http://www.ralphmag.org/DO/briefs.html
He is a guy who will talk for awhile about Nirvana --- called here Nibbana --- and then go off to see a sex show or visit a whore house; he is one who will have a few beers before going off to meditate in a wat. He eats some pot pizza, has visions, and then watches horrified as one of the political heavies of Phnom Penh gets shot right there in front of him. He is up to here with facts: that Thich Quang Duc (the monk who immolated himself in 1963) wasn't protesting the Viet-Nam war but, rather, the Catholics of South Viet Nam who closed down the Buddhist temples, hounded and murdered Buddhist priests. He suggests that the Buddha was truly a Socratic thinker , one who existed long before Socrates, whose message was *don't take it on faith; try it and see if it works.* Nibbana is not some far off paradise-in-the-sky. It's here, right now, but most Westeners don't get it because we are "always becoming." Nibbbana arrives when one has given up something very simple: desire. To abandon desire means abandoning pain. He compares the universe to a laser photograph: All of a picture is included in any of the tiny portions of the negative ... thus, "the whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it." Most of all, Asma has a love for the Cambodian Khmer world, which he conveys it with simplicity: *I'd sit down at a sidewalk food stand, and the proprietor might come sit next to me smiling and introducing family members, while an elephant lumbered by slowly, and a man with no legs or lower torso rolled up on a cart and took my shoes off for shining, and a snack plate of barbecued insects appeared on the table, followed by an amazing fish dish served inside a halved coconut, and the streets might literally flood in minutes with monsoon rains, leaving motos and cyclos to wobble slowly through the muddy streets. I was forced to focus on everything because everything seemed to require it --- I had to practice mindfulness by necessity. But even though my mindfulness was almost coerced by the exotic environment of Southeast Asia, I did carry some of that appreciation back to my less exotic life in Chicago."* Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
