom of Happiness" in which the Dalai Lama drills us (in his own endearing manner, patient teacher that he is, but just know there will be a test!) on core-teachings of his relentless obsession with Love, Hope, and Compassion. He is a great Buddhist teacher, but he is also a man of the world, a realist.

The Chinese have been trying to erase Tibetan culture for decades. Communist China, on the whole, has no respect for any religious practice or spiritual world view. It is adherence to the program that matters in Communist China, making sure your own little corner of the neighborhood is tidy, that you conduct your life so as to not rock the boat of the collective or the state.

If China is water, Buddhism is oil. What the Chinese understand about the 14th Dalai Lama, is that they cant pigeon-hole him. He doesn't fit any of their pigeon-holes!

The Dalai Lama meditates a lot but he isnt focusing on his navel, he is meditating as a man in the world, a man of prayer and contemplation in the Buddhist tradition, but also a man of science, with a boundless curiosity for how things work.

Science cannot accept the reality of miracles. (I know. My father was like this. He was a mathematician and a computer expert until he retired early and became a Jungian analyst. And I had to witness his struggles to chip away at his inability to believe in something. He couldn't break out of the rational universe.) The sterility of the scientific worldview would be OK if science didn't fancy itself a kind of quasi-religion, an orthodox one at that!

Taoism, represented by the yin / yang is a good sigil for appreciating how the Dalai Lama's mind functions. He isn't comfortable just being a good Buddhist. The world, with all its contradictions, pain, hard edges, tumultuous drama and fireworks beckons to his attention like a dog that patiently stands at the door with its leash in its mouth . . . ,calls him outward from his meditation, as if to say, "enough of merging with the all-in-all, you agreed to be embodied, honor your contract to love the world as much as it must love you to have prepared the way for your birth and incarnation." That twinkle in his eye, that so many of us know so well, is that gift he has, to be able to move almost seamlessly between the yin and the yang.

In the Western World, that seems to be rudderless and profoundly off center, we need to listen to The 14th Dalai Lama more than ever, but not just listen to him. He need to see him, to catch that twinkle in his eye, and preserve that twinkle for future reference when he is no longer here, because there are not that many people who move almost seamlessly between the yin and the yang.

This is what I should have posted before I posted "Alliance chief: Russia could attack Nato within five years (poets warning)". I am not exaggerating when I say (as your poet) that we are serving vigil at the wake of our dreams, of a livable planet and that, if we imagine the inevitability of war, we are breathing (blowing oxygen) on the spark of death.

This is rudimentary psychology, and its rudimentary Buddhistic teaching, that the world we imagine is the world we manifest.