an excerpt from ‘Ukiyo’ May 29, 2008
Posted by Geoffrey Wilson in : Book Excerpts, Challenge, Personal Freedom, Philosophy, Quote of the Week , add a commentThe First and Last Goodbye
Kolita tells his father that everyone must follow his own destiny in order to fulfil soul’s purpose. It is a prelude to his immanent departure and a gesture of respect. Deep down, Kolita is ready to go. He understands he cannot live without passion and expect to be at peace with his soul. There are too many questions unanswered and too many problems left unsolved.
‘Because my consciousness is beginning-less I know that I have taken countless rebirths in samsara,’ he says to the man who once was his idol and a Brahmin well versed in the classics.
‘I have already had countless bodies… if they were all gathered together, they would fill the entire world, and all the blood and other bodily fluids that have flowed through them would form an ocean! So great has been my suffering in all these previous lives that I have shed enough tears of sorrow to form yet another ocean!
‘In every single life without exception… I have experienced the sufferings of sickness, ageing, death… being separated from those I love… and being unable to fulfill my wishes. If I do not attain permanent liberation from suffering now, I shall have to experience these sufferings again and again in countless future lives.
‘From the very depths of our hearts… can we not at least try to abandon our attachment to worldly pleasures and attain permanent liberation from contaminated rebirths?’
Question:
What would you say to your son upon hearing that?
Man of Tao – from ‘Ukiyo’ (my novel) May 26, 2008
Posted by Geoffrey Wilson in : Book Excerpts, Meditations, Quote of the Week, Wisdom Notes , add a comment‘The man of Tao is established only in that which generates peace.
Thus he is naturally like the metal hidden in the crust of the hills or the pearl submerged in the valleys of the deep.
And therefore he does not look on affluence either as the source of joy or upon lust as the consummation of power.
In this way, he keeps his nose to the grindstone of spiritual accountability…
and he is never tempted to mull over the past…
nor is he prone to entertaining wild imaginings about the future.’
Tai Chi – The Art of Unlocking May 22, 2008
Posted by Geoffrey Wilson in : Health Tips, Meditations, Wisdom Notes , add a commentAustralian Tai Chi master Tony Ward, has a beautiful understanding of this ancient martial art and it is a pleasure to watch him in action as he simultaneously explains the principles to students and demonstrates. His basic premise is that the practice of Tai Chi is designed to unlock the body’s plethora of resistances – habituated responses to challenges – stored in muscle memory.
Based on the teachings of his master and passed down in the traditional manner, Tony insists that the essence of Tai Chi is to be discovered in stillness. In other words, training is designed to cultivate a deep personal relationship to quietude and stillness. In the process, the practitioner learns to passively watch what is actually happening in the body as the struggle to release tension escalates. It is a struggle because the mind puts up quite a fight – it doesn’t like it when distractions are disallowed and awareness is instead focused on the moment-to-moment reality.
Tony Ward suggests that the body’s habituated responses to the challenges it faces, creates energy blockages and these must be unblocked in order to literally open up! From this it is evident that there is a strong connection between the body and the mind. What happens to one, naturally affects the other.
Yet, placing attention on maintaining open awareness (e.g. ‘My legs feel very heavy’) without judgment (e.g. ‘This is painful and I want to get out of here but I’ll stay with it’), is the key to transformation. The body can be the vehicle therefore through which to calm the mind and vice-versa.
Happiness… when the children leave home May 9, 2008
Posted by Geoffrey Wilson in : Health Tips, Meditations, Personal Freedom, Psychology, Wisdom Notes , 6 commentsAccording to Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of the book ‘Stumbling on Happiness’, the happiness of people goes into steep decline after they have children and is never recovered until they leave home. This is despite investing so much time and energy and money in their children! At a conference in Sydney recently devoted to the exploration of happiness, over 2000 delegates also discovered that the continued accumulation of money did nothing for happiness and interfered with people finding other sources of joy.
The moral of the story is that if you think having a baby will bring you happiness, think again! And this brings us to an interesting point. It begs the question, what is happiness? And, how do you tap into it?
According to the ancient sages, freedom from emotional entanglement is the measure of happiness. So what is emotional entanglement then? In a word, it is very simply ‘attachment’ to either ‘this’ or ‘that’. And most of us spend the bulk of our waking moments dedicated to the preservation of these attachments – whatever they may be – and with whomever. Unfortunately, attachments only serve to strengthen the fear of losing what one has become attached to and this sets in motion the vicious cycle of entanglement.
If happiness is caused, watch out! True happiness has no cause and comes into being quite naturally when the urge to be somewhere else or do something else comes to an end. This is called being in the moment. When awareness is from moment to moment, the observer and the observed merge and there is no separation between them.
Meditate on this!