Words of the Buddha

You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.


This is an unsourced quote I got off an internet list, but it sounds like the Buddha to me. A persistent problem Westerners face, which apparently is absent in Tibetans, is the tendency to continually and obsessively self-criticize. To hold ourselves to higher standards than anyone else, and suffer inner dejection when we fail to meet those expectations. It is as though we are constantly stabbing ourselves with a knife, over and over and over again. Wouldn't it be great if we stopped? There's a difference between stabbing yourself with a knife and openly, warmly, compassionately assessing yourself. If you feel like you did something wrong, I'm not saying you shouldn't admit it, but it is better to lovingly accept yourself than to think "I'm no good." In fact the ability to merely see yourself as you are is a wisdom aspect of your mind, so when you notice certain things about yourself, even those you'd rather not accept, you are coming in contact with your own wisdom deity, your own Buddha nature. Or maybe it's better to say your inner wisdom nature is being revealed.

My Status

I haven't been posting as much lately, because my blogger energy has been depleted. When I began the path of recovery and I first began the Buddhist path, there was a lot I didn't understand and a lot I felt I needed to share in order to make progress. At this stage in my path, I don't have that same need, and have therefore stopped publishing regularly. Also, to be totally honest, I have started hanging out on Facebook and that has drained the energy I normally would funnel into a blog post. I posted the story about Lama Chenrezi's blessing because it was such a remarkable event of direct interest to my readers.

Anyway, I have no interest in drinking again, today. Alcohol robs you of your experience. It's like turning on a dimmer switch in your mind. There are outer appearances of having fun. People can be laughing, but in reality you are not present. Why would I want to do that? It's like grabbing for a vase of flowers, that starts to disappear every time you reach for it, but in reality far worse. There's a peculiar mental twist in alcoholics, which for some reason, only remembers the good parts of drinking, however illusory, and never fully contemplates the reality.

Lama Chenrezi's Blessing

Suppose a catastrophe was about to happen, and that you prayed and said mantras in order to avert it. Suppose then that you saw many Buddha and Chenrezi images and statues in a totally unexpected context, and that an event occurred to avert the catastrophe. That would be something that would make you think wouldn't it? Such a thing happened to me. A friend of mine was taking me to some good jazz, which I was looking forward to, but at one point he essentially listed what he expected to do at the club, and it involved us "washing down a couple of beers." For some reason my mind started playing with that, and thinking, well I've had enough meditative training that I might be able to drink a beer for social reasons without it leading down the inevitable path of self-destruction. This thought scared me enough to pray to the Lama and say mantras. The desire was still there as we were waiting for the subway, and suddenly the thought occurred to me that my playing with the thought to drink so obsessively was itself a sign that I was not going to be able to drink normally.
I kept saying mantras, and then my brother called, and it was awesome because he said he would come with me to the club, and I was able to tell him on the phone that I wasn't going to drink anything, in front of my other friend. Such a silly thing it seems, but it was tremendously important at the time. Right after that, we passed multiple shops with Buddhist statues in the window, and it seemed totally natural to me, and yet it was totally unexpected, because these were statues in the Tibetan tradition: statues of the Buddha, statues of Chenrezi. The odds of coming across such a thing are pretty slim, actually. It felt to me like the seal on the blessing that allowed my brother to unknowingly come to my rescue like that.

This reminds me of something I've heard multiple times in A.A. Everyone, at some point, the saying goes, will have no defense against that first drink, and such a defense must come from a higher power. It is amazing how closely my experience fits this general mold. I am not about to try to figure out how this happens to Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists etc. Clearly it does. The fact that all of these religions seem inconsistent is irrelevant to the true practitioner I think.