Nun of Your Business

I'm reading a book about a time traveler. It makes me wonder abou t this question I had on the table: " How to decide what to practice ." Don't our doubts about Dharma practice stem from not knowing whether it's going to give any results? Not knowing how it's going to turn out? We are told by our lamas that the process of transforming from an ordinary being into an enlightened being takes many lifetimes . His Holiness the Dalai Lama wants us to be willing and prepared to practice for eons, and not to ask how long it will take, like a child on a car trip, "Are we almost there yet?" So what am I expecting? To be able to jump into the future to check whether it's working? How am I supposed to know whether something that takes more than this lifetime is working or not? I am imagining myself jumping ahead 10 or 20 years , or maybe 2 or 3 lifetimes, and looking back to the causes that I am creating now. What will I deduce? And yet, here I am "jum...

What's the usual way that we decide to spend our time ? How do we decide? Some things we just decide once and then we have to keep doing it . Like accepting a job and then having to show up every day in order to keep that job. Or maybe you have to re-decide every day. Do I still want to keep this job or not? Should I get out of bed or not? Once you have a baby, then I guess a lot of things are decided for you. Have to get up in the middle of the night to feed it, have to change diapers. Years of activities are decided by that one act of having a baby. Maybe most people fill up their lives like that, making a few big decisions which then use up all their time. But what about the spare time ? How about for those of us who still have some free time, or could rearrange things to fit something extra in? How do you decide what to do then? Mainly pleasure, I think. If it feels good, do it. Right? Eat something nice, sit on a soft seat, read a fun book, watch an exciting movie, flirt, h...

Sometimes people tell me that they can't relate to certain things, like the images of buddhist deities with multiple arms and heads and strange accoutrements. So, I've been thinking about what it means to relate to something. It seems to mean that you are familiar with it. There is something in your experience which is similar enough to connect with this new thing that you are seeing or hearing. You already have a category in your mind to slip this new thing into. As spiritual adventurers, we have to be more flexible than the average person in expanding our minds to make room for new ideas and images. Maybe a new category needs to be added to your range of acceptable experiences. On the other hand, there is an idea in Buddhism that the enlightened beings--the buddhas--manifest in ordinary forms precisely so that ordinary beings can relate to them. The buddhas have various levels of being called 'kayas', or literally 'bodies'. The Dharmakaya is not a body at all,...