Throughout the history of Buddhism, in particular Vajrayana Buddhism, there is reference to the “Two Accumulations” which are “Merit” and “Awareness.” Merit and awareness are sometimes translated as “Skillful Means” and “Wisdom.” These two are said to be the key to real progress in dharma practice. But what are they? We need to know. Merit and awareness are not two unconnected qualities or virtues randomly grouped together but are connected as are action and reaction. One causes the other. Merit creates awareness and greater awareness makes performing meritorious actions easier, which in turn creates even greater awareness, and so on. These two are recursive like mirrors within mirrors within mirrors. They are a chain reaction that once started is unstoppable. However getting that recursion started is what dharma practice is all about. There is the rub as Shakespeare said, getting the ball rolling.

I am up late. Can’t sleep because of a chest cold. You know the drill. And I got to thinkin’ of how important the Sun has been to me in life. I have written before about how my first life teacher Andrew McIver told me over and over again to imagine myself standing at the center of the Sun. He would growl and say “That’s hot stuff! Then years later I did just that. I imagined myself standing at the center of the sun and discovered for myself heliocentric astrology, still the most potent astrology I know of. Then later yet in my life, high in the Himalayas of Tibet at some 15,000 feet, sitting in front of His Holiness the Gyalwa Karmapa, who spoke no English, he gave me a personal dharma name, “Tenzin Nyima,” which our guide/translator said means “Keeper of the Sun, Holder of the Sun.” He had no idea I was a heliocentric astrologer, but of course he just knew. So all this comes to mind on nights like this. And I love this poem I wrote even through one of my closest friends told me so very gently that this poem was not a good one.

As I get older, I pay more attention to these unannounced impulses that arise spontaneously in my mind. Suddenly, there they are, a thought or a vision of what is to be. I am not talking about my biases or any train of thought that I am driving, not thoughts that arise out of what I wish, think I want, think I need, etc. That’s different and I am on to them. They may or may not presage anything. Sometimes they come true, but just as often, perhaps even more often, they don’t. They are just thoughts from thinking, a byproduct. However, these other kinds of impulses just come out of the blue and are not pre-meditated, not what I wish, not what I have been thinking about, would like to see happen, or whatever.

I now get to the part that is purely personal, because it involves my own experience with mind treasures, and that is, of course, all that I finally know about and have to offer. So please forgive the personal tone, which you probably are used to anyway. And I will use my experience with astrology as an example. I am not sure exactly when I began to turn away from books in favor of using the mind, but it was fairly early on. The reason was simple. Many of the ideas I was most interested in were not covered in the books I could find and, as an archivist, I could find a lot of books. As many of you know I curate what is perhaps the largest astrological library on the planet, so books I have.

This is one of my reoccurring themes, a favorite if only because it is something I have to work on every day, my accumulation of karma. In other words, I seem to accumulate karma constantly and need I tell you that not all of it is good? We accumulate karma all the time. If we move and breathe, we are imprinting and laying down tracks in our mindstream, day in and day out. And if we worry about something we cannot do anything about, we are carving and reinforcing deep grooves in our consciousness. However, it is possible to drastically cut back on our karma imprinting, but it takes discipline and practice. At least in theory, the process is easy to understand.

For years I assumed that “good karma” was something very desirable that I never could get enough of. And I knew that I was a magnet in attracting that bad karma; it was that good karma I hoped to accumulate more of. Imagine my surprise to discover that while good karma is preferable to the bad stuff, it is ultimately not that useful or worth having. How is that?

We know the Moon orbits the earth each month, shuttling between the earth and the Sun and between the Earth the outer planets, the nearest one which is Mars. It is useful to visualize how the Moon moves in relationship to being inside and outside the position of the earth in its own orbit. Think on these diagrams.

A number of you wrote of your interest in this brilliant object that appeared in the sky around June 21st of 2010, after its light traveled halfway across the known universe, a five billion year journey. I will try to put this in perspective and as I am starting to get old (tomorrow I will be 69 years of age) I get to tell you a story or two of my own experience in this type of astrology. In 1976 I published the book “Astrophysical Directions,” the result of many years work on my part on the astrology of deep space and all of the objects in it like quasars, pulsars, black holes, and what-not. At the time I was an unknown astrologer, and that book was created using my IBM Selectric typewriter, a programmable calculator, and pen and ink. There I was in my tiny office, with hardly a penny to my name, yet fascinated by what deep space was all about. This was before home computers and for every one of those thousands of space objects I had to do the trig on them individually, in order to plot them into astrologer’s zodiac coordinates.

Some of you like my photography and I often am asked how I got into it. How I began mixing my mind with photography was not intentional. It just happened, and here is the story: At that particular time in my life I had just lost my job as a consultant in which I had been involved in for some years, due to layoffs and downsizing. I literally had nothing I had to do. Suddenly here I was with no job and only time on my hands. Of course, I was in shock. Through all of this something inside me somehow broke and I was just out on my own as I had not been since I was very young. I had no schedule of any kind.

It was my favorite music event of the year, the annual 2011 Harvest Gathering up at the Bernard Farm in Lake City, a weekend of music, with three stages going all the time, almost one-hundred bands, and a feast of organic whole foods. My daughter May and her husband Seth Bernard put this on each year, with the help of scores of volunteers. The Harvest Gathering used to be for musicians only, advertised by word of mouth, three days after the music festival season is over, when hundreds of musicians gather to play with and for one another. Sure, maybe 1,000 outsiders find their way into the scene. It is the most like gatherings in the 1960s that I have ever seen. It has been going on for well over a decade.

A number of you have commented or messaged me, asking for comment on the state of modern astrology and why astrologers are, as a group, so damn poor. That is like asking me to stick my hand in a hornet nest, but I figure I am still too young to resist and too old to be afraid of repercussions. Just keep in mind that, like perhaps many of you, I have devoted my life to astrology and given it my all every step of the way. And it grieves me that astrology today is not light years ahead of where it was when I started out.

Taking good photos is not something I ever learned from books. There is always a stark gap between conceptual learning or training and direct experience. Books and teachers can but point at it, point out how to do it, more often how they did it, and not necessarily what would work for me. This is a perennial problem, the difference between book learning and actual experience. Experience involves taking the plunge into direct experience where we are out there on our own and have only our self to please. Imagine that?

Some of you have asked what the solstices are physically, so pardon if this gets technical and too much like school. I try not to be technical in my blogs, but this is an exception. And I include some diagrams to help spell it out. Our Earth orbits the Sun in essentially a large circle that takes one year to go around. That one-year circle or orbit describes a horizontal plane around the Sun called the Ecliptic or Zodiac. Earth sits in the ecliptic like a spinning top. However, the Earth does not sit up in its orbit with its north pole pointing straight up toward the north pole of the ecliptic. Instead it is tilted in its orbit by about 23.5 degrees. Earth has a perpetual list or tilt.

I don’t mean to be beating a dead horse with this solar-flare-influx material, and please feel free to ignore what follows. It has to do with how solar change comes over us, and for most of you this is probably more than the ‘enough’ you seek. I write it only for those of you who resonate to it, so that you don’t worry when it comes. Or perhaps, finally, I am just talking to myself, if that is allowed. Once again we are looking at deep solar change flooding our regular sense of our self and perhaps changing that self at a core level. And it may appear to be doing so without our knowledge or even asking our permission. Yet since this change IS our deeper self, it trumps who we thought we were. It is the new and updated ‘us’.

Thank you for all your well wishes! Yesterday my birthday was a busy one indeed, but not our Sun. We continue with a very quiet sun into today. Scientists are speculating as to whether this is officially the end of the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle. It has been some three years since the sun has been this quiet.

Among other things, an active sun, as it has been these last years, means that the sun and the solar wind (an ejection stream of particles) creates a protective envelope around itself and of course all its planets, including Earth. This shield keeps out particles and information coming from beyond the sun itself (cosmic rays and whatever) that are streaming from the center of our galaxy and other external space objects and events.

Meditation and dharma practice are about becoming more aware, but aware of what? 

Ultimately (as the Tibetan Buddhists tell us) we seek to become aware of the true nature of the mind, whatever that is. If we have to ask then we don't know; that's what we have yet to find out. However, between that and where we are today is a sea of our own endless thoughts and obscurations, literally everything standing between our current state and realizing the unobstructed nature of the mind. That's why we practice.

Looking back some forty years, the key to meditation progress (at least for me) has

been to just relax and allow the mind to rest. And by rest I mean the same thing you

mean by rest, as in "give it a rest." Resting in the present moment allows everything

whose time has come to present itself naturally. Using western psychological terms, if

we think too much about the future and trying to get to it or make it happen, we are

pushing the curve, what psychologists call being sadistic. On the other hand, if we dwell

on or overly prolong the past, we are behind the curve, as in: being dragged through life

by time. This is masochism.

The traditional shaman does not choose to be a shaman. Shamanism of this kind is the result of a series of psychological experiences (call them visions) whose very nature estranges (at least for a time) one from conventional society and the normal way of seeing things. The shaman is somehow, often against their will, thrust outside of how everyone else sees life, and into a space and a view that is markedly altered from and mostly non-communicable to the society around them. In other words, they can’t be heard and understood.

One thing I noticed a great many years ago but seldom talk about is this whole being-of-service thing. Americans are not comfortable serving others, despite what their lip service proclaims. Sure, we like to think we are all community workers at heart, but when it comes down to owning the ‘service’ label, uhh, uhh. We don’t like it. We are just uncomfortable as servants, serving others. We like to “be served.” Perhaps it is just our heritage of independence. I might never have even noticed this except for my deep interest in Asian philosophy, which finally got around to actually looking at some Asian persons. I have traveled in countries like Tibet, China, Sikkim, India, and Nepal, some of them a number of times.

It is easy to say the self is fickle and we can laugh about that. It is more difficult to dwell on the darker side of the self, like when it is frightened and in panic, although this happens too often for many of us. In fact it is rather amazing. One minute I can be calm and all is right with my world and the future looks bright. I am happy. And the next minute the phone rings or I open a letter with some bad news and my world is instantly topsy-turvy again. If the news is really bad I go into full-panic mode, which means lying on my back at 3 AM staring at the ceiling. At that point I am completely out of control and in the throes of panic.

The definitive experience during my year in Berkeley was taking LSD, acid. In the end I was not sure what it was that I was taking; almost no one did that early in the scene. It was May 6th, 1964. I was intrigued (we all were) by the drug. More important, and the final impetus to take acid, is that I had reached a point in my life (a very tight place) where I really needed an alternative view. The stories I had heard were that LSD could provide that, whatever else it was. Something had to give and in the end I was willing to take a chance. Still, I was very nervous and worried about what I might do if I took acid, lost control, and then: what? I had no idea and neither did most folks that I spoke with, and I had asked around.

I am not a researcher or scholar in all of this, and don’t want to become one. My approach is experiential and the point of these blogs for me is to understand the framework in which my life experiences fit, and perhaps to discuss it with some of you. Right off I can see that there are many different flavors or ways of viewing not only the beat generation, but how that generation segued into what we call the Sixties. While I made it a point back then to spend time in what were probably the main beat centers in America (Greenwich Village, Venice West, and North Beach), I came from and went back to my life in Ann Arbor. In other words, your experience and views may differ. And, while yesterday I offered up a lot of experiential comments for examples, today (for my own clarity) I want to work on the general framework or “view.” This will be more abstract folks, so take note.

Lately I have been thinking about that most mysterious of decades, the 1960s. I not only came of age during that time (and lived through it), but I am old enough to actually predate the advent of the hippies and ended up serving as a welcoming committee to them. As would-be beatniks, folks my age were the natural older brothers and sisters to Sixties generation. I would like to explore this topic over several blogs. I understand this may well interest but a few of us, but who cares. We can share our comments and time together. Anyway, it is snowing outside today, and winter seems to be coming on.

Continuing with my story. Unfortunately for me, I never took to schooling. I guess I am hard to teach. So have ended up teaching myself almost everything I know how to do. Well, there was one year, and one teacher. When I was in fourth grade, a benign teacher by the name of Mrs. Althouse took me under her wing. I flourished, but the very next year, in fifth grade, the mean Mrs. Ryder ended that exception and proved the rule, that I hate school. All the other years I went to school were just a long, long, and boring wait.

I am still putting the pieces of time into various order covering the transition from the beat era to the hippie era, so bear with me. One of the things I did during that transition was live in Berkeley, California. Here is a little about that time. Back in 1964, when I lived there for a year, Berkeley was a college town like Ann Arbor was, but not like Ann Arbor. Moving there was like leaping into the future, because Berkeley was years ahead of Ann Arbor in most things. It gave me a real jolt relating to time, i.e., that time really is relative. Driving out there with all my things was also like driving from winter into perpetual summer. That was so different, at least for a while.

Today I have been thinking about all of this while the snow accumulates outside my window. How does one communicate experience to another? I find myself tending to abstract everything, intellectualize it, boil it down so I don’t have to relive all the details in my own mind. It becomes more like a classroom than a one-to-one conversation. I need to slow down. That being said, the only true way is for me is to tell you what happened and let you abstract from that. To do this means I have to give personal details, stories, and actually describe what happened to me back then, that sort of thing. Now, just to contradict myself, in this blog I will give you an overall (abstract) view going in, but I will digress (or progress) into the scene as I lived it. I hope you don’t mind. No one is forcing you to read this.

What is called "The Sixties" actually didn't start until the summer of 1965, which is like halfway through the decade, so what of those little-spoken of years from 1960 through the mid-1965? I don't know what they are officially called, but I call them the Post-Beat years, and they run from the late 1950s to, as mentioned, the summer of 1965, and they were crucial in helping to make the "1960s" what they were. For one, they represented the end of the Beat Movement, the remains of that day.

I want to relate to you a dream I had many years ago, back in the early 1970s, but before I do let me share a few experiences and thoughts that led up to this very special dream. They concern the structure of space beyond our solar system and the familiar zodiac, and how it might be of value astrologically for learning more about whom we are and what on Earth we might be here for.

I first became interested in deep-space astrology through exploring heliocentric astrology, the astrology of our entire solar system. Early on, I was amazed at the difference between my standard geocentric natal chart and some of the other astrological coordinate systems such as the heliocentric and Local Space charts. At that time my interest in the space beyond and surrounding our solar system was minimal. I was put off by the billions of stellar objects out there and, on a more basic level, by the ideas of coldness and blackness I had been programmed to associate with outer space. I sure didn’t want to go out there.

Things are not always what they seem. It can be a topsy-turvy, upside-down world we live in. What we see coming in is not always the same as what we see going out. In recent blogs we have been discussing developing an awareness of our reactions, the myriad of times each day that we react despite ourselves, despite our "self." I have mentioned in earlier posts how the self opens and closes down like an iris, wincing in an attempt to control what it does not like to know. We are a victim of our own likes and dislikes. The self, with all its filters, prejudices, likes and dislikes, is like walking around in an airtight space suit, trying to protect anything we don't like from reaching us at all times.

The great solar flares run deep in the mind just now and they flutter the dovecote and stir things up, myself included. Since I can't sleep, it has me thinking back to my very first dharma teacher Andrew Gunn McIver and his main teaching. Andrew was a traveling initiator for a Rosicrucian order. I met him in the mid-1960s. He was the first human I met outside of my family that cared for me more than I knew how to care for myself. He tamed me and I became his student. When he died in 1969, it was I who saw to his burial and designed his tombstone, the symbol of the Sun. I include it here. I received my first transmission from him and I will share something here of what he taught me. I warn you that this is esoteric and abstract, so please feel free to pass it by. It is not for everyone.

It was the great Tibetan yogi-saint Milarepa who said that he didn't need to read in a text about what are called the Common Preliminaries (The Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind to the Dharma). All he had to do was look around to see that impermanence is everywhere!

Milarepa is also quoted as saying "I do not study what is written in black ink," but rather he studied everything just as it is. He looked around at nature and found the dharma clearly enunciated everywhere.

Mother Nature is a straight shooter who never blinks when we look her in the eye. It is all right there in front of us if we will just look.

Little did I know at the time that I had stumbled on the missing ingredients to my

meditation practice, and was totally mixing my mind with my practice for the first time.

Better yet, I was meditating, and no longer just practicing meditation. Somehow my

personal disappointments were being purified through this whole process. This, mixed

with true joy in deep concentration on nature, created the perfect storm for my

meditation. I had no idea this would take place. It was an adventitious byproduct.

Continuing with my story of those first Ann Arbor Blues Festivals in 1969 and 1970:

While the Prime Movers Blues Band (my group) may have missed our chance to make

it big with the Motown folks, we were right on time for that first Ann Arbor Blues Festival

in 1969. As soon as we heard about it, my brother Dan and I were all over that event.

Before we knew it, we were in complete charge of taking care of the performers as

regards food and drink. What could be better than that, especially to dole out alcohol,

which was still really big back then, especially with the blues crowd?

Tibetan Buddhism is energy efficient to an extreme degree, aerodynamically designed to fly even in the worst psychological weather. When we run out of good things to do, we can start looking at and absorbing all the so-called bad things, one by one. They contain their own demise, and more important, they contain the energy needed to fuel us on to greater awareness. If you read even a little in the Buddhist literature you will come across the Three Poisons or the Five Poisons The three basic poisons are ignorance, attachment, and aversion. These are often expanded into the Five poisons by adding pride and jealousy to the three above, so we have ignorance, attachment, aversion, pride, and jealousy. In other words, our likes, dislikes, and all that we just ignore.

Let's talk some about oracles. I like oracles a lot, but I will restrict myself here to astrology as an oracle. Astrology is essentially cultural astronomy, what on Earth these natural astrophysical events mean. We have an endless list of astronomical events we can calculate into the future, and an endless list of events we can calculate that have already happened, but what do they all mean?

Most expensive in the world? For me this is true, because we owned it and my family and I ran it, or tried to. It seemed like a wonderful idea at the time. We had this large building that had been built as a parsonage in the early 1900s. It had been a part of a business complex for a company I founded (AMG – All-Music Guide, All-Movie Guide, etc.), but I had moved that whole business to Ann Arbor and sold it. So there the building sat. I tried to rent it but no one seemed interested.

Thanks for the many notes and messages about my posts concerning the two current eclipses, the second and last being the solar eclipse (New Moon) taking place tomorrow, Sunday July 11th at 3:40 PM EDT. I have given you the ‘low-hanging fruit’ and I don’t have a lot more to communicate about eclipses short of offering a brief tutorial on solunar events in general. To understand more on eclipse one needs to learn more about the lunar cycle, I general. I am surprised to find that many of you reading this are not astrologers, but still very much following all of this. So for those of you who still have enough interest, here are a few more ideas to consider about the Sun and Moon and how they relate:

"What is the meaning of life?" a question familiar to all of us. What does life mean? As Bill Clinton might say, that depends on the meaning of "meaning," but please don't take this discussion simply as an exercise in linguistics. According to the dictionary, "meaning" is seldom anything in itself, but instead intends, conveys, indicates, shows, etc. In other words, meaning always points beyond itself. That’s the whole idea. "Meaning" is a simple reference, a label or pointer that points beyond itself, but to where? And this is where it gets interesting.

These last eleven days here at the Karma Triyana Dharmachakra Monastery located high on a mountain above the legendary Woodstock, New York have been extraordinary. I have been here many times, many long trips from Michigan and back. This series of 10-day Mahamudra intensives alone have gone on for 26 years and Margaret and I have not yet missed a one. And we have been here many other times as well, in the early years with all of our kids. Imagine that!

The teaching ended yesterday afternoon and before I knew it, one after another, my fellow dharma brothers and sisters were streaming out of the complex, loading up their cars, and heading home or to an airport. This was such a gathering of senior students. Margaret and I stayed on for another day since tomorrow is a holiday and we decided not to drive the thirteen or fourteen hour trip when the highways are so packed. So I sat outside on one of the lovely teakwood benches and watched folks leave. Many hugs were had. This elaborate mandala was breaking up.

I have been putting together a little indoor studio these last few days, since winter appears to be definitely serious about coming in and having its season. There are no flowers to shoot outside and the plants too are pretty much gone until spring. Since photography is part of my daily meditation, what to photograph now? Here is a photo of a rupa (statue) made in Nepal in the Tibetan style. This type of statue usually either has gold and/or silver overlaid or they are just plain like this one. When you order such a statue as this, you have to ask for the ‘fine’ version. These actually cost more than the ones all decked out in precious metal trim.

This blog was first published on my Facebook Wall in November of 2010. It addresses one of the more common substance addictions that I have experienced, hopefully in a candid and helpful manner. In my own life, many of these topics only became problems as I grew older. What I could easily shake off at twenty-five years of age is not so easily dismissed later on, like in my fifties, sixties, and now my seventies. I don’t have all the answers, but I do seem to have most of the questions and problems, so I thought it might be better to share my thoughts with you than to not talk about them. I hope you agree.

Now sugar is a much more touchy area with me, as I am sure it is for many of you as well. I almost didn’t go there in these discussions because it might offend those who have never considered it a problem, but I really must. For one, it is only a matter of months since I gave up sugar completely after a lifetime of enough or more than enough of it. The candy that I grew up on would choke a horse: M&Ms, Kit Kat, Hershey’s, Three Musketeers, Snickers, Crunch, Clark Bars, Mr. Goodbar, Reese’s Peanut-Butter Cups, Jujubes, Baby Ruths, Dots, Butterfingers, Heath, Oh Henry!, PayDay, Milky Way, Good & Plenty, Gum Drops, Spearmint Slices, Necco Wafers, PEZ, Charleston Chew, Chunky, Raisinets, and scores of others. How about Tootsie Rolls? Of course I ate them all.

In this last blog for this series, I really am on virgin territory. I eat too much and am too attached to food. Period! When I was young, I ate to live and was very skinny. Now I live to eat and am not very skinny. I don’t like it, but I have not been moved (properly) to do anything about it yet. Yes, I have tried to lose weight from time to time, but somehow shortly after beginning a diet of any kind it seems that the events of my life somehow manage to distract me and I wake up later and find that I am eating as much as ever, if not more. It is like bad Shamata meditation. I can’t keep my focus.

For many even the discussion of why or why not to eat meat is like talking about religion or politics. When I speak of giving up meat, I really am on more sketchy ground, for society as a whole (or even in all its parts) does not yet recognize meat as something to give up. And meat is not addictive chemically (although most meat is full of chemicals and other stuff), but rather is a habit, something we picked up eons ago. And the reasons for giving it up are not so much physical as moral. Who ever heard of an addiction that perhaps should be given up for moral reasons? Think again folks; we have many of them. Just look at Washington and the folks there we should give up for moral reasons!

I don’t consider myself much of an expert on drug addiction, because I never did drugs all that much, prescription or otherwise. I took a few ‘bennies’ (Benzedrine) back in the late 1950s, some Dexedrine in the early sixties, and a bit of Methedrine in the later 1960 during the band (performing music) days. And sure, I smoked pot from time to time back then, and ‘yes’ to Peyote, a bit of Opium, even LCD and other hallucinogens, but nothing that I later had to shake off, unless it was the aftereffects of LSD. That did take some time, and I will address this later on. For now, I will start with pot.

Well there you have a quick tour of my vices, and I am sure I am not alone in having them. When I am sometimes asked “What is the key to beating these vices,” I always have the same answer: ever greater awareness. If I can manage to develop increasing awareness of myself and my surroundings, the rest all falls into place. Awareness allows me to see where and who I am, what is good for me and what is not, aside from what my ingrained habits dictate. I am a stubborn cuss. No preacher or teacher, no amount of proselytizing is going to force me to do anything unless I check it out personally and find it is in my best interests. The one thing I have found teachers good for is showing me how (methods) to become more aware of who I am and what is happening around me.

I am a slow learner when it comes to giving up what is bad for me, slow beyond reason, probably the last of the last when forced to give up a bad habit. I don’t do it voluntarily and I don’t do it rationally. I give up what is bad for me only when faced with no alternative, like knocking on death’s door. And I am not exaggerating here as I am (so I am told) sometimes prone to. When I look back at the trail of bad habits I have left behind me as I have aged, it does not speak well of me. It is clear that I don’t learn by reason, by reading, or being told (even by a doctor) that this or that is bad for me. When it comes to my bad habits, only at the last possible moment do I change, and even then I insist on being rational, scientific, using trial and error, and god knows what else. I try each habit until the last dog dies. I want to be certain it is bad for me and I leave no stone unturned.

Now caffeine was much more of a problem for me. I really liked coffee. Notice the past tense? I liked its smell. I liked its taste, and I liked the get-up-and-go that it offered. I have had a long and happy love affair with the bean. For sure I was addicted to it, and many times. Way back in the day, when I lived in just one room on no money, it was a hot plate and the jar of instant coffee, and all the time. Instant coffee back then was really terrible tasting. I have no idea how it is today.

Alcohol was next on my list of bad habits to overcome. And although cigarettes and tobacco are pretty much guaranteed to kill you in the end, alcohol comes damn close and is, in my experience, a lot more destructive emotionally and psychologically. While tobacco is definitely in the process of killing some of my friends slowly, alcohol has been far more destructive to friends and extended family in actuality. Unlike cigarettes, which had a death-grip on me, alcohol has been somewhat kinder overall to me personally. I never really got addicted to alcohol. I was never an alcoholic, although many I knew (and know) are. I liked to drink socially, but I was not one of those people who would drink alone. It never occurred to me. In my case, alcohol was always an excuse to be social, to throw caution to the wind and tell everyone how much I loved them. I was never a mean drunk, just a stupid one, a ‘drunk’ drunk.

I marvel at the intricate sand mandalas that Tibetan monks create. These elaborate designs can take a week or more to assemble. When they are finished and the offering made, they are then swept into a pile of colored sand and scattered into a nearby river or stream, certainly a gesture of impermanence. Mandalas are offerings, which is why they are often called “mandala offerings.” We too make offerings all the time in everything we do. Ours may not all be made well or last long, but they are our offerings all the same. They are all the things we try to do and care about. Carefully constructing a mandala (doing something with love and care) is a way or an attempt to make our life sacred, to somehow consecrate our efforts and ourselves. Consecrate to whom and why?

I suppose I should say something about how things last, an enduring topic that has fascinated me for decades. And I am not talking about ordinary memories, although some of them do indeed persist. I am talking about the mind itself and the half-life of what's in it.

As we all know, the mind can be amorphous, even cloudy. Not everything in the mind is clear and shining. There are dark areas too, of course. But there are also things that shine like the sun in the firmament of mind. How does that work? What lasts and what is lasting?

Something that I imagine few readers here will know much about is what the Tibetan Buddhists call the ‘Lha.” The ‘Lha’ is an energy-body we each have that is superimposed between the physical body and our mind or mental body. It is often described as a shadow of the physical body, a complete mirror-reflection of our physical and psychological makeup. The Lha appears to be what western theosophists and psychics call the etheric body, which term itself originated from Tibetan texts.

The Inspirational Factor I thought we need a break from the Buddhist blogs and since many of you have written asking about how I approach close-up photography, here are my guidelines: The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins came up with a concept that struck me as true. He even made up his own word to describe it, “inscape.” Inscape was to Hopkins an insight into the eternal or beautiful, literally the way or sign of the beautiful. Let me explain.

I don’t know how to begin telling you about His Holiness the Karmapa. First, many of you may be uncomfortable calling anyone “His Holiness,” and I can sympathize. You would have to meet him in person to understand. I was lucky enough to meet him in 1997 when I took most of my family to Tibet to meet His Holiness the 17th Karmapa at Tsurphu Monastery, his ancestral home, located at some 15,000 feet in the mountains. I wrote about that in my book of that trip, which is a free read called “Our Pilgrimage to Tibet” at:

One of the "intangible" concepts that we need to grasp is that of attachment or clinging.

Touching my hand to a hot stove gets a reaction out of me, for sure, but that is not the

kind of reaction I am looking at here. Instead, it is our instantaneous mental reactions to

things, people, and events that are being discussed, the fact that we form attachments

(judgments positive or negative) to objects we perceive as outside ourselves and then

cling to them.

I am sorry to say that it took me many years to get the following concepts through my thick skull. Not sure what I was thinking or even if I was thinking, but I kind of let it go in one ear and out the other. Somehow it seemed like too great an effort or somehow not necessary for me to actually just do it as suggested. I guess I don't like being told what to do. That was a very big mistake on my part. This has to do with how we begin and end our dharma practice for each session (any practice), whether sitting on the cushion or out walking around.

The history of thoughts is an old story, one we all have been following for a long time. Thoughts go on forever and are more than just their content and meaning. They share a common nature, and that nature can be seen and looked at in itself. Our thoughts often end up in sentences and words. What makes sentences work is that words have gaps between them, an ocean of emptiness in which words float.

The arrangement of letters in single words is fixed, but the arrangement of words in a sentence is not. The placement of words, one up against another, creates meaning. Arranging words carefully alters meaning and involves the clash and friction of consonants, and the smooth ease of vowels. This is why spoken poetry is so powerful. A simple rearrangement of words on the page changes the meaning.

What follows is an article on practice time. How much time we devote to meditation practice is a conundrum, one that has all kinds of answers depending on how we approach it or who we ask. It is not unlike the salesman who asks "How much do you want to spend?" Of course, just starting out we tend to have no idea. How can we know what we don't know? We are just beginners

No matter how you dice it, practice is practice, and that goes for dharma practice too. Enthusiasm for what (in the beginning) amounts to rote practice is almost an oxymoron. If you aren’t enthusiastic, where is it to be found?

Well, how do you find joy right now in anything in your life? What gives you joy? Start there. People typically use a pebble or a stick for an object to focus on in basic Shamata meditation, and most often the breath. In themselves, these are not holy objects. You get extra points for using an image of the Buddha, but that is beside the point that there is no "right" object of meditation. We are welcome to pick an object we love to work with and concentrate on, especially if it helps, so make it easy on yourself.

Buddhism brings with it some concepts new to most of us here in the west. We get it that Buddha was a human (like we are) who enlightened himself, and his method (how he did it) is called the dharma. And Bodhisattvas are those on their way to becoming Buddhas. But what about that other (and more mysterious) term Bodhicitta, pronounced "bōdhi-cheatah." What is that?

Bodhicitta is one of the more subtle of the Buddhist concepts, often difficult for beginners to grasp, and yet at the same time said to be the most important in  ractice. I don't claim to know that much about Bodhicitta, but I feel it is crucial for each of us to understand at least something about what it involves.

I know, I am like a dog on a bone with this stuff. The point of this series of blogs is to help make the "intangible" tangible, to become familiar with some of the more subtle Buddhist concepts. While intellectual distinctions of this kind may appear on the surface to be overly conceptual, these particular concepts translate rather quickly to the sphere of action, where mistakes on our part have real consequences. As an example, it can be important to understand the difference between accumulating good karma and accumulating merit. They are quite different.

For years I have listened to students asking Rinpoche why are they not progressing faster in their dharma practice, and the answer almost always is: you need to accumulate more merit first. Merit, indeed, is cumulative, but we don't accumulate it ike in a merit storehouse in the sky somewhere.

The word "accumulate" is misleading in that it suggests stockpiling merit. It would be more accurate to say that merit is cumulative. Its result adds up, but its effect is to reduce our obscurations. We could say that merit helps us to accumulate less obscurations, if that sentence makes sense. I warned you that the word "accumulation" was misleading.

I would like to say something about devotion in Buddhism. And by devotion I am referring to the whole idea of having a guru or spiritual guide, and especially to being devoted (having devotion) to a human being rather than to god. This very idea makes some people very uncomfortable. And not all forms of Buddhism depend on working closely with a teacher. There are many approaches to Buddhism where studying texts, meditating together, and working in a group, class-room style, is the norm. Only what is called Vajrayana Buddhism requires a particular teacher-student relationship as an integral part of the approach, and this deserves some explanation. It took me a long time to understand it, so please hear me out.

Another strong connection I made at KTD Monastery during my recent visit was with the "hermit" as folks call him. The hermit lives in a small (very small) retreat house behind the monastery. He has been there for many years and practices in seclusion most of the time. Oh yes, I have seen him walking around, but he has never spoken to me, that is, until the day before we were to drive back home to Michigan. And it happened this way.

I was sitting on one of the large wooden teak benches under what is called the "Gampopa Gateway." From those benches I can see the peaks of some nearby mountains with all the fog and clouds that surround them. It is lovely. I was just letting my mind rest after almost two weeks of being very busy.

It takes a lot to get me out of my house and the town where I live, on the road, and traveling an hour and a half to someplace else. After all, I am the kind of person that thinks for two or three days “Do I really want to go to the grocery store?” Just what did it take for me to leave Big Rapids where I live and drive up to Traverse City on lovely Lake Michigan? The simple answer is “beans,” thirteen kinds of heirloom beans, rare varieties you and I probably have never heard of, much less tasted. But my wife Margaret knows beans, and in our family she is the champion of beans, especially rare and wonderful ones, and the moment she heard about the bean-tasting bonanza, she had her mind all set to go. I had little choice but to follow her lead, for I too like beans, especially the soupy/watery beans like you might find in authentic Mexican food, and these beans were just that: just boiled beans with a little salt. Yum.

The Heart Center was founded in late 1972/early 1973 just before the birth of our first child. It was a very special time for many reasons. The whole idea for the center came in a vision, so let me tell you about that first. I had stayed up late talking with an occult scholar in Detroit. It was very, very dry and academic, so that by the time I got back to my home in Ann Arbor, I had a headache or something like one. My head was crammed/jammed with words that made little sense. I was literally nauseous. That next morning when I got up, I was really hung over and I had not been drinking. I did not feel well. Then a strange thing happened. I found myself dropping to the floor and going through a very exact yoga exercise, sometimes called “The Cat,” as in: a cat throwing up a fur ball. Anyway… my whole body went through this spontaneous kriya and it was as if, like a snake, I shed my skin of all of that stuff from the night before, and a lot more from my past. It was a transformative experience.

No doubt, the "Harvest Gathering" is the premier music event of the season here in the Midwest, and it is no longer only a private event. Never heard of it? That was by design because up until this year, it has been a private event for musicians only. Perhaps a couple of thousand non-musicians find their way to the event or get an invite, but mostly it is musicians for musicians. For those of you who live in Michigan and have never been to the gathering, here is a quick idea of what the Harvest Gathering is all about.

No doubt, the "Harvest Gathering" is the premier music event of the season here in the Midwest, and it is no longer only a private event. Never heard of it? That was by design because up until this year, it has been a private event for musicians only. Perhaps a couple of thousand non-musicians find their way to the event or get an invite, but mostly it is musicians for musicians. For those of you who live in Michigan and have never been to the gathering, here is a quick idea of what the Harvest Gathering is all about. Now in its 10th year, The Harvest Gathering has been a place for musicians from all over the Midwest to gather at the end of the season for one big 3-day musical blow-out event. Typically there are some 70-80 bands covering all genres of music that gather to perform for each other and with each other… day and night. Most bring tents and camp out; some stay in nearby motels.

“The Golden Child” is a 1986 movie starring Eddie Murphy about a marvelous child discovered in the mountains of Tibet. The movie was based on His Holiness the 17th Karmapa who recently visited the U.S. In 1997, I traveled along with my family to meet the actual Golden Child (the 17th Karmapa) high in the mountains of Tibet. We spent three days with His Holiness at Tsurphu Monastery, his ancestral home. He was twelve years old at the time and he was ageless. Here is one photo of the 17th Karmapa from our trip. Physically he has changed, but his presence was the same then as it is today.

Here is a bit of news that dharma students will enjoy, something that is happening right now, and a message I consider to be essential, at least to me. I am talking about the adventures of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, who has now become a wandering yogi in the style of Tibetan's great yogi-saint Milarepa. I will try to be brief, but still give you the flavor. Mingyur Rinpoche, who was born in 1975, is the son of the celebrated Buddhist Dzogchen master Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, who in addition to Mingyur Rinpoche had three other sons, today all important Buddhist masters: Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche, Tsikey Chokling Rinpoche, and Tsoknyi Rinpoche.

When I first heard about the Four Thoughts, I immediately recognized that they were simply the truth. In fact, they were already rooted in my mind as how things just naturally are. They were confirmation of what is, not revelation of something new. I didn't have to get with the program, listen up, or take anything on faith. Instead I recognized that these four thoughts were simply the truth as I had come to know it myself. Here are the Four Thoughts, simply put:

The First Reversal or first “Thought That Turns the Mind Toward the Dharma” is the precious human birth. I have been to Tibet, China, Sikkim, India, Nepal, etc. and I have watched the lamas carefully brushing mosquitoes off their arms, so I know that Buddhists value all sentient beings, even mosquitoes. In Nepal I was told they give you life in prison if you hit and kill a cow with your car, and there cows wandering everywhere in the streets over there - that kind of thing. How “foreign” to those of us over here in America. And the Buddhists are even more concerned with human life. And while all human life is to be treasured, Tibetan Buddhists reserve the words “precious human life” to refer to those of us fortunate enough to be born physically able to learn the dharma (have the necessary senses) and in a country or place where the dharma is available. The fact that we are reading this here and now means that we are such people.

The Tibetan text I have used for the third of the Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind translates to:

Third,

At death there is no freedom,

Karma takes its course,

As I create my own karma,

I should therefore abandon all unwholesome action.

With this in mind,

I must observe my mindstream each day.

Karma has been a buzz word for decades, gradually working its way into the popular

idiom. What is meant by karma I am sure varies widely, but the basic idea is that for

every action there is a reaction, for every statement, a response.

Yesterday, we briefly discussed the first thought that turns the mind toward the dharma, the precious human life. In fact, the translation of what I have been reciting in Tibetan all these years for that thought goes like this:

"First,

This precious human birth,

So favorable for the practice of dharma,

Is difficult to obtain and easily lost.

At this time I must make it meaningful."

This two-week intra-eclipse time winds down as we head into the final days before the New Moon and the Solar Eclipse coming (the day after tomorrow) on Tuesday, Apri 29th at 2:15 AM EDT. As the Tibetan Buddhists point out, eclipses mark unusually sensitive times when our inner veils become more transparent and we can perhaps see into forever a little farther than usual. Certainly these last weeks have been like that for me, opening my eyes, like it or not, and pushing me beyond thought and into fresh experience – a bit of a plunge, but refreshing.

And it is hard to describe. Those classic images of what is called the 'ouroboros' come to mind, you know, the snake coiled in a circle, biting its own tail, symbolizing what has been called the "eternal return," the phoenix-like birth of the next generation.

For the most part, the folk movement at this time was oriented around covering traditional folk tunes. The folk artists originality was in how well they sang the song and not yet in the writing of contemporary songs. This is not to say that no songs were written; some were. My point is that back then it was all about the ‘singer’ in ‘singer/songwriter’ and not yet so much about the ‘songwriter’. For most of us, that came a bit later. I can remember well traveling in 1961 with Bob Dylan and stopping at Gerde’s Folk City on West 4th Street in New York. Gerde’s was ‘the’ happening place back then and the folk star of the moment in that club was a guitar virtuoso named Danny Kalb, who later became part of the group known as the “Blues Project.” Dylan was obviously jealous of the attention Kalb was getting (you could hear it in his voice), but it was not just petty jealousy. He honestly could not understand what Kalb had going for him that he didn’t. It boggled his mind. I didn’t know then that my traveling companion was “The” Bob Dylan, but I am certain he must have. After all, he had something to say that we needed to hear.

In 1957 freshman student Al Young and Bill McAdoo founded the University of Michigan Folklore Society. Today Young is the Poet Laureate of California. The Folklore Society was a natural interface between the University folk and the townies – music. As a high-school dropout I had no trouble integrating and being accepted in the folk circles. No questions were asked. We were all just ‘folk’ and it was a culturally rich scene. And Michigan was not the only campus with a folklore society. Folk music was popping up on campuses all over the nation and we were interconnected by what came to be called the folk circuit, a constant stream of folk enthusiasts that traveled from campus to campus playing and sharing folk music. The circuit went from Cambridge to New York City to Ann Arbor to Chicago to Madison to Berkeley and back again. We were hitchhiking or piling into old cars and driving the route. Musicians like Bob Dylan would hitchhike into town, hang out, play a gig or two, and be on down the road. And well-known folk singers came.

Everyone, the scientific-minded among us especially, knows the law of impermanence. Just look around you. Nothing is permanent. Even the hardest rock and diamond admits changes and eventually decays.

I love the story where the great Tibetan lama Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (in an opening address to an audience) started out with the words "Some of us will die soon, the rest a little later." That's impermanence.

THE STORY OF THE FIRE PIT I don’t know exactly how it started but for some reason I got it into my head that I wanted to build a fire pit, and not just any old little fire pit. I wanted a big fire pit with all kinds of ambiance like space and seating and a sense of being a real mandala – an offering. This was back in the early 1970s.

We usually think of feng-shui in terms of sensitivity to the outer environment, rooms, homes, etc. I learned the essence of what I know about feng-shui from His Eminence Tai Situ Rinpoche, one of the four main regents of the Karma Kagyu Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. Situ Rinpoche visited our center a number of times years ago and he freely shared his love and knowledge of feng-shui with us. For me it was like a transmission. Among other things, Tai Situ Rinpoche took us on a tour of our own home, pointing out areas of our house that compromised the sense of the peaceful living space we were trying to achieve. And while feng-shui can be as complex as you want it to be, what I learned from Situ Rinpoche boils down to becoming aware of our own innate sensitivity to space. Instinctively we know, if we will relax and trust ourselves.

I know. I don't like diagrams much either, but please humor me. This one might be useful, so hang on. The extant written teachings of Buddhism, so I am told, are an order of magnitude greater than any other religion. Although the number of volumes can vary by the particular translation, the early Pali Canon contains some 40 to 50 volumes, the Chinese Buddhist Canon is some 80,000 pages, the Tibetan Kangyur is about 108 volumes, and the Tibetan Tengyur (commentaries on the sutras and tantras) is some 225 volumes. In other words, there is a lot to read.

Yesterday, I gave a brief summary of some of the astrological indicators present in this particular Full Moon of May. As I sit here unable (it seems) to sleep, the Moon outside my window floods the night with white light as it appears to float toward being full at 7:10 AM in the coming morning. I thought I might add a few more thoughts about this particular Full Moon, perhaps a little deeper look which may be harder to grasp but still useful. Here goes:

The Prime of Life Beyond maturity or the prime of life, it is downhill for everybody – every body. There is not a higher peak of physical prowess to be obtained. Like the trajectory of a missile, our body (if exercised and cared for) will reach a peak, maintain its form for a while, and then eventually begin to fall and fail. We all know this is true. It is true for everybody, human or otherwise.

A number of you responded to my short article on my visit to the natural spring and the local water-protector spirits (nagas) that watch over the place. I am working on a video on the earth and water lords for my cable show (Spirit Grooves), so this has been on my mind. I thought some of you might enjoy an earlier article I posted on this same spring, so bear with me if some of the material was mentioned before.

Back in the fall of 2012, I was helping a friend move and had a chance to visit their new home. It was located not in a city, but on the edge of about as much wilderness as you can imagine. The view from their home inset high upon a hillside was fabulous, forest as far as you could see below and then a large lake in the distance. I was told that even the occasional wolf, bear, and cougar were to be seen, and that you don’t venture into the dense forest below the house without a companion and a compass. In fact, one person who has lived there for 38 years said he has never crossed the half-mile of forest-swamp from his home to the lake. It is impenetrable, but he has walked the distance in winter on snowshoes.

No, I am not talking about the U.S. constitution or the Monroe Doctrine. And I am not even talking about the doctrine of signatures used by herbalists and doctors all the way back to Galen. I am more referring to how mystics like Jakob Böhme used the term “signatures,” that everything signals or is a sign of its own nature and use. And I also am leaning toward what in the East is called the Great Seal, also called Mahamudra or Dzogchen or Maha-Ati, that the natural world itself is a gesture and perfectly reflects the true nature of the mind. And most of all I am simply saying that as I progress in life (that is a kind way of saying I am getting older), but I mean here (rather than aging) some kind of spiritual progression. And I should remark that it totally amazed me when I first discovered it that the Tibetan masters have biographies called Nam-Tar, where the simple facts of life, like where you went to school, your personal circumstances, and so on are not in the biography.

This is a longish one, but it might be very useful for those of you who are curious just what the Dharma Chart is all about. It has been a long journey since I first became interested in things like astrology back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I don’t know if history has always had such an exponential curve, but I do know that so much happened so fast in the 1960s that I cannot possibly tell someone who was not there (in words) how it was. This line from the poet Yeats comes close:

“Because the mountain grass,

Cannot but keep the form,

Where the mountain hare has lain.”

The astrological weather continues pretty much as described yesterday, if anything stronger and less forgiving. If this sounds ominous, that is not my point. We are into the legendary three days before the New Moon, what the Tibetans call the fierce ‘dharma protector days’ and what western astrology used to call the “devil’s days.” Well, I guess that does sound a little ominous, after all, so let me explain. The lunation cycle is winding down, finishing up, and more and more of the nonessentials in life are seen for just that and starting to pass. Remember how the Christian Bible always says “this or that came to pass?” I say, “let it pass.” We are digging through the chaff just now and hanging on to the kernels of wheat we find, clinging to the baby and letting the bathwater of the waning Moon run out.

Much is made in the Buddhist literature of the Maras, the various forms of temptation and distraction that appear as obstacles in our dharma path. And although they often are portrayed as physical entities like the three temptresses that appeared to the Buddha, this kind of imagery encourages us to look outside ourselves for Maras, when quite the opposite is the truth. Maras come not from outside us but from right inside our own mindstream. No one tempts or carries us away. We get carried away all by ourselves and the person to watch out for who does all this is us. This makes vigilance much more difficult because we literally have to watch our self.

We are once again in those dark days just before the New Moon which used to be called the ‘Devil’s Days’ in Europe and the ‘Dharma Protector Days’ in Tibet. I first saw the Tibetan dharma protectors as a child while leafing through copies of National Geographic looking for photos of half-naked women. Being raised as one of five boys (with no sisters), how is a kid to learn? The dharma protectors are those fierce-looking deities that we find in Tibetan thangka paintings and sometimes in statues. They are terrifying to see and typically are shown holding human skullcaps in their hands overflowing with brains and blood. What is that all about I wondered? And why are these three days of the dark of the Moon called dharma protector days? Are these dark days of the New Moon like Halloween, a time when all the ghouls come out?

As I grow older (and hopefully more aware) I am amazed at how the moon cycle (and the phases of the moon) seems to affect me. I should say “affects us” since astrologers (and psychologists) have pointed to the effects of the moon cycle on all of us for about as long as we have a history. The monthly moon cycle along with the daily return of the sun each morning are perhaps the oldest ways of measuring time we know of. I have spent years studying the monthly cycle of the moon in the astrology of both the east and west. In Asia the moon is given much more attention. In fact, in Tibet they don’t have birthday celebrations as we do here, when the sun returns to where it was in its orbit on the day of your birth. Instead, they celebrate and ask about where was the moon in its monthly cycle when you were born. For example, no one celebrates Buddha’s birthday but rather they celebrate the day he was enlightened or died, etc., and that is always a Full Moon or some part of the lunar cycle and not the solar cycle.

I am putting on my astrology hat on for a moment because once again we are in one of those intra-eclipse times and they don’t happen very often, a time when two eclipses occur one after the other within a two-week period. Two successive eclipses that embrace a fourteen-day period are not only rather rare but traditionally very meaningful. In this case we have a partial eclipse of the Sun on Nov. 25, 2011 and a total eclipse of the moon on Dec. 10, 2011. I have written about this before here on Facebook. Astrology is the study of these cosmic cycles and this double-eclipse period has cycled back upon us once again and we are now living through it. And each eclipse period is different. What does it mean?

A story from our pilgrimage to Tibet, for those inclined to read it.

The Crystal Cave of Guru Rinpoche I came across this photo of Guru Rinpoche, the famous statue from the Crystal Cave that we saw in Tibet and suddenly remembered the incredible climb we made to Shel Drak, the Crystal Cave. I am old enough now to tell stories, so I will share this with those of you interested. One pilgrimage spot that everyone tried to talk me out of going to was the legendary Crystal Cave (Shel Drak) of Guru Rinpoche on Crystal Mountain, a key pilgrimage site for Tibetans, in particular those of the Nyingma Lineage. It is said to represent Guru Rinpoche’s Buddha attributes. After all, this was Guru Rinpoche’s first meditation cave in Tibet. It was here that he bound the demons and Bön influences under oath. Many termas were hidden and revealed here to practitioners like Orgyen Lingpa and others. I felt I had to go there.

Americans as a rule assume the mind is good-to-go, just as it comes out of the box. Asians, at least Buddhists, don't make that assumption. On the contrary, they assume that our current state of mind, including all of its mental suffering and chatter, are just the obvious consequences of an untrained mind. Another way to say this is that if we have not learned to work with our instinctual reactions to attachments, positive or negative, we are by definition subject to whatever we react to, and that in perpetuity. In an attempt to manage our reactivity, more and more Americans are turning to meditation techniques, the most basic of which is Tranquility Meditation, the ability to simply concentrate and be mindful.

"You are no more yourself than you now here live." This quote from Shakespeare is to the point. Furthermore, we "live" not only in our physical body, but also in all of the various bodies of interest we have created. A photographer lives in his photos and cameras, a teacher in the teaching process, etc. We actually spend a lot of time in these special areas of ourselves. As dharma practitioners, we live in the body-of-knowledge we call dharma that we have created for ourselves, and so forth.

Learning meditation is a little like a cowboy roundup and then the rodeo. You have to tame the mind before you can ride it. And there is a bit of the carrot and the stick involved, only in reverse order, first the stick and then the carrot. Learning meditation takes practice and practice (for most of us) is no fun or at least not much fun. So in the beginning it is hard to get folks attention enough for them to actually do the habit-building work of learning to meditate. To facilitate this, the Tibetan Buddhists introduce us to what are called the "Common Preliminaries," which are meant to be a reality-check enough to get anyone's attention. They consist of the Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind to the Dharma, sometimes called "The Four Notions," and they are sticks, not carrots.

For the most part, I have spared you my writing on music, but every once in a while you might want to see that I know something about the topic. After all, I had a whole career as a music critic and founder of the All-Music Guide (allmusic.com), the largest collection of albums, tracks, biographies, and discographies on the planet. Here is a short excerpt from an extended essay I wrote called "Groove and Blues in Jazz." It was written for blues lovers who have trouble getting into jazz. This piece was also included in the biography of the great jazz guitarist Grant Green, titled "Grant Green: Rediscovering the Forgotten Genius of Jazz Guitar." The cover of that book is shown above.

I came down with this cold and can’t sleep, so I will tell you a story. Looking back on my life, there is an argument to be made that in my own way much of it was spent in an attempt at community. I could tell the stories of how I tried to distribute pre-tax profit to my employees, or about hiring a cook and for years offering them a free lunch, and Friday night dinners for the community, and so on. But what I will tell is a little bit about the Heart Center, which is the building right next door to where we live. The Heart Center was founded in the final days of 1972 and the first days of 1973, around the turn of the year. Way back then I was very much the occult student. I was vice president of the Michigan Theosophists and somewhat skilled in the writings of the Golden Dawn, Rudolph Steiner, Madame Blavatsky, and especially Violet M. Firth, known to the world as Dion Fortune. And let’s not forget that cultural crossover Aleister Crowley. When Crowley was still little known, I had (and studied) his complete works on microfilm, but I digress.

I have written often about the profound initiation that occurs to each of us around the age of thirty years of age at our first Saturn Return. There is another earthshaking initiation, and that is birth itself. And I am not talking about your or my birth from our point of view, but rather what our birth meant to our mother and father. Birth is also a profound initiation for mom and dad, especially if the birth is the first child. Becoming a mother or a father is a very special club, with membership valid anywhere in the world. A mother can talk to any other mother about babies, but I find fathers have less awareness of the whole event. I thought to put some of my recollections and thoughts together about the subject.

The Story of how the Tibetans and Chinese believe astrology arose in the world (and my visit to that area of the world) is worth telling, so here goes:

I had studied some Chinese astrology over the years, but never got too much beyond the “I was born in the Year of the Snake” kind of approach. I knew there was a lot more to it, but I couldn’t seem to penetrate to wherever that might be. Then in 2004, something happened that changed my approach. I have been studying Tibetan Buddhism well before 1974, and quite early on found a Tibetan lama that I clicked with and have worked with now for many years, like almost thirty. By sheer time, I guess I had become one of his senior students. Certainly I am a senior by now!

Perhaps we are not supposed to talk about the excellent and wonderful qualities of meditation, because indeed it is a long slog from learning the basic technique and habit of meditation to experiencing the fruits of actual meditation, other than as some quiet time in a day. For me this took many, many years, but not because it had to, only because I was not doing it right and thought I was. But if you have ever learned to type or play an instrument, it is no different. We have to practice, and practice is not meditating, for the most part. There is a ticket price, an ante-in, a paying of the dues, all of which are just the learning of the habit, building the basic muscle memory needed to meditate properly. If we don’t want to (or “can’t right now”) learn that, then the door to meditation remains closed to us. Every activity requiring practice is like this.