this is hopefully hopeless...

Cam wrote recently:

Quote:

---

But I think just the recognition of distractions as distractions is also very helpful; it seems as though they come and go in disguise!

---

What else could be done??? What else could be more essential to the path? Noticing what is extra, the voice that says" I want more" or the "I want something else", seeing through our patterns and our basic delusions, our distractions and illusions, IS Buddha's activity. Buddha cannot be aware of Buddha. The eye cannot see itself. Buddha doesn't give a s.... about "itself", Buddha is blooming within a very turbulent and stormy sky, as we sit and watch the full show, the display of duality, that gaze and presence embraces them all.

That is basically why we dismiss any idea of sitting on our own shoulders. We come back to the simplicity of being fully human and work with this. Anything else belongs to cuckooland and airy-fairy whatever.
One of the greatest intuition of Trungpa was to clearly point out to the Western mind the traps and pitfalls of what he called "Spiritual materialism" that recreates the same old ego yearnings and wantings, generating hope and fears to play with.

To sit is hopeless. Hopeless. hope-less.No gain. Nothing. We sit to sit. It sounds pretty radical. But being hopless is not sad, far from that. Once that ghost dismissed, life is very full, ripe and tasty like a juicy mandarin in summer, it cannot get better than this :wink: .

a few haiku wriiten this summer that express this hopeless life:

Summer's gift
these fragile pearls
of sweat

Humid furnace
a nap in this
Freshness

first ciccadas drill
the thick moist air
sweet lullaby

gassho


Taigu

lumbering bear
slumbering
nevertheless perceives
the emptiness in form

gassho
( )

Thank you Taigu, what a nice poem ( c'est simple et très parlant, j'adore!).
Now "I want to" read again the talk Trungpa give at Boulder Zen center in 1971 about spiritual materialism...
But isn't it a kind of spiritual materialsm... :? ...
OK, I'll just sit! :D

Gassho to you "vieil ours à la plume bien tournée",

Luis

Thank you.

Nadi

Beautiful haikus! Thank you, Rev. Taigu.

Trungpa's son, Sakyong Mipham, talks about equanimity in a way I really enjoy - to be neither buoyed up by hope or weighed down by fear (hope-less, as you discuss here, and fear-less, as I have come to understand it). Another "reason" to sit.

Gassho, Jean