Dear Yogis,
If you didn’t read to the end of yesterdays newsletter, you missed the bit where I said, ALL OF MY YOGA CLASSES, TEACHER TRAINING, TAROT – EVERYTHING – ARE NOW ON LINE. The times and details are under classes, the blog, and yesterdays newsletter. Please go there. There are classes Mon, Wed, Fri, Sat and every second Sunday Teacher Training.
BUDDHAS TEACHINGS.
Every time I read the complete story of the Buddha and his times, I am surprised by the closeness of the story to the Biblical stories . Jesus a simple carpenter was the feminine energy speaking to the people. Buddha the son of a king, was the masculine energy teaching, informing the educated – he never anticipated his words being taken up by the lower castes.
In India, at the time of Buddha’s birth (yesterday?), the peoples’ assumptions about reality, could not have been more different than ours. According to the Vedas, every being was born with a debt to the Gods, other men, to the Holy men, to his ancestors, PLUS their Karmic load. More than anyone of his time, Buddha appreciated these debts, stored up by one act upon another. He realised that perfection is achieved when someone is ready to put an end to the long series of actions. When they achieve that perfection they are overtaken by a splendid lightness, and emptiness that is not empty.
When the Buddha was born he came to realise that he was here to “finish what had to be done”. His whole life was about that, played out against a hazy background. Mother, father, wife, child all barely sketched in. They do what they have to do and then are gone. Maybe that is why in ancient depictions of the Buddha he is the empty space in the centre of a scene, or at best represented by his attributes.
From his first teachings in Varanasi his words are easy, repetitive so that we can understand. Everything is numbered. The FOUR noble Truths, the Eightfold Path. A single word Dharma is now used to describe the LAW and the ELEMENTS. One word that is missing is SACRIFICE. before him this word dominated; after his teaching it was minimal. He understood that the strongest form of denial is NOT TO GIVE VOICE, not to mention something.
The Buddha untied the knot that tied the victim to the sacrificial pole. Whilst he was showing us the way he explained that everything is a knot. In treading His path we are untying one knot after the other. It is our responsibility alone, no-one can do it for us and we can’t do it for others. He saw things as so many aggregates and encouraged us to dismantle them.
We become what we cling to, what we grasp. “Men become like unto that to which they become intoxicated” were Buddhas words. We seek to know the world by being posessed by it. There is a risk here. We are like monkeys in the fig tree. The one who reaches out, always grasping, never having enough. Tied to the fig tree by the fear of leaving. Posessed by the possession.
To overcome the world we have to see it, the mind must gather itself up the way we gather a clump of grass before we use the shears and cut it. The shears are “wisdom” (prajna) and the hand that gathers up is attention.
Click on the link above (“revised back design”), to see the reverse of my new Tea Leaf Reading cards being printed…
HAVE A LOVELY DAY (Camelot here – rain at night, sunny days). I WILL SEE YOU NEXT WEEK AT ZOOM YOGA.
NAMASTE. JAHNE