Crazy Monkey Mind

Mingyur RinpocheMeet your Crazy Monkey Mind!

Mingyur Rinpoche gave a great talk about how our mind exaggerates tiny problems, the stress of wisdom and the meditation of sound.

He explains in a very funny way, why our Monkey Mind is so happy to get a job! In addition he shares his knowledge about the importance of the balance between wisdom and experience.

Give the video at least 11 minutes of your time until you decide if you like it or not… Warning: Watching the video might hurt your belly and make you wanna say to yourself: “I am gooooood!” 😉

/edit: the video moved on the Rigpa website. The detailed title is: Mingyur Rinpoche, public talk in Lerab Ling, 11 September 2010: Calming the Mind: The Practice of Awareness Meditation

ZEN-Sparring with Peter Ralston

Portrait of world champion Peter RalstonSparring is a form of training common to many martial arts. Although the precise form varies, it is essentially relatively ‘free-form‘ fighting…” Wikipedia.

World champion Peter Ralston and author of the books Cheng Hsin, Zen Body-Being and The Book of Not Knowing agreed to do some ‘free-form thinking’ with me. I did sent him some questions and he was so friendly to give us some kind of training with his detailed answers. Thank you, Peter!

Let’s do a warm-up:

5. Feelings: Anything we experience only has the value we put into it. If you feel hurt, who did *really* hurt you?

You have to experience not just that you are creating your emotions, but feel yourself in the act of creating the emotions.

6. Work: It seems we struggle day in, day out. What is the highest level of fighting?

One of the most important dynamics I learned while attempting to master fighting is that whenever I had trouble with an opponent ”” when the relationship was characterized as a struggle for me ”” I always found that I was mentally resisting the opponent being exactly the way that he was.

8. Love: Love is being the first one to give. Why are we afraid to love?

When you are afraid to love, or afraid of anything else for that matter, you imagine future negative consequences. If you didn”™t imagine something bad might happen, then you would love freely, wouldn”™t you?

Are you ready for the full, detailed training?
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The Stress Window

a new window conceptWhen we are stressed, our window to the world can be full of bricks, in the worst case, all we see is a plain wall. The good news is, you don’t have to be Jackie Chan (or Guy Kawasaki) to fight back your clear vision. Omar Al Rashid Bey wrote in the year 1912(!):

“You enter the room – and out of nothing evolves appearance, movement and design, body, character, strength, effectiveness, development, life in endless abundance and endless changes; from your feelings – the world.

Soon this room will appear to you large or small, high or low, light or dark, hot or cold, beautiful or ugly, or in any aspects desirable or undesirable to your senses, and every gradation between these opposites of your feelings. The ground on which you stand is under you, the ceiling you see above you, the portal through which you have entered is behind you, before you, giving wide views, the open bow, the closed wall here is to your left and that’s the right side of the room.

These are descriptions, judgments that seem indisputable – but when someone stands in front of you, he claims, the side that you refer to as the right one, is suddenly the left one for him and he says, the wall that you call the left , is now his right one. Judgments can not both be true: they are contradictory, are opposites that exclude each other, they cancel each other out.

Here happens the miracle that something with a specific attribute is used simultaneously with the opposite of the term. Who of the judges is right at the end? No one – or, if you want both. The wall is both right and left, also none of the two, neither left nor right.”

(from the German book “Das hohe Ziel der Erkenntnis”)

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The Book of Not Knowing

Book cover of The Book of not KnowingThe package from Amazon arrived and I thought: “Wow, quite heavy for one single book!” Opened the box and first of all I had to laugh 😀
Does it really take 581 pages to learn how to NOT know? In one word: Yes.

In the past I wrote about two other books of world champion Peter Ralston: Cheng Hsin and Zen Body-Being. The Book of Not Knowing is basically a manual how to dismantle Your-Self. Let’s do a flight through the table of contents (only a few extracts!):

  • Questioning the Obvious
  • A Powerful Openness
  • Beginning to Wonder
  • Knowing and Not-Knowing
  • Learning to Not-Know
  • Empty Your Cup
  • We Are Culture
  • What Is an Insight?
  • Authentic Experience
  • Honesty
  • What Is a Concept?
  • Concepts Dominate Our Perceptions
  • Masks and Hats
  • Looking for Self in All the Wrong Places
  • The Origins of Your Self
  • What Am I?
  • “Doing” versus “Being”
  • The Never-Ending Story of Me
  • Life in the Loop
  • Living as a False-Self
  • All about You
  • Social Survival
  • Survival Is Not Being
  • Changing from Reaction to Experience
  • On the Shoulders of Giants
  • Feeling Trapped
  • Creating a Place to Stand
  • Looking Both Ways
  • The Nature of Emotion
  • The Paradox of Being
  • A Final Word

Keep in mind, there are even more chapters/ topics in the book! My favorites are in the chapter The Nature of Reality: Fear and Anger

Peter leads the way a bit, provides reflective questions to help us to keep on going the path ourselves. If we would only believe the insights Peter talks about, we would just drop into another concept trap. Have you ever thought about how fear can exist? Fear is only possible in a future space-time and maybe you have already noticed, we live in the Now… A hint: fear is not pain…

Anger and a feeling of being hurt are close friends. You find the fuel for anger in your past. It’s up to you how much you feed that fire. Some let it burn until the therapist fires up the three silver bullets: “You have burnout!

If you know a lot, you are considered clever. If you don’t know much, you are labeled as dumb. Breathing in is a wise move if you like to stay alive - breathing out is considered as intelligent, too!

Besides being a manual, The Book of Not Knowing is also a kind of a dictionary, a travel guide, fun, a translator and liberator. If you are lost in translation at daytimes and are tired of your life in the loop at nighttimes, this book is for you. Thank you, Peter!

Amazon.com The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness

Short feedback from Peter:

Chris,
Thanks for writing about NK. Glad you enjoyed it.
Not sure if “Fear is not pain” will give readers a correct impression, but I doubt it really matters since they’ll have to read up on it anyway.
Thanks for the support, I appreciate it.
Peter

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Happiness cannot be found

A rainbow in France at the beachAbout happiness, rainbows and elephants by Lama Gendun Rinpoche

Happiness cannot be found
through great effort and willpower,
but is already present, in open relaxation and letting go.

Don”™t strain yourself,
there is nothing to do or undo.
Whatever momentarily arises in the body-mind
has no real importance at all, has little reality whatsoever.
Why identify with, and become attached to it,
passing judgment upon it and ourselves?

Far better to simply
let the entire game happen on its own,
springing up and falling back like waves,
without changing or manipulating anything,
and notice how everything vanishes and
reappears, magically, again and again,
time without end.

Only our searching for happiness
prevents us from seeing it.
It”™s like a vivid rainbow which you pursue without ever
catching,
or a dog chasing its own tail.

Although peace and happiness do not exist
as an actual thing or place,
it is always available
and accompanies you every instant.

Don”™t believe in the reality
of good and bad experiences;
they are like today”™s ephemeral weather,
like rainbows in the sky.

Wanting to grasp the ungraspable,
you exhaust yourself in vain.
As soon as you open and relax this tight fist of grasping,
infinite space is there – open, inviting and comfortable.

Make use of the spaciousness, this freedom and natural ease.
Don”™t search any further.
Don”™t go into the tangled jungle
looking for the great awakened elephant,
who is already resting quietly at home
in front of your own hearth.

Nothing to do or undo,
nothing to force,
nothing to want,
and nothing missing…

Emaho! Marvelous!
Everything happens by itself.

Deutsche Ãœbersetzung
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Energy for the good Life

Energy for the good LifePeanuts + Charlie Brown + iPhone
=
Energy for the good Life!

The gods of the peanut have sent a tasty tool to Earth: Peanuts now grow in the App Store! I imagine Charlie Brown installing the free app on his iPhone, while he nervously looks at the football and his brain is filled up with one single thought:

Can I kick it???

Lucy holds the ball, Charlie is ready to go – action! While sailing through the air once again, he realizes, something has to be changed. He needs more energy for the good life! But how?

Peanuts! With a loud thud he lands on his back – ouch. “Ground yourself!” was a headline on a glossy, spiritual magazine. Maybe they had a different approach…

That brings us back to the fresh way with which the National Peanut Board wants to help people to get more in balance. The free app for the iPhone/ iPad offers yummy recipes, healthful snacks and a reminder tool. Never ever again run out of peanut butter! And it grows even beyond: a Break button 🙂

Relax with a guided meditation by Stephan Bodian, author of Meditation for Dummies. The full meditation is about 12 minutes. Have a look at your iPhone’s auto-lock settings before you hit the play button. Happy chillaxing with this fine mix out of food, facts and a free-your-mind meditation app. And remember: “You are what you eat.”

iTunes: Peanuts – the free Energy for the good Life App

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Buddhism meets Star Wars

One of the key scenes of Star Wars is Luke Skywalker flying through the tunnel of the Death Star. Approaching his target, thoughts and fears cloud his vision, doubts expand in his mind like marshmallows in a microwave. Shortly before he collapses, he hears the voice of his master in his head: “Use the Force, Luke!”

Professor Dr. Gerhard Marcel Martin wrote a fine book about old sayings of the wandering monks of medieval Japan – the Hijiri. The collection is dated between 1287 and 1333. The inherent force of these sayings is enlightening even today:

#4 Disturbances don’t have priority.

Luke was surrounded by disturbances; fire towers, TIE fighters – Darth Vader. How did he reach his goal? Disturbances had no priority for him. Sure, there are as always exceptions to the rule. Next time you feel like Luke, use the Hijiri (or Jedi) force!

#22 Actions where you have to weigh up whether you should do it or not, you’d better leave undone.

A pair of proton torpedos fired by Mr Skywalker destroyed the Death Star – a pair of sonic words can exterminate a relationship. MYÅŒZEN (1184 – 1225) suggests us here to have a look at the tiny gap between our thoughts and actions. A word, once said, you cannot take back. Sure you can try to apologize, but out is out. Like the proton torpedos. Allow yourself this microsecond of time – it might make the difference between Death and Star.

Amazon.de (in German only so far) Buddhismus krass: Botschaften der japanischen Hijiri-Mönche

Feedback (in German) from Professor Dr. Gerhard Marcel Martin:

Lieber Herr Remspecher!
Endlich sage ich Dank für Ihre e-mail. Hat mich erfreut. Und ich fühle mich / mein Buch garnicht mißverstanden!
Ich war kurz in Nordkalifornien (darum die verspätete Antwort) und werde in Kürze nach Japan und Korea reisen.
Freundliche Grüße
Ihr
Gerhard Marcel Martin

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Words Of My Perfect Teacher

Sometimes you don’t need many words to describe something:

If he’s enlightened, why doesn’t he act like an enlightened being? … That’s a reasonable question, isn’t it?

Words of my perfect teacher is not only a movie, it’s also a journey inside your heart and soul. Much too often we try to fulfill somebody else’s expectations, we try to follow the rules. On our trail back to real happiness, we either will have to break some rules or  we might lose our-self. Choose wisely!

Amazon.com Words of My Perfect Teacher – DVD

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The movie of your life

Imagine you are at the cinema, you have a fine place in a relaxing armchair, the lights slowly go out. Luckily we are intelligent beings and even find the coke and our popcorn in the dark. The dark side is strong, we all know this since Star Wars, but especially in a movie theater it would be very boring to sit in the dark for two hours. With one push of a button, the projector lights up and the movie starts rolling…

Most times when we go to the movies we preselect what movie we like to see. Our decision might be based on recommendations by friends, current mood, passed workday or the media. Something moves us to choose. Let’s have a closer look to the involved elements of our movie experience:

  • Without a room – no movie
  • Without a projector – no movie
  • Without a movie – no illusion
  • Without you – no experience

The room and the projector are neutral so to say. It’s the movie and your relation to the movie which charge your emotions and thoughts. The movie wants to light up neuronal thunderstorms in your brain, that’s what it’s made for, but at the end – the trigger is in your hand or head.

What kind of movies do you select for your life? Happy, depressing, action, drama, fear, horror, romantic, trashy or do you simply feel Lost? When you watch a movie, how often do you take your eyes off the canvas or the screen? If you suddenly feel like an actor in your own life, maybe it’s time to pause the movie for a while, step back mentally and remember that the movie of your life is your choice!

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