I'm finding it impossible to write anything even mildly creative at the moment - let alone get my thoughts together about the South West Coast Path - because the virus I came back with (which I thought gone) has left my ears in a sorry state. To put it bluntly, I'm half deaf in one, and completely deaf in the other. I believe I may have an infection in the completely deaf ear, as it hurts. So I suppose I'll have to visit the doctor on Monday if things don't improve. I thought a purgative onion, garlic and chilli soup had blasted the virus away - but, oh no! There's often a sting in life's tail (or tale), isn't there?
The Tibetan Book Of Living And Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche is giving me some consolation, so I thought I'd post a few quotes from this wise classic ...
Confined in the dark, narrow cage of our own making which we take for the whole universe, very few of us can even begin to imagine another dimension of reality. Patrul Rinpoche tells the story of an old frog who had lived all his life in a dank well. One day a frog from the sea paid him a visit.
'Where do you come from?' asked the frog in the well.
'From the great ocean,' he replied.
'How big is your ocean?'
'It's gigantic.'
'You mean about a quarter of the size of my well here?'
'Bigger.'
'Bigger? You mean half as big?'
'No, even bigger.'
'Is it ... as big as this well?'
'There's no comparison.'
'That's impossible! I've got to see this for myself.'
They set off together. When the frog from the well saw the ocean, it was such a shock that his head just exploded into pieces.
Dudjom Rinpoche described the buddha nature of mind thus:
No words can describe it
No example can point to it
Samsara does not make it worse
Nirvana does not make it better
It has never been born
It has never ceased
It has never been nonexistent
It has no limits at all
It does not fall into any kind of catagory.
And the poet Nyoshul Khenpo wrote:
Rest in great natural peace
This exhausted mind
Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thought,
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara.
