New full-length podcasts now available on iTunes.

Thanks to a request for longer teachings via iTunes, we have launched "Inciting Happiness," full-length, two hour podcasts by Lama Marut. Please visit aci-la.org to subscribe. Many thanks to Judith Ring and Bob Arnold for launching the project.

These “Dharma in the Media” newsletters have really been fun to put together and we hope you have enjoyed them. We regret that this will be the last edition of the bi-monthly “Dharma in the Media” newsletter. We’ll also be concluding the Lama Marut Newsletter with next month’s finale as we move into a more retreat-oriented lifestyle beginning in September.

Subscribers to the Lama Marut newsletter will automatically be subscribed to the new quarterly “Awakenings” e-magazine. Lama Marut will be contributing an article to each edition of this magazine and you’ll be able to keep up with our teaching schedule and other news in “Awakenings.”

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> http://faithandleadership.com/blog/04-23-2010/scott-benhase-stability-seeks-god-the-ordinary

David Simmons finds the most interesting stories! Check this one out: “Here’s someone with very interesting karma,” writes David. Published in the Corpus Christi Caller Times on July 2, 2010, and written by Mike Baird. The article is headlined, “Bishop native wins millions for 4th time." If you still are holding on to the idea that things happen randomly (see below for the comment that this lady was “born under a lucky star”), go ahead and try to calculate the odds! You’re going to need a lot of zeroes!

Once, twice, three times a millionaire — now it’s four.

Joan R. Ginther, a native of Bishop who moved to Las Vegas, made her fourth appearance Monday at lottery headquarters in Austin to collect seven figures, lottery officials said.

Ginther, 63, won $10 million, the top prize in Texas Lottery’s $140,000,000 Extreme Payout scratch-off ticket, pushing her total wins to $20.4 million.

It was her third time to win on a ticket from a Bishop store, and second one at Times Market at 525 Highway 77 Bypass, in Bishop.

“This is a very lucky store,” said Bob Solis, store manager. The owner Sun Bae is the one with the lucky hand, Solis said. “;Sun sold both the winning tickets to the woman”.

The store, which sells about 1,000 lottery tickets daily, now is eligible to receive a bonus of $10,000 for the second time, lottery officials said.
“It’s incredible for the store owner,” said Bobby Heith, spokesman for the commission. “;Most of our 16,000 retail stores have never sold a winning ticket”.

In 1993 Ginther first won a $5.4 million share of an $11 million Lotto Texas jackpot for a ticket bought in Bishop. She opted for annual payments of $270,000 (excluding tax charges) for 19 years.

On year 13, while visiting Bishop to care for her father in 2006, Ginther won the top prize of $2 million in the Holiday Millionaire game. It was on a $30 scratch-off ticket she bought at Diamond Shamrock at 525 S. 14th St. in Kingsville. Ginther requested a lump-sum payment of about $1.5 million, after the 25 percent taken by the commission for taxes.

Two years later she collected a $3 million prize in Millions and Millions, another scratch-off, at the same Times Market where she won this week.

Ginther requested minimal publicity, according to the lottery commission, and could not be reached Friday.

The commission doesn’t calculate the odds of winning millions more than once, Heith said.

“We have had multiple winners before,” he said. “But she’s obviously been born under a lucky star.”

CLICK HERE for source.

> http://www.caller.com/news/2010/jul/02/bishop-native-wins-millions-for-4th-time/

CLICK HERE:

> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/23/the-stupidest-pet-product_n_548146.html

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> CLICK HERE FOR THE VIDEO

Our friend Michael Hewett is a popular and accomplished yoga teacher in New York City (as well as a first rate musician). He has launched a yoga teacher training program called the ”Sarva Yoga Academy” and as part of that new enterprise has put up an extremely informative and entertaining website. You will learn a lot from the interviews with Michael on the site. Check out especially the ”Q & A” section:

> CLICK HERE

CNN has a religion page on their website with lots of interesting articles related to religion and spirituality (for example, news of a recording of chants by cloistered Benedictine nuns on a new music label run by Lady Gaga):

> CLICK HERE

Newsletter of the Month

Geshe Michael Roach has founded a new organization to teach the principles of how things really work to the business community. He’s named it the “Diamond Cutter Institute”. To subscribe to the free newsletter connected to that organization please visit their site and sign up.

CLICK HERE
> http://www.diamondcutterinstitute.com/

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Lama Marut’s Web Gallery

We tried to get as many photos as we could on the road for the ”Great Awakening Tour”. The Gallery page on lamamarut.org has plenty of images of teachings, retreats, the opening of the Diamond Heart Center, marokes and much, much more… If you couldn’t make it to any events, rejoice now in the goodness!
http://www.lamamarut.org/?page_id=254

Twitter Into Happiness

Just sign up at www.twitter.com and then text “follow Lama Marut” to 40404 from your phone.  You’ll get daily inspirational thoughts sent as text messages.

” target=”_blank”>http://www.awakeningjournal.org/

Go shopping at CaféPress – or offer to design a series of items for the retreat fundraising program (email lamamarut@aci-la.org)

> http://www.cafepress.com/lamamarut

We Need You!

Help Transcribe Lama Marut’s Teachings
We always need transcribers to transcribe Lama Marut’s precious teachings, to form the basis of books and also to offer to students who prefer to read than listen to audio. If you would like to volunteer to transcribe, please > email Carmencita.

For a more extensive list of our Dharma projects and volunteer opportunities, please visit:

>http://thousandarms.wordpress.com

Or write to us at:

>info.lamamarut@gmail.com

Online Communities

Join Lama Marut’s pages on:

Facebook:

> http://www.facebook.com/people/Lama-Marut/1008218709

MySpace:

> http://www.myspace.com/lamamarut

Join 700 others who are now receiving daily inspirational messages from Lama Marut sent directly to your phone as a text message!  To get your daily dharma fix, just create a profile at www.twitter.com and then text “follow LamaMarut” to 40404 from your phone.

JULY AND AUGUST TEACHINGS

Yoga, The Complete Path– for all levels of experience

A Residential Retreat, August 6-21 in Lake Tahoe, California.
Please see the blog, www.classicsofyogaretreat.com for details.

Join Lama Marut, Cindy Lee, David Fishman and Brandy Davis and David White this summer for an extraordinary two weeks of study, practice and fun in the stunning environs of beautiful South Lake Tahoe.

For more information, please contact David Fishman: davidbfishman@gmail.com.

“Recovering Silence: The Meditative Life as the Path to Freedom and Genuine Happiness”

August 25-29 with Lama Marut, Cindy Lee, Lindsay Crouse and Rick Blue.

>http://www.thesummerretreat.com

An invitation from Lindsay Crouse

When I tell people I’m going on a silent retreat, they recoil. “I’d go crazy,” most of them say. I tell them, “We’re all already crazy so it can’t make things worse.”

In fact being quiet longer than an inbreath could make things much, much better.

Why? Because we’re all just in the fray, reacting. We don’t even know what we think. Our true encounters with ourselves are so infrequent we can count them on one hand.

We’re whipped up, worn out, and we don’t know who we are.

We need help to understand that relaxation, gentleness and peace are not synonymous with death. They’re at the heart of our own nature, and the condition for true happiness.

Meditation as a way to live means living happily – with grace and gratitude, compassion, wonder and fun.

Come join us and do something new. Have a profound rest. Return home knowing how to make life sweet and sane and good.

Everyone is welcome.
I’ll see you there.

Lindsay Crouse

Teachers

Lama Marut, Cindy Lee, Rick Blue and Lindsay Crouse will offer teachings on how to live a meditative life, on and off the cushion. From classes on how to begin or deepen your meditation practice, to staying still in the constant flow of change. From living meditatively in partnerships and families, to cultivating awareness for the deepest and most profound realizations of all.

Michael and Stephanie Johnson, Julie Upton and Pattie O’Brian will be leading morning yoga, offering profound practices for bringing meditation into your asana.

“Marut Motorcycle Mayhem”

Steve Yochum from the Diamond Heart Center in Reno has kindly and expertly restored Lama Marut’s beloved BMW motorcycle! He’s raffling it off until August 15th and Lama Marut will draw the winning ticket on August 21st. All proceeds go toward Lama’s retreat. To purchase tickets, please contact your local ticket-seller below, or email Steve Yochum at steve.yochum@charter.net (Post: PO Box 396, Genoa, NV 89411).

But a good deal of the content of June’s newsletter seems to revolve around Apple products – check out the “Scary Consumer Products of the Month” for a unique iPod docking station and a special iPad even you can’t afford!

And to return to the titular question of the newsletter this month: do iPads blend? To find out, check out our “On-line Videos of the Month” section below.

Please remember that we need your help and recommendations for content for the newsletter. Email us at lamamarut@aci-la.org with your ideas for news stories or on-line videos, movie suggestions, dharma books that you have found helpful, “scary consumer products,” relevant websites, or anything else you’d like to share.

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In the journal Science a couple of months ago, the psychologist Joseph Henrich and several of his colleagues reported a cross-cultural study of 15 diverse populations and found that people’s propensities to behave kindly to strangers and to punish unfairness are strongest in large-scale communities with market economies, where such norms are essential to the smooth functioning of trade. Henrich and his colleagues concluded that much of the morality that humans possess is a consequence of the culture in which they are raised, not their innate capacities.

At the same time, though, people everywhere have some sense of right and wrong. You won’t find a society where people don’t have some notion of fairness, don’t put some value on loyalty and kindness, don’t distinguish between acts of cruelty and innocent mistakes, don’t categorize people as nasty or nice. These universals make evolutionary sense. Since natural selection works, at least in part, at a genetic level, there is a logic to being instinctively kind to our kin, whose survival and well-being promote the spread of our genes. More than that, it is often beneficial for humans to work together with other humans, which means that it would have been adaptive to evaluate the niceness and nastiness of other individuals. All this is reason to consider the innateness of at least basic moral concepts.

In addition, scientists know that certain compassionate feelings and impulses emerge early and apparently universally in human development. These are not moral concepts, exactly, but they seem closely related. One example is feeling pain at the pain of others. In his book "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals," Charles Darwin, a keen observer of human nature, tells the story of how his first son, William, was fooled by his nurse into expressing sympathy at a very young age: "When a few days over 6 months old, his nurse pretended to cry, and I saw that his face instantly assumed a melancholy expression, with the corners of his mouth strongly depressed."

There seems to be something evolutionarily ancient to this empathetic response. If you want to cause a rat distress, you can expose it to the screams of other rats. Human babies, notably, cry more to the cries of other babies than to tape recordings of their own crying, suggesting that they are responding to their awareness of someone else’s pain, not merely to a certain pitch of sound. Babies also seem to want to assuage the pain of others: once they have enough physical competence (starting at about 1 year old), they soothe others in distress by stroking and touching or by handing over a bottle or toy. There are individual differences, to be sure, in the intensity of response: some babies are great soothers; others don’t care as much. But the basic impulse seems common to all. (Some other primates behave similarly: the primatologist Frans de Waal reports that chimpanzees “will approach a victim of attack, put an arm around her and gently pat her back or groom her.” Monkeys, on the other hand, tend to shun victims of aggression.)

Some recent studies have explored the existence of behavior in toddlers that is “altruistic” in an even stronger sense — like when they give up their time and energy to help a stranger accomplish a difficult task. The psychologists Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello have put toddlers in situations in which an adult is struggling to get something done, like opening a cabinet door with his hands full or trying to get to an object out of reach. The toddlers tend to spontaneously help, even without any prompting, encouragement or reward. . . .

In one of our first studies of moral evaluation, we decided not to use two-dimensional animated movies but rather a three-dimensional display in which real geometrical objects, manipulated like puppets, acted out the helping/hindering situations: a yellow square would help the circle up the hill; a red triangle would push it down. After showing the babies the scene, the experimenter placed the helper and the hinderer on a tray and brought them to the child. In this instance, we opted to record not the babies’ looking time but rather which character they reached for, on the theory that what a baby reaches for is a reliable indicator of what a baby wants. In the end, we found that 6- and 10-month-old infants overwhelmingly preferred the helpful individual to the hindering individual. This wasn’t a subtle statistical trend; just about all the babies reached for the good guy. . . .

Does our research show that babies believe that the helpful character is good and the hindering character is bad? Not necessarily. All that we can safely infer from what the babies reached for is that babies prefer the good guy and show an aversion to the bad guy. But what’s exciting here is that these preferences are based on how one individual treated another, on whether one individual was helping another individual achieve its goals or hindering it. This is preference of a very special sort; babies were responding to behaviors that adults would describe as nice or mean. When we showed these scenes to much older kids — 18-month-olds — and asked them, “Who was nice? Who was good?” and “Who was mean? Who was bad?” they responded as adults would, identifying the helper as nice and the hinderer as mean. . . .

All of this research, taken together, supports a general picture of baby morality. It’s even possible, as a thought experiment, to ask what it would be like to see the world in the moral terms that a baby does. Babies probably have no conscious access to moral notions, no idea why certain acts are good or bad. They respond on a gut level. Indeed, if you watch the older babies during the experiments, they don’t act like impassive judges — they tend to smile and clap during good events and frown, shake their heads and look sad during the naughty events (remember the toddler who smacked the bad puppet). The babies’ experiences might be cognitively empty but emotionally intense, replete with strong feelings and strong desires. But this shouldn’t strike you as an altogether alien experience: while we adults possess the additional critical capacity of being able to consciously reason about morality, we’re not otherwise that different from babies — our moral feelings are often instinctive. In fact, one discovery of contemporary research in social psychology and social neuroscience is the powerful emotional underpinning of what we once thought of as cool, untroubled, mature moral deliberation. . . .

Morality, then, is a synthesis of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered and the invented. Babies possess certain moral foundations — the capacity and willingness to judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, gut responses to altruism and nastiness. Regardless of how smart we are, if we didn’t start with this basic apparatus, we would be nothing more than amoral agents, ruthlessly driven to pursue our self-interest. But our capacities as babies are sharply limited. It is the insights of rational individuals that make a truly universal and unselfish morality something that our species can aspire to.

> CLICK HERE for source.

Thanks to Larry Wolf for this piece written by Rajesh Joshi and published on April 29, 2010, on PhysOrg.com, “India studies yogic power for life without food.”A team of military doctors backed by India’s national defence research centre is studying an 83-year-old holy man who claims to have spent seven decades surviving without food or water.

The long-haired and bearded yogi, Prahlad Jani, has been sealed in a hospital in the western city of Ahmedabad where he is under 24-hour observation by 30 doctors and will be subjected to a series of medical tests.

“The observation from this study may throw light on human survival without food and water,” doctor G. Ilavazahagan, director of India’s Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences (DIPAS), told AFP.

The DIPAS is part of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, India’s state defence and military research institute also behind a grenade packed with chilli powder that recently hit headlines.

“This may help in working out strategies for survival during natural calamities, extreme stressful conditions and extra-terrestrial explorations like future missions to the Moon and Mars by the human race,” Ilavazahagan said.

The tests on Jani include magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, measuring brain and heart activity with electrodes and other neuro-physiological studies, in addition to blood tests.

The experiment started on April 22 and will take 15-20 days. Since the beginning, Jani has neither eaten nor drunk and has not been to the toilet, Ilavazahagan said.

“The exercise of taking this yogi under the medical scanner is to understand what energy supports his existence,” he added, explaining that soldiers could benefit from his apparent ability to survive.

“Jani says he meditates to get energy. Our soldiers will not be able to meditate, but we would still like to find out more about the man and his body,” he said.

Neurologist Sudhir Shah, who studied Jani in 2003 and is part of the new experiment, said that the extremely skinny but apparently active man faced round-the-clock observation.

“Two stationary 24-hour video cameras have been set up in his room, while a mobile video camera follows him whenever he needs to step outside,” he said.

Jani, who dresses in red and wears a nose ring, grew up in Charod village in the Mehsana district in Gujarat and claims to have been blessed by a goddess aged eight, which has enabled him to survive without sustenance.

Shah said that Jani told him the key to his survival was a mystical and unexplained process by which he receives drops of water through a hole in his palate.

Analysis of data, to determine his secret or expose his fraudulence, will take at least two months, the doctors said.

Fasting is a part of Indian culture, made famous by independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, who brought himself to the brink of death on several occasions by refusing food and water to protest against colonial rule.

A monk from India’s minority Jain religion — devout followers of which undertake frequent fasts, sometimes to death — claims to have deprived himself of food for one year, which is believed to be a record.

“If you’re busy with something you don’t feel hunger, thirst, or the heat and cold,” said Sri Sahaj Muni Maharaj, who took daily glasses of warm water during his fast which ended on May 1998.

“I’m busy contemplating the infinite,” he told India’s Outlook magazine one month before the end of his experiment.

> CLICK HERE for source. For the BBC’s article on Jani, CLICK HERE.

Also from the New Yorker Magazine, and thanks to Brian Stricker.

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:Someone gave us a card with this image on it on our recent tour. Sums it up nicely.

Think you’re special because of your new iPad? Think again, unless you have purchased one of the ten “Gold iPad Supremes” that have been produced by Stuart Hughs, a British company that bills itself as a purveyor of “ultimate luxury.” Thanks again to David Simmons, who seems to have real eye for scary consumer iPod products (remember the “Wall of Sound” featured in this space in April’s newsletter?). This month’s “iProduct” is “a 22-carat gold iPad encrusted with more than 25 carats of flawless diamonds (including a diamond Apple logo),” selling for a mere 129,995 British pounds (ca. U.S. $190,000). “This most luxurious iPad’s appearance is outstanding even down to the precise polishing to reveal its most beautiful harmonious appearance,” according to the company’s website. Huh? “Harmonious appearance”? Judge for yourself;

> Click Here for Source.

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Websites of the Month

Brian Weed sent in the link to this website that calculates your place among the richest people on earth and then makes suggestions on how you could help others with all that dough. Try it for yourself! Find out just how rich you really are!

>Click HERE.

Ava Gerber discovered this one: Reed Sandridge, who was laid off his job, is spending a year giving away $10 to a different person each day and documenting it all on his website. Sandridge acknowledges that $10 is not a major sum, but he believes that the act of giving will hopefully inspire others to pursue the ideals of altruism. He keeps track of the basic demographics of his recipients on the Stats page of his site and also documents what people say they’ll do with the money. Many amazing stories of folks “paying it forward.” Check it out:

Click HERE.

Join the thousands (literally!) who are downloading free weekly Lama Marut videocasts and audio podcasts. Go to iTunes and search “Lama Marut” in the iTunes Store to subscribe. The Audio Podcast page on aci-la.org is also host to new podcasts from the Mahasukha Center “Practice Happiness”
http://www.aci-la.org/mg-podcasts.html

Twitter Into Happiness

Just sign up at www.twitter.com and then text “follow LamaMarut” to 40404 from your phone.  You’ll get daily inspirational thoughts sent as text messages.

Help ACI-LA with their website!
If you have HTML or web design and development skills, why not work on the coolest website on the planet?! If you can volunteer some time, please email the incomparable Brian Reid.

Help Transcribe Lama Marut’s Teachings!
We always need transcribers to transcribe Lama Marut’s precious teachings, to form the basis of books and also to offer to students who prefer to read than listen to audio.
If you would like to volunteer to transcribe, please > email Carmencita.

For a more extensive list of our Dharma projects and volunteer opportunities, please visit:
> http://thousandarms.wordpress.com/

Help the Retreat Fund!
Find out more about the Mahasukha Kula Retreat Scholarship Program and help our students take what they are learning into deep retreats.
>http://www.aci-la.org/retreat-scholarship/

Join Lama Marut as he stretches your mind with the essential insights into yoga philosophy. Meditations with Cindy Lee.

The ultimate success of one’s yoga practice depends on a balanced and coordinated use of all the eight components of the traditional yogic system. These components form a bridge to the realizations of the powerful and radical goals of yoga.

In two 4-class courses, Lama Marut will overview two of the most important
yoga texts of the ancient Indian tradition, the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika by Master Svatmarama.

http://greatawakeningtour.wordpress.com

SUMMER EVENTS IN THE USA

“THE MISSING TEACHINGS OF YOGA”

A CLASSICS OF YOGA 200 HOUR TEACHER INTENSIVE

with LAMA MARUT, CINDY LEE, BRANDY DAVIS, DAVID FISHMAN, DAVID WHITE

More Information: http://www.classicsofyogaretreat.com

IMMERSE YOURSELF IN YOGA,
IMMERSE YOURSELF IN BEAUTY!
August 6-21st
Shorter  study modules are also available.

Join us this summer for an extraordinary two weeks of intense study, practice, and fun in the stunning surroundings of beautiful Lake Tahoe.

Lama Marut will both provide a comprehensive overview of classic yoga texts – Yoga Sutra, Hatha Yoga Pradipika and Bhagavad Gita – and he will unveil an exciting new translation and commentary of the Ashtavakra Gita.

“THE SUMMER RETREAT”
August 25-29

“RECOVERING SILENCE: THE MEDITATIVE LIFE AS THE PATH TO FREEDOM AND GENUINE HAPPINESS”
August 25-29

With Lama Marut and Cindy Lee, Rick Blue and Lindsay Crouse
And yoga with Michael and Stephanie Johnson, Julie Upton and Pattie O’Brien

MORE INFORMATION: http://www.thesummerretreat.com/

For those who wish to begin or deepen their daily meditative practice, and for everyone wishing to live a quieter, happier, and more rewarding life, join us for this exciting (and silent!) residential retreat with Lama Marut in Massachusetts.

The Summer Retreat will offer five days of conscious living, mindfulness, and tranquility.  Lamas Lindsay Crouse and Rick Blue will teach on living meditatively in relationships and opening ourselves up to others through ‘exchanging self for others’ techniques. You will also learn how to meditate, what to meditate on, and how to live all day long – alone and with others — with awareness, compassion, and wisdom.

Lama Marut and Cindy Lee will offer classes on maintaining stillness through the vicissitudes of life, seeing the sacred and being the sacred in everyday life, and exploring various spiritual texts that describe what the liberated and enlightened being looks like.

Lama Marut will offer not-to-be-missed evening classes on how to use meditation to penetrate the illusions of life, discover ultimate reality and finally go beyond conceptions; recovering true silence.

“DEVELOPING THE GOOD HEART”
September 17-19
With Lama Marut and Cindy Lee
Join us again for a residential retreat at the glorious Satyananda Yoga Ashram
in Rocklyn, Victoria www.yogavic.com

Teachings on wisdom and compassion, heart-expanding yoga, meditation, great food, ashram lifestyle and more . . .
For more information, please contact Maree: chickens@bigpond.net.au
Cost: $210
Registration at http://yogavic.com/monthly_calendar/september_2010

DHARMA IN THE MEDIA

Please keep sending the wonderful and the weird representations of the dharma in the media. Email us at lamamarut@aci-la.org with news stories, on-line videos, dharma books, websites or anything else that expresses the dharma in our world.

This is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there, that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination.

The Buddha went on to state that the third truth entails “the cessation of suffering: it is the complete fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it.” And then in the fourth truth, the Buddha outlined a path for the cessation of suffering and “that same craving” that brings suffering to us.

While in the Mahayana scriptures it is usually ignorance (avidya) that is targeted as the root cause of our suffering, in the early Pali texts of the Buddhist canon it is quite clearly desire or “craving” (the Sanskrit is tanha, “thirst”) that is identified as THE problem. Craving, as the passage above indicates, is subdivided into three kinds. The first is the “craving for sensual desires” (kama tanha), the constant hunger for more titillations – dinner at the new Thai restaurant, a new iPad, another holiday to a Lonely Planet destination, more and different sexual escapades. But the Buddha also talked about the “craving for existence” (bhava tanha), the longing for more life itself that throws into rebirth after rebirth. Lastly, there is the “craving for extermination” (vibhava tanha), meaning both the nihilistic death-wish for oblivion but also perhaps the wish for nirvana (remembering that Nagarjuna himself pointed out that the grasping to nirvana is just another kind of grasping that precludes freedom).

The Hindu scriptures tend to agree with the Buddhists in declaring desire to be not only bad but Public Enemy Number One. In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna plaintively poses a question any practitioner has had at one time or another: “What compels a person, seemingly against his will, to do wrong things as if commanded by an outside power?” Lord Krishna replies like this:

Know it is desire (kama) and anger (krodha). . .that is the real enemy here, voracious and very evil. . . . Wisdom is obscured by the perpetual enemy of the wise that comes in the form of desire, Arjuna, as insatiable as fire. It is said to reside in the senses, the mind, and the understanding, and through these it obscures wisdom and bewilders the embodied self. Therefore you should restrain your senses and so forth, Arjuna, and then vanquish this evil, the destroyer of wisdom and knowledge. ((3.36-37, 39-41)

Tapping into a common metaphor that compares desire to fire – all-consuming and insatiable, we “burn” with desire — the Gita echoes the Buddha in spotlighting both sensual and mental dissatisfaction and longing as the primary cause of our unhappiness. The text goes on to note that anger or hatred (krodha) is actually a derivative mental affliction: it is only when our desire is thwarted that anger arises. It is, therefore, ultimately desire that lies behind and fuels all other mental afflictions and the unhappiness they bring.

Desire also appears in the list of the Seven Deadly Sins of the Christian in several forms (“lust,” “gluttony,” and “avarice”) and is problematic in Judaism and Islam as well. There seems to be a general agreement that our incessant and voracious yearning is antithetical to our well-being.

In a way, the observation that desire thwarts happiness is sort of obvious. Desire is, of course, the opposite of contentment and the latter is what would I call “entry-level happiness”. “It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied”, wrote Aristotle, “and most men live only for the gratification of it”. Otherwise put, we suffer because we always want things to be different than how they are. We are afflicted by two forms of discontentment: we wish for things we don’t have (raga), and we wish we didn’t have things we do have (dvesha).

We suffer, in sum, due to our perpetual dissatisfaction with life as it is. Nirvana, from this point of view, is the end of desire in the sense of the radical and totalistic acceptance of reality itself.

But it doesn’t take much reflection to realize that there seems to be a problem built into this equation of desire = suffering. For what would motivate our quest for deep-seated contentment and happiness if not a desire for that very state? Desire may lead to suffering, but isn’t it also what inspires us toward the termination of suffering?

Indeed, in the same Buddhist texts that excoriate desire we read how important “attraction,” “will” or “volition” are in one’s spiritual practice. These English terms are all possible translations of the Sanskrit word canda – and surely are all just variants of “desire”. In Master Shantideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life we read that “attraction (canda) is the root of all goodness” and only a fool would want to cast aside the desire for and attraction to the Dharma (7.39-40). “Will” or “determination” is listed as one of the powers one must marshal for engendering the strong effort needed for success in the spiritual life:

Eliminate then what acts against us;
Work hard to use the various forces
Of will, confidence, joy, and also
Leaving off, and being engaged, and the
Feeling of self-command, in order
To increase your capacity for effort. (7.32)

So the problem is this: How can we end desire and achieve peace if we don’t desire the end of desire and the state of peace? How can the termination of desire be the goal when we must rely on desire to reach that (or any) goal?

One way to overcome this apparent contradiction is to divide out “ignorant” or “bad” desire from “wise” or “good” desire. Ignorant desire is the real culprit, and we are ignorant about desire in different ways. We are, first of all, ignorant about the object of desire. We suffer because we think desirable things are desirable in themselves – the food we find tasty seems to have delectable qualities in it; the person we perceive to be so attractive appears to us objectively and obviously appealing; the money and things we crave and work so hard to obtain have inherently, we believe, the power to bring us happiness. When the thing or person lets us down by showing us that they never intrinsically had the ability to bring us the long-lasting satisfaction we seek in them, we are disappointed (again) and suffer (again) and (again) seek satisfaction in some other object we think will make us happy.

Ignorance about the objects of desire is bound up with ignorance about the changing nature of reality. Desirable things do not have a “self” or “essence” of being objectively desirable (they are anatman or “without essence”) and (or you could also say, because) they are not stable entities (they are anitya or “impermanent”). The moment when we get the things we desire the process of losing them begins: they begin to wear out, break, die, or we begin to weary of them. In one way or another, changing things lose their appeal.

So we suffer because we are ignorant about the nature of the objects we desire. From another point of view, the problem with desire involves our ignorance about how we obtain the objects we desire. We think, ignorantly and in a way that is designed to cause us trouble, that to obtain desirable things we need to try to get them before others do. We act as though we’re playing a zero-sum game where if someone else gets something before we do it means we won’t be getting it at all. We selfishly desire things and then pursue selfish means to try to satisfy our desire. When we ignorantly desire things in this way, we quickly forget what we know about karma. We pursue what we want not remembering that we get what we desire only if we help others get what they desire first.

Here is the key to unraveling the Gordian knot of desire: we can (wisely and selflessly) use desire to overcome (ignorant and selfish) desire. The “good” desire gradually replaces the bad. We wisely desire goals without misunderstanding the nature of those goals (i.e., we realize the emptiness of the objects we desire), and we intelligently go about reaching those goals by utilizing the only really effective method, karma. We get what we want by making sure that others get what they want.

So far so good.

But this “wise” use of desire involves its own paradox: in order to achieve our own desire we must renounce our own selfish desire and first try to fulfill the desire of others. This, in turn, creates the causes for the fulfillment of our own desire — which we renounced in the first place. Desire for the fulfillment of the other’s desire is used to overcome one’s selfish desire which, in any case, doesn’t work to obtain the object of one’s desire.

Desire, then, is fulfilled only by being relinquished. This is, after all, the very principle of karma: you get what you want when you don’t want it enough to be able to give it to someone else first. Karmic law is based on the principle of sacrifice — of giving up in order to get back. You must give to receive; the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

In Buddhism, there are techniques to train us to “jujitsu” desire in this way. We have, for example, the practice of “equalizing and exchanging self for others.” In the 8th chapter of Master Shantideva’s Guide, he basically says, “Look, stop trying to overcome desire. It’s too hard. Rather than fight this enormous power, cultivate it! That’s right. Desire away! Just stop being ‘you.’ Be someone else and then work hard to fulfill ‘your’ (i.e., the other’s) desires.” It can be a little confusing, but the technique is sound: you will get what you want when you stop wanting it for yourself and want it for others.

This, so far, is wisdom regarding the methods for obtaining the objects of desire. But we have also seen that we are ignorant about the nature of the objects of desire. We wrongly see them as essentially desirable; we think the desirable qualities of desirable objects are in the objects themselves. One obvious proof that the desirable qualities of, say, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream can’t be in the object is that not everyone likes Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Another proof is that if the desirable qualities were in the ice cream, the more ice cream we consumed the happier we’d get. As many of us know through our own scientific experimentation, at some point (around the second or third pint) the once-desirable ice cream somehow turns into a nausea-producing substance.

Understanding the emptiness of the ice cream (the fact that the desirable qualities I see in the ice cream are not coming from the ice cream) is one main corrective to ignorance about the objects of desire. But another method involves the transference of desire from objects like ice cream that are “impure” (in the sense of incapable of bringing the true happiness we are seeking in them) to a “pure” object. As it is said in a text written by Master Ngulchu Dharma Bhadra, “To be attracted to something impure is stupid desire, but to be attracted to something pure is devotion.”

So what would count as a “pure” object of desire or devotion? Enlightenment itself – the end of all suffering, perfect happiness, and the ability to help all living beings in just the right way. It is bodhicitta, the wish (i.e., desire) to obtain Buddhahood, which is the only truly pure and beneficial desire we can have.

Think of it like this: All desires are forms of THE desire. When we desire ice cream, a new iPad, a vacation in Jamaica, or companionship with an attractive partner, what we really want is the true happiness we think those objects will deliver to us. We really want the deep-seated contentment and joy that only enlightenment can bring us. We’re all just looking for bliss, but we’re looking for it in all the wrong places.

Cultivating THE desire motivates us to do the meritorious activities that will actually bring us what we truly do desire. In fact, as it is said in the Guide (1.5-8), it is the only desire capable of overcoming our “bad” desires, the ones that lead us to vice rather than to virtue:

Just as lightning illuminates the darkness of a cloudy night for an instant, in the same way, because of the inspiration of the Buddha, occasionally people’s minds are momentarily inclined toward merit.

Thus, virtue is always feeble while the power of vice is great and very dreadful. If there were not something called the wish for enlightenment, what other virtue would overcome it?

The Lords of Sages, who have been contemplating for many eons, have seen this alone as a blessing by which happiness is easily increased and immeasurable multitudes of beings are rescued.

Those who long to overcome the abundant miseries of life, who wish to dispel the adversities of sentient beings, and who yearn to experience a myriad of joys should never forsake the wish for enlightenment.

We are thus enjoined to cultivate the wish for enlightenment, a state which will finally make it possible for us to fulfill both our own and others’ deepest needs and desires. We are encouraged not to repudiate desire but rather to want to obtain this highest object of desire . . . and want it bad! If we have any version of a real bodhicitta, we become obsessed with achieving enlightenment as soon as possible and by any means necessary. The wish for enlightenment entails engendering a desire that will overwhelm all other desires. All desires collapse and are subsumed within THE desire.

But when it comes to real bodhicitta, the snake again eats its tail: one who truly has this overweening wish for enlightenment realizes that the method for reaching it requires the end of one’s own selfish desires in favor of the welfare of others. The life of a bodhisattva is one of complete altruism and selflessness as other people’s desire for happiness takes precedence over one’s own.

And one final twist. The wish for enlightenment ultimately requires the sacrifice of itself. One must, finally, abandon even the desire for enlightenment if one is to attain enlightenment, the culmination and end of all desires. We must finally abandon the “spiritual materialism” Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche warned against:

“We have many expectations, especially if we seek a spiritual path and involve ourselves with spiritual materialism. We have the expectation that spirituality will bring us happiness and comfort, wisdom and salvation. This literal, ego-centric way of regarding spirituality must be turned completely upside down. Finally, if we give up all hope of attaining any sort of enlightenment, then at that moment the path begins to open.”

The end of desire thus calls for even the renouncing of the desire for the end of desire; it entails perfect contentment with things as they are. “Do not try to become anything,” advises Ajhan Chah.

Do not make yourself into anything.
Do not be a meditator.
Do not become enlightened.
When you sit, let it be.
When you walk, let it be.
Grasp at nothing.
Resist nothing.

In summary, we can say that the spiritual life unfolds like this: We first recognize bad desire as bad, i.e., as the cause of our suffering. We then, out of a kind of enlightened self-interest, replace it with good desire – the desire for the welfare and happiness of others – realizing that this is the only way we ever get what we desire anyway. We then enhance and grow this good desire until we recognize it as THE desire, the wish to achieve perfect enlightenment so as to perfectly fulfill our own and others’ true desire. But we simultaneously root out any remnant of selfish or bad desire by eliminating them from our wish to be enlightened. We purify our bodhicitta when we “grasp at nothing” – including the enlightenment we so fervently wish for.

So desire happiness. . . for others. Desire enlightenment. . . by not wanting anything for oneself, including enlightenment. Nirvana will come when we stop grasping to and craving for things, including nirvana. Enlightenment will dawn on us when, having absorbed and concentrated all desires into THE desire, we stop yearning for even it.

Desire the end of desire, and then end the desire for the end of desire.

Practice contentment for yourself while strongly desiring the fulfillment of others’ desires.

Beat desire at its own game.

New Video and Audio Teachings Available On-Line

For free, weekly Lama Marut videocasts and audio podcasts in iTunes, search "Lama Marut" in the iTunes Store, or download audio podcasts from aci-la.org:

>http://www.aci-la.org/mg-podcasts.html

Audio Podcasts:
The latest audio podcasts have come from the series of teachings titled “Living the Perfect Life, Here and Now.” These teachings examine what a being who is libertated in this lifetime would look like. A perfect companion for Lama Marut’s article this month. What would it feel like to be perfectly free?

Download podcasts at:
> http://www.aci-la.org/mg-podcasts.html

Or go to the iTunes store and search “Lama Marut” to subscribe to “A Lama Sumati Marut Podcast”.

Live Video Webcasts:

The Great Awakening Tour:
The Great Awakening Tour channel on USTREAM broadcast all of the teachings from the Mahasukha Center and Vajramudra Center. Thank you to all the students who worked so hard to send the teachings out online. Check out the channel by clicking the link below and browsing the videos:
> http://www.ustream.tv/channel/great-awakening

Great Awakening Tour

Thank you so much to all of the cities, centers and students who hosted us on the Great Awakening Tour. We enjoyed seeing old friends again, and meeting many new ones.

Lamaji tried to ‘blog’ from each city we visited on the tour on the Great Awakening website, and we have put photos and links to audio and video under each city too (click the dates on the site menu).
> http://greatawakeningtour.wordpress.com

Go shopping at CaféPress – or offer to design a series of items for the retreat fundraising program (email lamamarut@aci-la.org)

> http://www.cafepress.com/lamamarut

We Need You!

Help Transcribe Lama Marut’s Teachings
We always need transcribers to transcribe Lama Marut’s precious teachings, to form the basis of books and also to offer to students who prefer to read than listen to audio. If you would like to volunteer to transcribe, please > email Carmencita (link to – carmencita.penaloza@gmail.com)

For a more extensive list of our Dharma projects and volunteer opportunities, please visit:

>http://thousandarms.wordpress.com

Or write to us at:

>info.lamamarut@gmail.com

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> http://www.facebook.com/people/Lama-Marut/1008218709

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Yoga, The Complete Path– for all levels of experience

* Early bird deadline extended until May 15th! *

A Residential Retreat, August 6-21 in Lake Tahoe, California.
Please see the blog, www.classicsofyogaretreat.com for details.

Join Lama Marut, Cindy Lee, David Fishman and Brandy Davis and David White this summer for an extraordinary two weeks of study, practice and fun in the stunning environs of beautiful South Lake Tahoe.

For more information, please contact David Fishman: davidbfishman@gmail.com.

“Recovering Silence: The Meditative Life as the Path to Freedom and Genuine Happiness”

August 25-29 with Lama Marut, Cindy Lee, Lindsay Crouse and Rick Blue.

>http://www.thesummerretreat.com

An invitation from Lindsay Crouse

When I tell people I’m going on a silent retreat, they recoil. “I’d go crazy,” most of them say. I tell them, “We’re all already crazy so it can’t make things worse.”

In fact being quiet longer than an inbreath could make things much, much better.

Why? Because we’re all just in the fray, reacting. We don’t even know what we think. Our true encounters with ourselves are so infrequent we can count them on one hand.

We’re whipped up, worn out, and we don’t know who we are.

We need help to understand that relaxation, gentleness and peace are not synonymous with death. They’re at the heart of our own nature, and the condition for true happiness.

Meditation as a way to live means living happily – with grace and gratitude, compassion, wonder and fun.

Come join us and do something new. Have a profound rest. Return home knowing how to make life sweet and sane and good.

Everyone is welcome.
I’ll see you there.

Lindsay Crouse

Teachers

Lama Marut, Cindy Lee, Rick Blue and Lindsay Crouse will offer teachings on how to live a meditative life, on and off the cushion. From classes on how to begin or deepen your meditation practice, to staying still in the constant flow of change. From living meditatively in partnerships and families, to cultivating awareness for the deepest and most profound realizations of all.

Michael and Stephanie Johnson, Julie Upton and Pattie O’Brian will be leading morning yoga, offering profound practices for bringing meditation into your asana.

We’ve also included below two articles on people who truly have realized that money isn’t the real source of happiness and who have had the courage to just give most of what they have away to others.

We continue with features like “Cartoons of the Month,” “On-line Videos of the Month,” “Website of the Month,” and the ever-popular “Scary Consumer Products of the Month.”

A new addition this month is “Joke of the Month.” See below also for information on our “Great Awakening Tour” and other upcoming teaching events. Keep in touch with the tour at greatawakeningtour.wordpress.comwhere we’ll be posting updates from the road.

We hope you find the newsletter informative and enjoyable!

Please remember that we need your help and recommendations for content for the newsletter. Email us at lamamarut@aci-la.org with your ideas for news stories or on-line videos, movie suggestions, dharma books that you have found helpful, “scary consumer products”, relevant websites, or anything else you’d like to share.

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Thanks to Cindy Lee’s mother, Wendy, who passed this one on. It’s a story about an experiment organized by the Washington Post and conducted in the Washington, D.C., metro station. As the article notes by way of conclusion, “If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?”

“A Violinist in the Metro”

A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

Three minutes went by and a middle-aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule.

A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk.

A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.

The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year-old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.

Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100. . . .

Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?

One of the possible conclusions from this experiment could be: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?

You can also listen to a brief clip from Josh’s subway concert:
 CLICK HERE for source

This one went viral this past February: the story of Karl Rabeder, Austrian millionaire, who is giving away his fortune to orphans in South America. “Money is counterproductive,” says Mr. Rabeder. “It prevents happiness. . . ”

A millionaire is giving away all his money and possessions to help orphaned children.

Businessman Karl Rabeder, 47, said the reason for his surprising act of generosity was his fortune never made him happy.

“My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing,” he told London’s Daily Telegraph. “Money is counterproductive – it prevents happiness to come.”

The Austrian businessman is selling his $2.5 million villa, which has a lake, sauna and spectacular views of the Alps, and his stone farmhouse in Provence.

Already gone are his collection of six gliders and his luxury car, as well as the interior furnishings and accessories business that made his $4.8 million fortune.

Mr Rabeder said that he would use the money to fund orphanages and other charity projects in South America.

“I had the idea on holiday in Hawaii some years ago,” he said. “My cars and plane have already gone and the rest follows very soon. I can’t wait to be free of them. It has taken me until now to realise that I don’t need money and possessions.” . . .

He told Austrian television of his plan to raffle his villa by lots – with all money going to the charitable foundation he started late last year.
He now lives in a small two-room flat in Innsbruck, is divorced and survives on the equivalent of $1400 a month.

“‘The worst that can happen to me is that I have to take a small job to get by,” he said.

> CLICK HERE for source.

Laura VanderBurgh discovered this related story, a New York Times piece published on January 23, 2010, by Nicholas D. Kristof entitled “What Could You Live Without?” This family’s experience “confirms the selfish pleasures of selflessness” and encourages people “to step off the treadmill of accumulation, to define themselves by what they give as well as by what they possess.”

Kevin Salwen, a writer and entrepreneur in Atlanta, was driving his 14-year-old daughter, Hannah, back from a sleepover in 2006. While waiting at a traffic light, they saw a black Mercedes coupe on one side and a homeless man begging for food on the other.

“Dad, if that man had a less nice car, that man there could have a meal,” Hannah protested. The light changed and they drove on, but Hannah was too young to be reasonable. She pestered her parents about inequity, insisting that she wanted to do something.

“What do you want to do?” her mom responded. “Sell our house?”

Warning! Never suggest a grand gesture to an idealistic teenager. Hannah seized upon the idea of selling the luxurious family home and donating half the proceeds to charity, while using the other half to buy a more modest replacement home.

Eventually, that’s what the family did. The project — crazy, impetuous and utterly inspiring — is chronicled in a book by father and daughter scheduled to be published next month: “The Power of Half.” It’s a book that, frankly, I’d be nervous about leaving around where my own teenage kids might find it. An impressionable child reads this, and the next thing you know your whole family is out on the street.

At a time of enormous needs in Haiti and elsewhere, when so many Americans are trying to help Haitians by sending everything from text messages to shoes, the Salwens offer an example of a family that came together to make a difference — for themselves as much as the people they were trying to help. In a column a week ago, I described neurological evidence from brain scans that altruism lights up parts of the brain normally associated with more primal gratifications such as food and sex. The Salwens’ experience confirms the selfish

Mr. Salwen and his wife, Joan, had always assumed that their kids would be better off in a bigger house. But after they downsized, there was much less space to retreat to, so the family members spent more time around each other. A smaller house unexpectedly turned out to be a more family-friendly house.

“We essentially traded stuff for togetherness and connectedness,” Mr. Salwen told me, adding, “I can’t figure out why everybody wouldn’t want that deal.”

One reason for that togetherness was the complex process of deciding how to spend the money. The Salwens researched causes and charities, finally settling on the Hunger Project, a New York City-based international development organization that has a good record of tackling global poverty.

The Salwens pledged $800,000 to sponsor health, microfinancing, food and other programs for about 40 villages in Ghana. They traveled to Ghana with a Hunger Project executive, John Coonrod, who is an inspiration in his own right. Over the years, he and his wife donated so much back from their modest aid-worker salaries that they were among the top Hunger Project donors in New York.

The Salwens’ initiative hasn’t gone entirely smoothly. Hannah promptly won over her parents, but her younger brother, Joe, was (reassuringly) a red-blooded American boy to whom it wasn’t intuitively obvious that life would improve by moving into a smaller house and giving money to poor people. Outvoted and outmaneuvered, Joe gamely went along.

The Salwens also are troubled that some people are reacting negatively to their project, seeing them as sanctimonious showoffs. Or that people are protesting giving to Ghana when there are so many needy Americans.

Still, they have inspired some converts. The people who sold the Salwens their new home were so impressed that they committed $100,000 to the project. And one of Hannah’s closest friends, Blaise, pledged half of her baby-sitting savings to an environmental charity.

In writing the book, the Salwens say, the aim wasn’t actually to get people to sell their houses. They realize that few people are quite that nutty. Rather, the aim was to encourage people to step off the treadmill of accumulation, to define themselves by what they give as well as by what they possess.

“No one expects anyone to sell a house,” said Hannah, now a high school junior who hopes to become a nurse. “That’s kind of a ridiculous thing to do. For us, the house was just something we could live without. It was too big for us. Everyone has too much of something, whether it’s time, talent or treasure. Everyone does have their own half, you just have to find it.”

As for Kevin Salwen, he’s delighted by what has unfolded since that encounter at the red light.
“This is the most self-interested thing we have ever done,” he said. “I’m thrilled that we can help others. I’m blown away by how much it has helped us.”

> CLICK HERE for source.

Melbourne recently hosted an international conference of atheists. This cartoon appeared shortly thereafter in the local paper, The Age. A picture’s worth a thousand words! No need for further editorial comment.

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Molly Dahl found this on-line product: the “Day-Ruining Notepad.” Artist Jessica Hische has designed $25.00 notepads that are “letter-pressed on 100lb Cover French Paper (Steel Blue from their “Construction” line) with 2C offset interiors on 80lb ivory paper. They are bound with binders glue for easy tear-outing, and black binding tape… for fanciness.” Tres chic! And what’s the purpose of such high design and expensive paper? The advertizing encourages us to “Stash a Day-Ruining notepad in your purse, so you can fill out a sheet and let a yahoo know when he uses poor etiquette or makes ridiculous demands.” The product allows you to issue police-like summons to “people who have ruined your day” by making “ridiculous demands, passive-aggressive email cc-ing and more.” That’ll teach ‘em! It’s all their fault, isn’t it?
> http://buystufffrom.jessicahische.com

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Join the Happiness Revolution! Lama Marut’s “Inciting Happiness” teachings in Melbourne were a wonderful exploration of the Three Principal Paths. Check them out on the Recent Teachings page.

http://www.aci-la.org/teach_marut_recent.html

Join the thousands (literally!) who are downloading free weekly Lama Marut videocasts and audio podcasts! Go to iTunes and search “Lama Marut” in the iTunes Store, or download audio podcasts from aci-la.org: http://www.aci-la.org/mg-podcasts.html

Twitter Into Happiness

Just sign up at www.twitter.com and then text “follow LamaMarut” to 40404 from your phone.  You’ll get daily inspirational thoughts sent as text messages.

Help ACI-LA with their website!
If you have HTML or web design and development skills, why not work on the coolest website on the planet?! If you can volunteer some time, please email the incomparable Brian Reid.

Help Transcribe Lama Marut’s Teachings: We always need transcirbers to transcribe Lama Marut’s precious teachings, to form the basis of books and also to offer to students who prefer to read than listen to audio.
If you would like to volunteer to transcribe, please > email Carmencita – at: carmencita.penaloza@gmail.com

For a more extensive list of our Dharma projects and more volunteer opportunities, please visit the ‘Thousand Arms’ site:
http://thousandarms.wordpress.com

Help the Retreat Fund!

Find out more about the Mahasukha Kula Retreat Scholarship Program, just launched by our wonderful and dedicated retreat committee.
> http://www.aci-la.org/retreat-scholarship/
> http://www.cafepress.com/lamamarut

http://www.cafepress.com/lamamarut

SUMMER EVENTS

“THE MISSING TEACHINGS OF YOGA”
A CLASSICS OF YOGA 200 HOUR TEACHER INTENSIVE
with LAMA MARUT & YSI STAFF TEACHERS

Full Program:
Friday August 6th thru Saturday August 21st, 2010
Shorter study modules are also available.

This summer we will be offering an extraordinary set of teachings on yoga philosophy at a beautiful retreat setting in Lake Tahoe, CA. For those of you interested in yoga, this will be a unique opportunity to steep yourself in the philosophical context of all physical yogic practice and catch up with all the Yoga Studies Institute’s courses in the Classics of Yoga. If you are primarily interested in Buddhism, these teachings will support and fill out in unexpected ways your understanding of the Dharma (both in its open and more esoteric or tantric dimensions).

Lama Marut will be teaching comprehensive reviews of the entirety of the Yoga Sutra and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, as well as a complete 10 class version of the first of YSI’s Bhagavad Gita courses. In addition, we will also be offering a new 10 class course on the Ashtavakra Gita, an amazing text that focuses on the concept of the jivanmukta – one who has achieved enlightenment in this very lifetime. We’re very, very excited to be teaching this extraordinary Sanskrit scripture of the Vedantic tradition.

The retreat will also include daily asana and meditation sessions together with a full Dharma Essentials course on “Applied Meditation” by Brandy Davis and David Fishman; daily classes comprising a crash course in Sanskrit by David White; a survey by Cindy Lee of the great figures of the yoga and tantric lineage (the “mahasiddhas”); evening kirtan and satsang sessions; and plenty of time to enjoy one of the world’s most beautiful vacation destinations in the peak of the summer season.

For more information and to register, please go to theClassics of Yoga Retreat website

As many of you know, from this summer we are morphing into a much more limited teaching schedule. This event will be one of only two sets of public teachings we will be scheduling each year, beginning in the summer of 2010. And we are pretty sure the retreat will fill up – so if you wish to attend or would like to know more information, please contact > David Fishman [email: davidbfishman@gmail.com ] as soon as possible to let him know of your interest.

“THE SUMMER RETREAT”
August 25-29

“RECOVERING SILENCE: THE MEDITATIVE LIFE AS THE PATH TO FREEDOM AND GENUINE HAPPINESS”

For those who wish to begin or deepen their daily meditative practice, and for everyone wishing to live a quieter, happier, and more rewarding life, join us for this exciting (and silent!) residential retreat with Lama Marut in Massachusetts.

The Summer Retreat will offer five days of conscious living, mindfulness, and tranquility. Lamas Lindsay Crouse and Rick Blue will teach on living meditatively in relationships and opening ourselves up to others through ‘exchanging self for others’ techniques. You will also learn how to meditate, what to meditate on, and how to live all day long – alone and with others — with awareness, compassion, and wisdom.

Lama Marut and Cindy Lee will offer classes on maintaining stillness through the vicissitudes of life and seeing the sacred and being the sacred in everyday life, exploring various spiritual texts that describe what the liberated and enlightened being looks like.

Lama Marut will offer not-to-be-missed evening classes on how to use meditation to penetrate the illusions of life, discover ultimate reality and finally go beyond conceptions; recovering silence.

Visit www.thessummerretreat for more information.

DHARMA IN THE MEDIA

Please keep sending the wonderful and the weird representations of the dharma in the media. Email us at lamamarut@aci-la.org with news stories, on-line videos, dharma books, websites or anything else that expresses the dharma in our world.

The idea that one can recover anything “original” that hasn’t already been interpreted and represented has long been regarded as fanciful in academic circles. It is a truism in the humanities and social sciences that nothing lays outside of subjective, historical, and cultural conditioning. And this very much includes the person who is seeking such an objectively existing thing. None of us can escape our perspective; none can claim some God’s eye view on an object like “what the Buddha really taught” or “the original Buddhism” or “what is distinctive to Buddhism”. There is no representation of “the real Buddhism” that isn’t someone’s representation; there is no perspective that isn’t just one among the many possible.

But let’s leave all that post-modern intellectual theory aside. What’s really amazing is that a Buddhist would be propounding this kind of argument. The very articulation of a purified Buddhism that is “timeless”, “unconditioned”, and “independent” should raise major red flags. For if there is anything truly distinctive about what we call “Buddhism” it would have to include the observation that things are impermanent, conditioned, and dependent. The search for what is essentially the teaching of the Buddha implodes when confronted with what surely must count as one of the “essential teachings of the Buddha” – that things have no essences at all.

Accordingly, surely we can agree that what is meant by “Buddhism” generally is that everything exists only dependently, not independently or essentially. And things exist dependently in three ways, the first two being ultimately subsumed and superseded by the third.

First, things exist dependent on their “causes and conditions”, which means in this case that “Buddhism” (as well as any modern-day conceptualization of “what the Buddha really taught”) is conditioned by history, culture, language, and a whole host of other factors that come together to bring us the phenomenon in question. Nothing – no object, and no subject mind that perceives objects — exists outside of the realm of causality, contingency, and conditionality. Searching for such an object is not only futile but also disingenuous.

Second, compounded things (“wholes”) exist dependent on their parts. One implication of this is that there can be no one “essential” part of “what the Buddha really taught” or “Buddhism”. Nor can any part that functions as an integral part of the whole (like reincarnation, for example) be jettisoned without fundamentally changing the whole of which it is a part. “Buddhism” is comprised of many interdependent components: doctrines such as the Four Noble Truths, karma and reincarnation, etc., and practices like going for refuge, taking vows, and engaging in meditation. None exists independently; each plays its role in constituting the whole and none can be isolated and privileged as somehow “less dependent” (let alone “independent” or “unique”).

But the third way that things exist dependently is on a mind that conceptualizes and labels phenomena the way it does. There is no possible “pen” until a mind conceives of it as “a pen” and gives it the label “pen”. There are no pens independently and objectively existing “out there”. Phenomena like “what the Buddha really taught” or “the distinctive essence of Buddhism” exist dependently in exactly the same way as a pen – as subjective concepts or ideas and not as objective entities. All things exist only nominally — but, of course, that doesn’t mean they somehow don’t “really” exist. Things exist, function and work quite well, but only as nominally existing things.

“Real” Buddhism need not be abandoned as a result of all these metaphysical gyrations. But in light of what Buddhism teaches about how things do and don’t exist, the way such an investigation proceeds should probably be rethought.

If things exist for us dependent on our conceptualizations of them, then where do our ideas about things like “Buddhism” and “the Buddha” and “what the Buddha really taught” come from in the first place? The answer is they came from others, from those who taught us about “Buddhism” et al. And this is one of the most important roles of the Guru – to generate in us the conceptualizations we have about “the Buddha”, “what the Buddha really taught”, “Buddhism”, “the dharma”, and other such nominally existing entities.

Interaction with the Guru makes possible the formation in us of conceptual categories that, in turn, make possible our understanding and practice of “Buddhism”. The ability to formulate a representation of Buddhism is engendered by linking ourselves to those who teach us how to go about representing such a thing. There would literally be no “Buddhism” (or any particular “lineage” of Buddhism) were it not for the personal relationship we have with the Guru (who, needless to say, can work in many ways and in multiple forms). This is another reason why, according to Buddhism, it is true that for each of us the Guru is the Buddha. It is truly only the Guru who fulfills the role of the Buddha and gives us access to (what we can then conceptualize and name as) Buddhism.

To put this simply, we have the understanding of Buddhism we do because of the teachers of Buddhism we have had. This is why it’s so important to choose your spiritual teachers wisely and carefully. You will literally learn to think like your teacher. We are not really “Buddhists”; we are “Geshe Michael-ists” or “Lama Zopa Rinpoche-ists” or “Dalai Lama-ists”.

So in any search for the “real” Buddhism we must start with what the Guru has taught us about Buddhism. There is no “real” Buddhism that exists independent or apart from that. But one of first things any authentic teacher of Buddhism will convey to the student is to not just slavishly and unthinkingly accept anything the teacher teaches. Once we have been fortunate enough to be taught Buddhism, it is then our understanding of the dharma or the teachings of Buddhism that constitutes the “real” Buddhism for us.

“Rely on the Teaching, not the Teacher”, the Buddha said in the Sutra on what are called the Four “Reliances” or refuges (pratishara). It is not the appearance, personality, charisma or eloquence of the teacher that determines the authenticity of the teaching. It is, rather, the relative veracity of the teachings themselves. Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche (in the Dec. 2001 edition of Shenpen Osel) spells it all out: This means that regardless of the greater experience or perceived level of realization of the teacher, one should still rely on the teachings, ascertaining for oneself their truthfulness or lack thereof, rather than accept them simply because of the profound impression the teacher may have made on one or because of his or her reputation or hierarchical status.

So the “real” Buddhism is what the Buddha taught (which we know only as it has been taught by our own teachers). But this doesn’t clinch things in and of itself either. Sometimes we can become obsessed with the “letter” and miss the “spirit” of the teachings; we stick to the surface and neglect the depth. “Rely on the meaning, not the letter” is the second of the Four Reliances. This second principle, as Bob Thurman writes in an article entitled “Buddhist Hermeneutics”, emphasizes “the role of analytic reasoning in Buddhist practice, wherein a practitioner’s first task is to sift through the complexities of Doctrine to discover its inner meaning.”

And often enough the “real” or inner meaning of the teaching isn’t what it first appears to be. The third “Reliance” is to rely on the final meaning (nitartha) rather than the merely provisional meaning (neyartha). Tsultrim Gyamtso notes that “This injunction is very important when it comes to distinguishing the various levels of the Buddhist teachings, understanding which teachings supersede which other teachings when it comes to understanding absolute truth, and understanding when certain teachings should be applied and when they should not.”

But how do we determine between the “final” and “provisional” meanings? A whole science of hermeneutics has developed within every strand of Buddhism to help us with this task (check out material collected in the Asian Classics Institute Course XV, “What the Buddha Really Meant”), but ultimately we must revert to the fourth of the “Four Reliances”: We rely on direct, experiential wisdom or gnosis (jnana) rather than on merely intellectual and discursive thinking (vijnana). Again, Tsultrim Gyamtso:

This means that in order to understand the definitive truth, in order to understand beyond the need to interpret the true nature of things and which of the Buddha’s many teachings lead directly to that understanding, one must rely ultimately on the wisdom that arises in meditation and not on any of the workings of conceptual mind. At the ultimate level, words and concepts are at best very useful lies; they are the finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself.

It is in our own deep, unmediated experience of the truth, at a level beyond concepts and words where one discovers the “real” Buddhism. Buddhism ultimately transcends any conceptualization of “Buddhism”. Like all authentic spiritual traditions, the Buddha’s dharma can only point one toward an experience one must have for oneself. While some would characterize this direct, non-conceptual, and unspeakable communion with ultimate reality as a kind of mystical seizure, Bob Thurman argues that “the transcendence of verbalization is approached not as a non-rational escape into mysticism, but as an affirmation of empiricism, a rational acknowledgement of the fact that reality, even ordinary reality, is never, in the final analysis, reducible to what we may say about it.”

“Buddhism” is never really Buddhism, after all. Every conceptualization of the dharma or Truth fails to capture and encapsulate it. The “pure” and most “authentic” form of Buddhism has nothing to do with history, or with tenets, beliefs, practices, or labels. It is beyond disputation, silent, transcending the words and concepts that define deceptive (as opposed to ultimate) reality.

“I bow down to him, to Gautama,” writes Arya Nagarjuna at the end of one of his treatises, “who out of compassion taught the true dharma in order to bring about the abandoning of all viewpoints.”

TWO NOT-TO-BE-MISSED RETREATS IN THE USA:

THE MISSING TEACHINGS OF YOGA: An Intensive in the Yoga of Wisdom in South Lake Tahoe, August 6-21

A CLASSICS OF YOGA 200 HOUR INTENSIVE with Lama Marut and YSI Staff Teachers.
Join Join Lama Marut, Cindy Lee, David Fishman and Brandy Davis, Stephane Dreyfus and Jessica Kung this summer for an extraordinary two weeks of study, practice and fun in the stunning environs of beautiful South Lake Tahoe.
Immerse yourself in the classic texts of the Yoga tradition; the Yoga Sutra, Hatha Yoga Pradipika, Bhagavad Gita and a new text on Jivanmukti (“liberated in this lifetime”) ~ all taught by Lama Marut. The intensive will also include daily Sanskrit classes, meditation and asana, classes on ‘How to Teach,’ the lineage of the Mahasiddhas and more . . .
This retreat will fill up fast, so please be sure to REGISTER EARLY!

> Register at YOGA STUDIES INSTITUTE
For more information, please contact David Fishman: >davidbfishman@gmail.com

“Recovering Silence: The Meditative Life as the Path to Freedom and Genuine Happiness” at The Summer Retreat, in Massachusetts (website to be launched soon . . . stay tuned!)
August 25-29 with Lama Marut, Lamas Lindsay Crouse and Rick Blue and Cindy Lee