Painting by Carlos Paez Vilaro
(my newly discovered favorite artist from Uruguay)

If you earn the wealth of pure love, you become the richest person in the world. He who is contented is the richest man in the world and the one who has many desires is the poorest man in the world. Today, man is filled with desires from top to toe. As long as one has desires, one can never be happy and peaceful. Give up desires and see for yourself how much love and bliss you get. The bliss you experience will be far superior to all the happiness you have experienced before. All the bliss is within you. But you are imagining that it is outside. What is outside is only the reflection, reaction and resound of what is within you.

~Baba

- BABA

Karma is not fatalistic or predetermined. Karma means our ability to create and to change. It is creative because we can determine how and why we act. We can change. The future is in our hands, and in the hands of our heart.

Buddha said:

Karma creates all, like an artist,
Karma composes, like a dancer.

~Sogyal Rinpoche

How hard it can be to turn our attention within! How easily we allow our old habits and set patterns to dominate us! Even though they bring us suffering, we accept them with almost fatalistic resignation, for we are so used to giving in to them. We may idealize freedom, but when it comes to our habits, we are completely enslaved. Still, reflection can slowly bring us wisdom. We may, of course, fall back into fixed repetitive patterns again and again, but slowly we can emerge from them and change. Last night I dreamed that I got drunk. This led to feelings of guilt and anguish as I tried to explain my behaviors to my family. My Mom, in particular, was in distress. It has been a year since I let go of that habit. Still, my subconscious persists. I see this dream as a means to reflect on the true nature of an abusive habit: guilt, anguish, distress...add that to powerlessness, numbness and attachment. It is a blessing that we are able to change. It takes strength, persistence and sometimes support, and... it is always worth it!

"Not Here"

There's courage involved if you want
to become truth. There is a broken-

open place in a lover. Where are
those qualities of bravery and sharp

compassion in this group? What's the
use of old and frozen thought? I want

a howling hurt. This is not a treasury
where gold is stored; this is for copper.

We alchemists look for talent that
can heat up and change. Lukewarm

won't do. Halfhearted holding back,
well-enough getting by? Not here.

-- Version by Coleman Barks
"The Soul of Rumi"

In our minds, changes always equal loss and suffering. And if they come, we try to anesthetize ourselves as far as possible. We assume, stubbornly and unquestioningly, that permanence provides security and impermanence does not. But in fact impermanence is like some of the people we meet in life - difficult and disturbing at first, but on deeper acquaintance far friendlier and less unnerving than we could have imagined.

~Sogyal Rinpoche

The moon shines in my body...

The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:
The moon is within me, and so is the sun.
The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it. So long as man clamours for the I and the Mine,
his works are as naught:
When all love of the I and the Mine is dead, then the work of the Lord is done.
For work has no other aim than the getting of knowledge: When that comes, then work is put away.

The flower blooms for the fruit: when the fruit comes, the flower withers.
The musk is in the deer, but it seeks it not within itself: it wanders in quest of grass.

~Kabir