Yesterday Tamdrin told me about pilgrims who spend three years traveling from eastern Tibet to Lasa. Their mode of transportation is prostrations. They wear knee pads and hand pads, the hand pads are made of wood and look like sanding blocks. A prostration consists of squatting down, then putting your hands on the ground in front of you and pushing forward until you are prone on the ground, arms extended. Then you push yourself back up, once standing, you slap your hands together, the blocks of wood making a loud, loud smack, and then do it again. It is a slow way to travel. There are other things devotees do. They will spend 2-3 months saying 1 million repititions of a mantra. Not so hard, Tamdrin told me. If you just do 2,000 a day, it goes pretty quick. All the monks do this, some more than once.
As I listened, I thought there is no way I would want to do any of these things. It brought forward to me how different I am from these monks, whose lives are devoted to awakening.
And yet I too, feel the need to grow, explore just how much stretch life has, how much joy and love can be felt, shared, sent out to others. Somehow, prostrations don't tempt me though, as the path.
I find myself grateful for my teachers, Julie Henderson and Michael Macklin. People who have also pushed to find ways to grow.
So I hold out to the truth that life is seldom all or nothing. Like water running down hill, a path emerges if the drive to find it exists. So I poke along, looking, listening, feeling my way through this plethora of choices. Slow business, this, and yet there is a kind of peace in this slow moving, sometimes sideways, sometimes stalling, sometimes a free fall into a new space. So maybe this is my form of prostration, this slow path of moving. Who knew?
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Your path sounds like a fascinating one. We've been thinking of you.
ReplyDeleteHi, MBW is a type of German auto, no?
ReplyDeleteI am not on the road to enlightenment. I got off that road because I had to change tires, water and brake fluid. Unfortunately, the bus broke down in a little village without a mechanic. I was going to get back on the road but the sgn at the one-time junction had been changed. It now reads: construction for the next ... miles. your
tax dollars at work.
I tried clicking my heels about 1,000,000 times (not too hard to do with a 2,000 click/day regimen but hard on shoes and heels)
however, I did not arrive in Kansas, which was a huge relief.
3 feet must be a mile in the flea metric. Did you remember to drop the i? You have to do that to rotate out of the complex plane.
i B (it's kind of inscrutable)