In the meantime...

So, its been quite some time since I posted to this weblog. Life has been very full since I started school a month ago. While I only sit in class for 3.5 hours at most a day, soaking myself in the Tibetan language is a full time endeavor. I have relaxed significantly recently and am beginning to settle into the long haul that will be required to really learn this language. Habitually I would give myself grief for not perfectly understanding something (here, a language) that I've only really been studying formally for a month, so thankfully this tendency is beginning to relax itself as I gain awareness of it and see it for what it is.

Also, over the last few days I have been reflecting on what I feel is my most significant internal accomplishment of this life - that I have finally gained significant altitude on the most troubling inner voice in my psychology: The Critic. For those of you who are intimate with my psychology, you know that there is a significant habit pattern of crippling and indiscriminate self-judgement which has been a roadblock to my personal and spiritual development for much of my life. Beginning two years ago when I met Lama Drimed, and really taking off this year after working with Louis Carrosio, I finally am able to see the arising of this voice which bears terrible and false messages like "You're not doing this right!" or "You'll never master this!" or "No, you aren't feeling _____ strongly enough! So it doesn't count as feeling!" Following a month-long solitary meditation retreat in southern Oregon this summer and endless weeks of suffering at the heavy hand of the Critic, I finally got enough perspective on his ways and means that I am able to see him arising, and to tell him to take a hike. For this skill, I can definitely thank Ranier Maria Rilke, whose Letters to a Young Poet I read in retreat. I quote a passage which perfectly captures my new relationship to the Critic:

And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers - perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.

- Letter 9; November 4, 1904

This weekend I'm hoping to see Marcus, a friend from my Bodh Gaya days who has spent the last few weeks driving a three wheeled auto-rickshaw from Goa to somewhere in Nepal (over 2000 km - an insane distance in a contraption not designed for long-distance travel nor known for reliability). We are also having a day off of school as the Hindus celebrate Desain by (so far) blasting trance music in the emptied school yards and (soon apparently) sacrificing goats en mass and accumulating negative karma as quickly as possible.

Its really disconcerting every time I peek my head into the news-sphere and am confronted with the unfortunate reality of political discourse in America. Given that my opinion matters far less than it even minimally does normally, I will refrain from pronouncing on the subject, but instead offer my prayers that my country will get its collective shit together, start speaking in meaningfully complete sentences that convey useful information, and get in the habit of making difficult decisions about more than whether to get up and go to the refrigerator.

I hope that is extravagant enough for you!