Title: FW: [globalnews] Experience of vision is mind: This culture is crazy
This beautiful and poignant message was forwarded to me from a dear friend, Dean Janoff, a Buddhist practitioner, graphics designer and videographer who has traveled the world studying with the high lamas.
Curtis
--
"Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit."
- Kahlil Gibran
Someone just sent this to me and I want to pass it along.
"RINPOCHE'S EXPERIENCE OF VISION IS MIND" - an edited excerpt from oral
teachings given by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche during the Tenth Annual Summer
Retreat, July 19, 2002
With regard to vision is mind, I'll give this example about one of my
first experiences in America. One of the
culture shocks for me coming to the West was first opening a big
refrigerator. Late one night after just arriving
in the United States, I was with friends
and we were saying to each other, "Let's cook something." There was a
huge fridge, the kind you only see in
the United States - and you'll find them even in single small houses! In
most other places in the world there are
refrigerators but none that big.
When they opened the fridge, I saw that there was so much food. Yet, the
person who opened the door said,
"Oh, there's no food. We need to go to the grocery store." For a moment,
it was a total shock for me. I thought
maybe I was seeing things incorrectly! How is it possible, I thought,
that we are looking into the same fridge
and somebody is seeing that there is no food, yet I am seeing a fridge
full of food? But, then when we went to
the grocery store I saw that what we bought were just the few extra
things we needed to cook with that were
not there.
Where I grew up in India, though, we made lunch from the leftover
breakfast. And the leftover lunch would then
be our dinner. So it was never an option that if the onion was missing,
we would skip the whole dinner plan
and run out to the store.
So, even if something is missing in the refrigerator, still, you don't
have to run to the grocery store every time.
This is a crazy culture. [laughs] When you continue to live here,
though, you
tend to forget that and not see the different perspectives. But when
you're coming here from other places and
looking freshly from another point of view, it's just amazing.
So, using the fridge as an example, just as you open the fridge, so do
you open up your life. And when you
open your life, what do you see? There is the opportunity to see, "Oh,
life is full. We have milk. We have yogurt.
We have this. We have that." You can see it's full, so full! Or, you may
open it and see, "The onion is missing;
my life is empty." [laughter] You aren't able to see how full it is
because the absence of the onion is so
powerful.
This is absolutely due to our own vision. Clearly, we have experiences
in our lives of the feeling of abundance
regardless of what we may actually have or not have. It is simply due to
our vision.
One of the greatest experiences of this that I have had, which brought
me almost to tears, was in Dolanji
(India) when a few Tibetans came there from Tibet. The conditions that
we were living in there were very poor,
but the people who came there from Tibet were basically poorer than us.
They didn't have anything. So these
few Tibetans arrived in Dolanji, and one day I went to visit them in
their room where they stayed. They greeted
me, "Oh, come in!" They were so happy, so happy. As I visited with them
there in their room they said, "Okay,
let's fix something!" Of course, in that situation, it was the opposite
of when I looked into the fridge in America.
They had nothing. I mean nothing in the sense that they had only one
plate of dried pieces of bread, leftover
bread from maybe a week earlier, and then only boiled water.
When we think about how our vision can create a feeling of abundance,
it's just amazing that someone could
experience it with just this. When they first said, "Have something," I
thought there would really be something.
Then, they brought out the dried bread and a glass of water. They had
excitedly offered it, though, and the
amazing thing was their joy. Just so much joy. And this generosity, this
giving of their dried bread and boiled
water. It was a truly amazing experience.
�
“Relaxing loosely, letting go ---
original wisdom holds it’s ground.
In the river of awareness the mud settles down
and the brightness shines!”
from - Looking Nakedly, Resting Still by Milarepa
