We've had snow in Seattle the past couple of days.
The Buddhist Center in Seattle is doing 2 weeks of Buddha Heruka retreat, which means lots of meditation on emptiness, the ultimate nature of phenomenon - that the "things we normally see or perceive do not exist." (They exist, just not in the way we think they do.)
So, on a break between meditation sessions, while walking the dog in the snow, I was contemplating emptiness. Of course, with the new white snow covering everything, it's easy to think about purity, then about the purifying nature of emptiness. And how the snow makes the things we normally see disappear. There are still forms there, but they're obscured.
To try for a better analogy, I thought of a whiteout in the mountains, where you can't distinguish between ground and sky. All you can see is white in every direction. Everything is obliterated.
I'm not sure if that's helpful, but it's what I was thinking.
In Eight Steps to Happiness Geshe-la says "'Self' and 'other' are relative terms, rather like 'this mountain' and 'that mountain ... 'This' and 'that' therefore depend upon our point of reference. This is also true of self and other. By climbing down the mountain of self, it is possible to ascend the mountain of other, and thereby cherish others as much as we presently cherish ourself."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment