Back then, I also had a problem with the idea of the sacred. To my mind, the sacred was always outside myself, wrapped up in the “there” and the “then.” It was in my future and never now. It was there and never here. Of course, I wanted my life to be sacred, but I definitely identified more with the profane. It seemed I had no choice. The ‘sacred’ was something I wanted to get to, not somewhere I already was or even had been. I had not internalized it. As it turns out, the sacred is not a ‘thing’ at all, but more of a process, a way of living. I know, we label some “things” as sacred, but if you look into them, they are sacred because of their use, and the way they are used. Sacredness is an attitude, an approach to life.

Every college town probably has a local bookstore where everyone who is ‘anyone’ educated hangs out. In Ann Arbor in the late 1960s (pre-Borders), that was Centicore Books, originally on Maynard Street, but relocated to South University. Somewhere I read that the official title was “Paper Back Bookstore and Centicore Modern Poetry Shop.” It was the South University period I am writing about here. Sure there were other bookstores in Ann Arbor, but this particular one is where both the students and professors bought their books and hung out. Centicore was the place where you might run into Andy Warhol, Norman Mailer, or John Cage when they were in town. Centicore was “the” place. And what made it that ‘place’ was a single individual, Russell Gregory. He didn’t own the store but he made the store what it was. He knew more about books and literature than any of us, professors included. And he was not simply a walking inventory of book names. He had read them all and could talk to you about them with real intelligence. Literally everyone who read knew Russell.

Taken at India and Nepal

THE STRIKE: RUNNING THE GAUNTLET [Here is a story from one of our trips to Tibet and India that is good for a chuckle or two. In 1997 I took my family to meet the Karmapa, a reincarnate lama who (like the Dalai Lama) is the head of an entire lineage. The young Karmapa was the poster child for the movie “The Golden Child.” This story has to do with trying to get out of India and back into Nepal.] Coming back from India into Nepal, we had a problem. The day we were to fly back to Kathmandu from Bhadrapur in Nepal there was scheduled another of the Nepalese nationwide strike days protesting the advent of VAT taxation. In fact this time they were striking for two consecutive days and the first day was declared to be what they called “very serious.” “Very serious” means they throw rocks at you. In order not to have our vehicle stoned we had to somehow get from India into Nepal early enough in the morning so that the strikers were not yet up and about. So far, OK.

Two large X-Class solar flares in a row (like we had yesterday) is unusual, not to mention that we have had a pretty quiet sun for some time. [and a third one this morning]. This indeed is an event. Scientists concern themselves, and rightly so, with the effect of solar flares on various radio transmissions and the possibility that such a flare could bring down the communications or electric grids and cause damage that could take weeks or months to overcome. This happened in 1989, when a smallish flare took out Hydro Quebec's electric grid, leaving Canadians without power for an extended period.

The concept of marketing nostalgia (like the 1960s generation's nostalgia) to young people has got to be an oxymoron. You have to have been there to be nostalgic. This is why I am always a little embarrassed when young people think they know what the 1960s was like and try to emulate it. I don't know what it was like some days and I was there. God bless them, but my sincere comment is "as if." Time is not linear, it moves (it would seem) on an exponential curve, up and out of the reach of the next generation.

The Tibetan Mahasidda (great adept) Götsangpa Gönpo Dorje wrote: “The mind is not found through searching. It is not seen by looking. If examined, it is found to be non-existent. If grasped at, it cannot be held. If dismissed, it does not go. If placed, it does not stay. If mixed, it does not blend. It cannot be split through division. It cannot be parted by separation. It is not known through looking. It is not realized through explanations. It cannot be illustrated by any example. It cannot be arrived at through any means.”

Here is an excerpt from a Spirit Grooves video called “Minding the View,” which can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y96GLkUHX70&list=UU3cL8v4fkupc9lRtugPkkWQ&index=1

It took me many years to understand the when the meditation instructions said to let the mind rest, they meant the same kind of “rest” you and I mean when we use the term R&R, like actually rest and take it easy. In fact, the tradition has a wonderful analogy as to how you are supposed to sit and relax.

I am going to take a break from this series on the history of how I got into dharma-study to talk about an important topic: responsibility within a relationship, our sense of responsibility in relationships and how what is usually considered a virtue can instead become just another vice. This is probably a little abstract, but I hope that some of you will see what I am pointing at here and recognize it as the prevalent problem that it is. And I am speaking here about relationships, especially close relationships like love and marriage. Let me know if this connects please.

I am taking off my story-telling hat and putting on my didactic hat, because I keep running across folks in my life that have managed to paint themselves into one corner or another because they react instead of respond. It makes me want to comment, and I am. I have been counseling for something like 45 years now, and I want to share with you what I find to be a key factor in that experience. Much of what takes place in a counseling session boils down to how a person responds to what is happening to them in their life. We can’t control what others say and do to us personally, much less what happens in the outside world of news events. That is what dictators try to do and they all eventually fail.

Last Saturday I had the privilege of attending an empowerment by the Venerable Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche. This took place in Columbus, Ohio at the KTC (Karma Thegsum Chöling) dharma center. A Tibetan Buddhist empowerment (for those of you who may be unfamiliar with this term) is a ceremony in which the empowering master administers a particular quality directly to those present – an initiation. The Tibetan word for empowerment is “wang,” which literally means “power,” so that kind of says it all.

I grew into Buddhism with the idea that it was a graduated path, probably a linear continuum starting from where I am practicing now straight on to my eventual enlightenment -- something like that. I have since found out, in fact, that the actual path to enlightenment is more like an exponential curve, and that it has a very clear speed bump not far from the beginning, more like a dead stop. I wish I had understood earlier that there is this stepping stone (a full stop) between the dharma practice we are doing today and the eventual road to our enlightenment. There is what in esoteric studies is called a ring-pass-not, an event which must take place within us before we can proceed further. In other words, between practicing dharma as we now do and the road to actual enlightenment, there is an intermediate stage or major step that, while not enlightenment itself, we must negotiate before we can pass through and onward. It comes up as we get into Insight meditation.

Readers here know that I am all about solar flares and CME Events (Coronal Mass Ejection) as they affect us psychologically and perhaps spiritually. I monitor for intense solar activity daily and compare what I sense happening to me internally with the various intense solar phenomena charted by astrophysicists on the government sites. I often report here what is happening. However, it is clear to me that I sense deep inner changes at times when there is no registered solar activity. I have had no way to explain this to myself, but now there is a fascinating clue.

What is the difference between the two very popular terms often used by Buddhists: experience and realization. It is worth being clear about. Experience is what we are all having every day of our lives, and this includes our metaphysical or sacred experiences. When we are talking about spiritual experiences, the bottom line is that they are not permanent. What goes up comes down, sooner or later. That is the hallmark of all experience: it does not last. We all know this. Heaven knows, when I have some kind of epiphany (or the least spiritual insight) I hope it will last. I act as if it will last and certainly blab to others as if it is now a permanent state that I am living. The sad truth is that these experiences do not last. What is up one day (i.e. me) is almost certain to be down the next day or soon after that.

Like going to school for a single class or to church only on Sunday for an hour, with that amount of practice we get what we pay for. An hour or so a week gets us an hour or so a week of training, nothing more. Think it through. If we practiced an hour a week on guitar, we would not exactly be the musician we envisioned.

I don't intend this to sound too harsh, but even an hour a day of practice leaves 23 hours to unravel what we have done and generally accumulate karma. Part-time solutions seldom satisfy full-time needs.

Something I often write about is responsibility, literally: the ability to respond. We all have it in us somewhere, but not always at the ready. It is one of the byproducts of successful dharma practice to bring out our ability to respond. And an ability to respond can be contrasted with how we react to life. In fact, there is a case to be made that the difference between enlightened or skillful action and unenlightened or unskillful action is the difference between involuntarily reacting to an event and appropriately responding to it.

My Big Fat Self: Me, Myself, and I This is me doing an “Andy Rooney” or “George Carlin” type of monologue, just for fun. My serious friends can just skip this please. I want to tell you about myself, but I don’t want to offend you. I know that this whole ‘self’ thing is a sensitive issue and not always a popular topic, but I notice that myself seems to never be far from my thoughts. On the one hand I have been told not to be selfish, and at the same time, in another breath, I am told to be sure to always be myself. So which is it?

I imagine many readers are tired of these little dharma discussions. Why can't I write somethinga little lighter? Well, I probably could if I wanted to, but to be perfectly honest, I am fascinated with the mind, how it works, and how we can become more aware. It is that simple. It is unfortunate that mind training and meditation are not more valued in this society. They are so precious.

For example, we all know that we can lose a limb and still be present, but we also know that if we lose our mind, we are no longer really there. Well, I feel the same way about using the mind. The mind is not good-to-go just as it is. Most of us are severely obscured and don't even know it. If we don't learn to clarify and properly use the mind, we are at a great disadvantage.

I am receiving various requests for historical documents, dates, posters, graphics, etc. on my old 1960’s band the “Prime Movers Blues Band,” The reason for the requests usually is because Iggy Pop was are drummer, and folks want to know more about Iggy, so here are some of what I could find easily. The posters I personally designed and silkscreen are marked as such, as well as the graphic designers of the other posters, where known. Flyers and what-not are just posted here. I may not know who designed them. The Prime Movers Blues Band formed in the summer of 1965, the same time as the Grateful Dead formed out in San Francisco.

Yesterday it was like Indian Summer here and today it is not. A little rain, some arctic air, and here we are right on the verge of frost. Winter will be a while yet, but the subpoena has been delivered. I got it. My first reaction today was to make a huge pot of vegetarian chili, with lots of celery in it. Being indoors all day is tough; closing the windows so air does not flow through the house is tougher. As they say, "The frost is on the pumpkin," well, almost anyway. We are bringing in the house plants. 

What follows is not an essay, but just some of my musings, so I hope they can be accepted for what they are. I have been thinking about this present moment.

Meditation requires practice and practice is kind of boring or can be whether it is practicing scales and fingering on a guitar or practicing meditation. Our practice is not the result or fruition of meditation practice but only the means of forming a habit that can bring us toward that fruition, call it realization, awareness, or whatever. The practice of meditation is like any other form of practice, preliminary by design. It is practice and not the real thing. That is why we call it meditation ‘practice’ as in “I am now going to do my practice.” That says it all.

Meditation and the practice of meditation, two different things. I have written here many times how meditation is first about building a habit and only later can it be said that we are “meditating,” much later for most of us. Like the scaffolding on a building, meditation “practice” is just that, practicing meditation, and not meditation itself. The practice or habit-building part of meditation has to eventually be let go of or removed, leaving room for the actual meditation itself. In order to learn to meditate, we must practice the process of meditating. We must learn it. It is a little like those molds that form Jell-O our moms had when we were kids. When the molds are taken away, the form remains. This is sometimes called muscle memory or just plain habit.

I have written here many times how meditation is first about building a habit and only later can it be said that we are “meditating,” like: much later for most of us. Like the scaffolding on a building, meditation “practice” is just that, practicing meditation, and not meditation itself. The practice or habit-building part of meditation has to eventually be let go of or removed, leaving room for the actual meditation itself. It is a little like those molds that form Jell-O our moms had when we were kids. When they are taken away, the form remains.

The following article is new and here is a link for a free download of a new book for those interested in learning meditation. It is the last book in this list: http://dharmagrooves.com/e-Books.aspx#Dharma In many Buddhist practices, in particular the yidam or deity practices, toward the end of the practice we rest for a moment in the nature of the mind or try to, but until we actually have recognized the true nature of the mind, we are just going through the motions. That's what practice is.

I want to hammer on this purity thing again. Purity is not a dirty word. For me, purification was as simple as wanting to be pure to the point of finally voluntarily shedding some of the trappings that I thought distinguished me from being just plainvanilla, only to find that plain vanilla, what is called "ordinary mind," is what I always thirsted for in the first place.

Many of you are interested in nature photographs and want to know a little more about my work. Perhaps most important to know is that I have been a naturalist since I was six years old, and very intense about it at that. Nature study is mostly what I did from an early age onward until my late teens, and I took my parents with me. My whole family learned probably more than they wanted to know about the natural world because my room and our house was soon filled with every kind of animal and collection you could imagine. I raised skunks, squirrels, boa constrictors, copperheads, rattlesnakes, rabbits, possums, raccoons, frogs, etc., and I had collections of insects, fossils, rocks, leaves, shells, and you-name-it.

What follows is a little abstract, for which I apologize, but I hope you will find it more than worth the effort to slowly read through it until at least understanding occurs. This is about Vipassana, what is called "Insight Meditation."

Thoughts and thinking are an integral part of meditation, but they are often looked down on by even good meditators, but this (or so the great meditators tell us) is a big mistake.

In other words, thoughts are too often thought of as distractions that need to be eliminated in meditation, when in reality thoughts are what pull us out of our distractions, and only thoughts. Without thoughts we would permanently remain in a closed loop – a hopeless catch-22. The Tibetan Buddhists teach that thoughts are not distractions, but rather they are opportunities for awareness itself to break through the cloister of our mental firewall and wake us up. In fact the great meditation master Phagmo Drupa, a disciple of Lord Gampopa, said this:

"Thoughts are awareness."

grew up in the folk-scene environment of the late 1950s and beyond. Even back then Pete Seeger was a landmark, a single person who perhaps best represented what the folk music scene was all about to me. So much of that world revolved around Seeger. Even when the younger players begin to emerge, Pete Seeger was always in there somewhere, just being himself. Seeger has passed on, but will never be gone. He is like a rock that has always been there. I was very much part of that folk scene, so perhaps a little history is in order.

This will probably be my last blog in this series on transferring one’s consciousness from focusing exclusively on one’s personality, to something more inclusive and (note this please) less impermanent. In the transference process, we don’t abandon our personality, but we do learn to manage it or, as I tell myself, I put my personality out to pasture, and perpetually (and gently) care for it as I would care for any other person, but I no longer let it exclusively “drive the car.” In the metaphor of astrology that I have been using, we discover our heliocentric chart, our Dharma Chart. In the process we loosen our death-grip (at least a bit) on our personality and ego. We simply transfer our consciousness.

I have had some fun of late poking at our concept of a self, pointing out that it is a collection of attachments and even those are ever changing. And although the Self is, as I put it, a case of “permanent impermanence,” this does not mean that our self is useless or not interesting. It is useful and can even be fascinating; this is perhaps best seen in the different types of persons around us, as in: our personalities. We each build our personality by the choices we make and the things we like and only time will tell if we have made the right choices or not. Most of us would like to have an attractive or interesting personality and the endless stream of popular magazines is testimony to the fact that imitating what is considered “cool” is the way many personalities are put together these days. We copy, big time. Monkey see, monkey do.

I want to write about my personal memories of that first Ann Arbor Blues Festival in early August of 1969. I already wrote the text for a whole (award-winning) book about the festival, but it was mostly the general history of the festival. You can find it here:

http://www.amazon.com/Blues-Black-White-Landmark-Festivals/dp/0472116959/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386328730&sr=8-1&keywords=blues+in+black+and+white

I have yet to write my own personal story of that event, so I am working on this for a short video I am putting together. I thought I might post some thoughts here, if you don't mind. And I have to back up a bit and first talk about how it was for me way back then in the 1960s.

According to the Buddhist view, our personality and "Self" is nothing more than a composite image or montage of attachments, all our personal likes and dislikes. I mean, it's right there in the word "persona" if I would just read the dictionary, often defined as social facade or mask, but masking what? And what is behind the mask?

I sometimes think the mask of personality (self image) is like those old view cameras where the photographer holds up a little stuffed bird and calls out "watch the birdie" while he snaps away. Anyway, that's what we seem to do with the self, focus on the personality or self image surrounding a person (or ourselves), rather than what is inside or behind it. We see the cover and not the book. What is inside?

I am Western, not Asian. Years ago I studied Western philosophy and psychology, and not just once-over-lightly. For example, I liked the author Dostoevsky so much that I read all 52 of his novels, and I then took the Russian language in school; that kind of study. I read almost of all of the philosopher Hegel, and so on. But there was something in Western literature and philosophy that I found to be confusing and this led me into Eastern philosophy and psychology, from which I have never returned. I want to tell you something about what that was. It has to do with myself. Here in the West, the Ego or Self is a big deal, the big tar baby, something to wrestle with, try to overcome, and not get stuck in. Good luck! On the one hand we are told from early on not to be self-centered or selfish, not to think of our self so much and to think only of others. Then, on the other hand, we are told to love ourselves, to find and discover our self, and above all to always “be’ ourselves. Do you see the ambiguity in these two approaches?

It occurred to me early on, shortly after meeting my main Tibetan dharma teacher (for the last 31 years) Khenpo Rinpoche, that the natural practice for Americans (and westerners in general) was a mind-training technique called Tong-Len. Perhaps even more essential than basic sitting meditation, Tong-Len, if presented properly, is instantly understandable to Americans. In fact, Tong-Len was the first practice that Rinpoche pointed out to Margaret and me on one of the coldest days of the year, those Limbo days between Christmas and New Year. It was 1983.

Now here is a touchy issue, my own emotional upheavals. When I discover (I don't always even know) that I am emotionally upset by something, I have learned I must be much more careful than usual. Years ago I had a little mantra that I whispered to myself, "We will withstand shocks out-breaking." I have no idea who I meant by "we," but I guess it was all of us. Anyway, back then (much like now) emotional shocks of one sort of another were always out-breaking. Let's face it; some things in life (even little things) are hard to take, especially if we are sensitive.

Way back at the beginning of my attempts to meditate, I used to wonder how silly I must look sitting there trying to meditate, much less saying prayers of any kind. I seemed like such a hypocrite for, after all, I am not particularly religious. At that time I was probably in full reaction to my Catholic upbringing, which was, spiritually speaking, rather brutal. Anything that smacked of religion or laying down the law was immediately off the menu.

My experience in Catholic school, catechism class, mass on Sundays, and being an altar boy left its mark. About the only good thing that came from my brush with Catholicism was a sense of mystery about life, and a flair for the mystical. Everything else was something to suppress in my memory. And I was so innocent, as this story will tell.

Once in a while my "self" falls off the wagon, like after a push of change from a large solar flare. When I am out-of-phase with myself, there are suddenly two of us, the uncomfortable me that feels at a loss and the other "me" that I used to be, which I know is now only a memory of what I recently was when I felt "non-dual." My very conservative "self" would prefer to be that way again. But synching the two of us together is not always an easy task, at least for me. You can't go home again, as they say, or even step in the same river twice (or even once some Zen Buddhists say).

Although today it seems like some far off dream, only a few short years ago I was high in the mountains of Tibet at Tsurphu Monastery (the seat of the Karma Kagyu Lineage), where I met His Holiness Urgyen Trinley Dorje, the 17th Gyalwa Karmapa. All of this is even more remarkable since my friends know that I hate airplanes and seldom travel far from my home in mid-Michigan. Although I have been interested in Buddhism for many years, I never seriously considered going to Tibet. Then suddenly, in less than a month, I am in Tibet, along with my wife, two daughters, and young son. How does such an event happen to a middle-aged businessman? It happens when your lama tells you to go to Tibet as soon as we could manage it. Here is our story:

First, these are two different charts calculated for the same exact birth moment and the same planets, but each from a different perspective or view. So, what you have here are not different entities (you are the entity), but rather different views of the same entity and the same moment in time. We are talking astrology here. The one chart, let's call it your "Karma Chart," is the standard traditional astrology chart used for centuries and probably millennia. And there is nothing new here that I have added. This karma chart has always been a chart of the personality (how we appear, with ascendant and houses, etc.), you know, the particular Earth-centered circumstances in which each of us find ourselves embedded in and looking out through the lens of our particular personality, which some poets have referred to as that "terrible crystal." The personality eventually grows old and dies. That kind of thing.