Sangha of Auspicious Companions

COMPLICATED SIMPLICITY

Emptiness is the simplest and most unelaborated thing we could imagine, but then there is this whole literature about all these very discursive details with all their subpoints. There are five paths and ten bhumis, and each path is divided into a number of stages, with certain numbers of obscurations having to be relinquished on each one of those subpaths. Most people just think, “Who wants or needs to know all that? Don’t we have too many thoughts already? I thought this was about letting go of all reference points.”

Of course nobody really wants to know all those details and in a sense we all know them already, because they are the details of the many reference points that we already have in our mind. The fact that these sutras and their commentaries talk about our obscurations is precisely the point why they seem so endless and complicated—because our minds are complicated. Emptiness is extremely simple, but our convoluted minds that do not get this simplicity are very complicated. It is not that the Buddha and the other speakers in the sutras and the commentaries really like to, but they need to address each one of those knots in our minds, which are like knots in space.

June 25, 2012

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Rediscovering the Lost Art of Blessing

“In his writing the mystic poet John O’Donohue encourages all of us to rediscover our power to bless one another. I’ve become enchanted with this invitation, regardless of whether we define a blessing as being a wish or a prayer, whether we conceive it as coming from us or through us or whether we offer blessings through what we say, write, or think. In any of these forms, the act of blessing another contains several irresistible qualities.” This thoughtful piece explores the often forgotten power that is folded into our capacity to wish each other well. { read more }

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