a room this big

A friend just posted this on facebook and I thought I would share it here as I haven't updated in a while.

One of the worst kinds of elevation of the self is playing the victim. There are times when we actually are victims, when actual blame is appropriate, but to take on the identity of a victim and be stuck blaming is something else. Surprisingly, it is actually a subtle form of elevation—I’m not responsible, you are. This is giving up all freedom.

- Nancy Baker, "The Seventh Zen Precept"

love always,
Samuel

New Things

I want to post another link to my music. This is the latest Media Them album.



I am listening to it right now as a sort of review. I just woke up and it goes really nicely with some light Saturday morning work. I am sort of proud of it, but that's not why I made it.

I have thought a great deal about the short verse I wrote about in my previous post. It stands the test of my own critical eye, as well as the test of bringing it up and contemplating it up later. I like it. I am currently reading a small pamphlet called Buddhism and Social Action by Ken Jones. One can find it here: Access To Insight. In the first few pages, Jones talks about creating Utopias in an effort to curb suffering in the world. I was reminded of my verse when I read what he was saying. By attempting to bring a "perfect" social order to the world, we are denying that Utopia may be in our own heart. And we may also be denying the fact that so much of suffering originates purely from within. This is why I introduce the idea of utopia being in one's heart by stating that one should "embrace impermanence" and "end suffering."


love always,
Samuel

Poetry

Embrance impermanence,
End suffering.
Utopia is in your heart.

I wrote the above quote on the wall of a visitor's center in New Harmony, IN when I was visiting with a couple of friends. I have written a few things like this over the years. I think that it is in all honesty that I can say I have not really been that satisfied with some of what I have written along this vein. However, after sitting on this for a while, I can say that it stands the test of my own critical mind.


love always,
Samuel

finishing

I now have nice albums up on the front page of my bandcamp.com site. I am satisfied fully with all of them, and I know that there are at least two that are elsewhere on the site that I would not want to disown at all either. So, I think that I have "done that." There is a part of me that thinks it is about time for me to take some of that ambition and let it start influencing a different aspect of my many projects. I have finished two paintings recently and I'm working on two more sort of. I am probably going to take a lot more time and really get down in to the nitty gritty for the next list of songs I work on. So, what do I do in the meantime? I save up for the trip to Colorado! And I continue working on the paintings I'm trying to finish (one will take a while and the other could be done tonight). My poetry books are still the biggest ongoing project I have ever undertaken.

Sounds like I have a lot of stuff on my plate. Why do I still have the itch to record? Because I have so much material now and I want to keep it going! Momentum is nice...until you want to slow it down a little bit.


love always,
Samuel

nothing

love always,
Samuel

quote

"An inward-staying
unentangled knowing,
All outward-going knowing
cast aside."

--Upasika Kee Nanayon


love always,
Samuel

Newest Project

I just finished a new album. I am really satisfied with it and happy with the way it turned out.





love always,
Samuel

after past

I haven't written in here in a long time.
I have written in here recently.

in here

Water runs down the mountain.

I haven't
I have

Written in a long time.
Written in a long time.

in a long time

Written.
Written.


love always,
Samuel

Old New

"So even for the most 'modern' people, including the intelligentsia who theoretically should know better, any sustained focus on the conditioned, conventional nature of their own perceptions remains taboo. They proceed through life guiding their actions by whatever standards their community has taught them to accept as their own. In a pluralistic society, without a single, unanimously accepted set of values, they can flatter themselves all the more that they have freely chosen what they believe on the basis of their experience of reality. No one cares to notice how circumscribed is the range of options upon which this 'free choice' operates. People are sure that they have 'made up their own minds' (about what to believe and how to act) on the basis of the facts.
But from the Buddhist point of view, it is precisely the sense of certainty, this insistence that one's own conventional notions of reality are reality (and the parallel fiction that they are one's own), is the linchpin of delusion. This may be why, when they are exposed to Buddhist ideas on this subject, the defenders of conventional thinking in all cultures, from classical India to medieval China to the modern West, have found Buddhism so irritating, and so threatening."

-- J.C. Cleary
A Tune Beyond the Clouds


love always,
Samuel

responding via post

Finding an empirical way of defining what causes depression in every case would be just another way of describing Karma by giving it a new name. I would like to suggest my response to the following question:

"What are the factors that create depression?"

Look deeply into your own experience and try to find the cause of your current state of mind. Causes for one's state of mind are different for everybody. However, what is similar for those who have depression is the manner in which they respond to stimuli. For my own experience with depression I could describe it as this:

"I'm not happy enough to know why I am depressed and that makes me depressed."

Clearly, it seems like it is a circular type of existence that begins with grasping towards being happy.


I paraphrased the above from something I was going to post on a discussion forum. Somebody was asking about depression, but I thought that it would be more appropriate for me to post it here instead of there.


love always,
Samuel