OT: books by HH The Dalai Lama and Richard Gere

Rusty

Rusty

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Used a gift certificate to order the Dalai Lama's Practice and Richard Gere's Pilgrim. Will report if I make it through both. HHDL's book should be more than good on the strength of his other books, but I don't know about Gere.

Since Amazon.com is located in Fernley ( 30 miles closer to me than Uncle), it'll be interesting to see how long it takes to get the order here. With Uncle, it's order by noon today, get it by noon tomorrow.

I said this post is off topic, but it deals with the set of principals Uncle and Pala ( and million of others ) try to live by, so I guess it's like Uncle says "What has this got to do with kukuris? Everything!"

I think that Practice is one of the books Uncle recommended. Has anyone read it or Gere's Pilgim? It's sellng for less than a third of retail, brand new. Hmmn! If you have I'd be interested in your comments.
 
Got message from Amazon.com the above order had been shipped Priority Mail today. Will see if it turns up in mailbox tomorrow like Uncle's shipping.
 
Rusty,
I recently received these three books from wisdompubs.org and hope to start on the "novice to master" today.

http://www.wisdompubs.org/

1-Novice to Master by Sok Roshi
2-The Art of Just Sitting by John Loori
3-Food For The Heart by Ajah Chah
 
While we are on the subject, probably my favorite spiritual book I have read in the past 5 years is "After Ecstacy, The Laundry" by former Buddhist monk Jack Kornfield.

The book focuses not so much on the moments of illumination that people on the path have, but rather their attempts to integrate these moments into their everyday exsistence. What happens when they go back into the day to day struggle.

I read a story in one of Stephen Gaskins books where he talks about a monk that had meditated for years in a cave, and realized God. He came down from the cave to spread the good news to humanity. When he got to the city it was crowded and people kept bumping into him and he got angry and he started yelling at them. He was holy as long as he controlled his environment, but when he attempted to be an avatar, he couldn't deal with humanity. That is what this whole book is about. It's a great one.
 
It got here.

Went thru the Gere book ( Pilgrim )which at 12" x 13" is a coffee table book. Has about 60 B&W photos taken mostly in Tibet on right side page only. Left side of page has a number which you can use to look up info on the picture on the facing page with, in the back on a footnotes page. IMHO the footnotes give meaning to the photos and should have been printed on the page facing each photo.

Will take it with me to leave with Uncle. The photos may jostle his memories and make them more meaningful and evocative to him than to me. And Howard Wallace may be interested also.

Haven't had time to do more than skim HHDL's book Practice. From the brief excerpts I've read, it seems much like a session with an older wiser friend telling you truths you want to believe, that resonate as true inside, but cannot really be known without your actually experiencing them. And HHDL seems concerned to teach you what you need to come through those experiences.

Clearblue, thanks for the info on the books and the wisdom pubs link. It's appreciated. And will be used.

Hollowdweller, thanks for the reference to the Kornfield book. I will check it out.

For me it was a book by Andrew M. Greely titled Patience of a Saint a book of fiction about a guy who has mystical experiences. Greely, ever the sociologist, includes an afterward giving statistics on how many actually admit having those experiences.

What made it a dangerous book to read is that after you read it you ask if it really could happen to you? Seems like that is what the Great Mystery has been waiting for you to ask all along. The result can be somewhere between ecstacy and being goosed by a cattle prod.

Maybe now my signature line will make more sense.
 
"The result can be somewhere between ecstacy and being goosed by a cattle prod."

I hear you. Along the same lines here is a great quote:

"Some people have a hard time with high juice situations- they just blow out. Blowing out in high juice situations mainly stems from not keeping yourself in shape in the day to day interactions as you go along. If a kid cries, you have a choice between hearing it the first time, jumping up and doing something creative, or hanging out for a while before you do anything about it. Suppose you decide:

"I'll lay here a little longer until the kid gets a little madder"

You do that a few times, and then you come into a heavy situation...those were the exercises that would have got your psychic muscles up so you wouldn't freak out in a heavy situation." - Stephen Gaskin from Mind At Play

I believe a lot of what people pooh pooh as moral dictates in religions have to do with getting you able to handle that energy. Some are just cultural things that crept in religion, but some have to do with handling that cattle prod jolt.


;)
 
A story comes to mind about the Dalai Lama meeting what he had rembered from twenty years ago in Tibet as being a very ordinary monk. The monk had suffered for most of the twenty years in a Chinese prison and only recently escaped to freedom.

The Dalai Lama asked what had happened to him and was unsurprised to hear the monk say that much of his time in prison had been filled with great danger. "Of torture?" HHDL asked. "Oh, that too," replied the monk, "but I was referring to the great danger of anger."

HHDL quickly revised his opinion of the monk.
 
I think the Dali Lama is a great avatar. I think his expulsion from Tibet has actually broadened his perspective and allowed him to view his theology in a context beyond it's original cultural constraints. I was real surprised how he came down on the Shugden controversy. I heard he said that we should practice the dharma and not spirit worship.
 
Legalism is a problem in all religions, it seems. That leads to application of the principals ( or letter of the law ) without making the inner changes taught.

It also leads to self-justification: judging other's failures so as not to have to look yourself in the mirror and see the absolutely appaling need for change in your own soul.

One funny I've noted is the almost universal tendency of those men in recovery from substance abuse to grow facial hair. Maybe I'm being overly freudian but it seems to me they don't want to look themselves in the face.

( Did I mention I've had a beard for over ten years? )
 
There has always been a struggle in the Jewish religon between the Legalistic side and the Spiritual side, so over the last 5000 years we've had 6000 years of arguments.

Oh, I've had a beard since I turned 18, that's 19 years ago.
 
Alan Watts never owned any multi-million dollar homes, or sold any books for 100 bucks, but, if you read everything he ever wrote ( I mean really *read*) , you will have all you need to successfully pursue Buddhism, or life. After that, it's only up to you.
My 3 cents.
 
I was a 16 year old college freshman in Central California in 1966.

I was much more callow then. I still see Watts on the shelf in the used bookstores, though. And somewhere packed away in the garage are several of his books untouched since we moved in 20 years ago.

Ahh the sixties. Patty Hearst, deciding whether or not to join the Students for a Democratio Society, amd Augustus Stanley Owsley ( not up to Sandoz Labs, but the best available locally ) ergo ( or should that be ergot? ) a much more important figure of the times than Watts.
 
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