Off to See His Holiness

As I mentioned previously, the Dalai Lama is coming to Stanford later this week (Friday and Saturday). Tickets sold out long before I even heard His Holiness was visiting, but I turned to Craigslist and struck gold! So now it looks like I will be attending the morning meditation session AND the Saturday seminar on Craving and Suffering (with boxed lunch). And because it's the Dalai Lama, people are not charging more than they paid for the original tickets, so that's pretty amazing. The Dalai Lama just visited Rutgers University in New Jersey and drew the "largest crowd for a non-athletic event in Rutgers University history" according to the San Jose Mercury News (click title above for link).

In literary news, I just missed a reading by Mary Gaitskill here in the Bay Area, and now I really reget it. There's a good article in the New York Times about her (cut & paste URL):

www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/fashion/sundaystyles/30Gaitskill.html

**By the way, HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!! Do yourself a favor and go read a story by Edgar Allan Poe in honor of this esteemed scary holiday. One of my favorites has always been "The Cask of Amontillado" so here's a URL to the story:

http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/poe/works/cask_amo.html

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A Quick Buddhist Quote

*The Beat poet Jack Kerouac, feeling primed for a spiritual breakthrough, wrote to a friend before he retreated into the wilderness, "If I don't get a vision on Desolation Peak, then my name ain't William Blake." But later he wrote that he found it hard to face the naked truth. "I'd thought, in June when I get to the top—and everybody leaves—I will come face to face with God or Tathagata (Buddha) and find out once and for all what is the meaning of all this existence and suffering—but instead I'd come face to face with myself, no liquor, no drugs, no chance of faking it, but face to face with ole Hateful . . . Me."

*(from an essay entitled "Resting Completely" by Pema Chödrön in Shambhala Sun)

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Backyard Blues: The Anti-Garden

I'm trying to work from home today (as a freelancer), and meanwhile there's a construction crew in our backyard here in Oakland creating a new yard and garden. That sounds lovely, of course, but for some inexplicable reason this future "garden" has required them to chop down a giant (and healthy and beautiful) avocado tree from the backyard (exposing a very ugly backdrop of bland fences and grey walls), dig several large holes and trenches, build an ugly cinderblock wall, and construct an equally clunky-looking wooden fence that has effectively turned the backyard into a corral for invisible, miniature cattle. In the process, the workers managed to crush the sewage system pipe, thereby allowing sewage to spill into the yard until they realized what had happened. In addition to all of this, they tore up every scrap of vegetation in the front, back and side yards, including many beautiful flowers, several large boxwood (I think) bushes, and also a lot of weeds and overgrown grasses. I asked one worker when they were actually going to plant something in this new garden and he laughed, saying, "That won't be until the very end of the project, in the last couple of days." The total project time will be well over a month.

Meanwhile, pulling out all of the plant life exposed a large family of little field mice to the elements. What was their solution? The little critters hustled inside the house to keep warm. The lawyer who lives in our basement has a cat, so the mice avoided her place. Instead, they focused their attention on my roommate Alan and me. Alan would occasionally feel tiny mice feet dashing over his arm while he slept in his bed. I saw a mouse run along a ledge near my bed in broad daylight and disappear behind some boxes. My fearless dog Pop-Eye pretended not to notice. The mice also raided my cupboard and munched on some nuts I had left in a plastic bag. One day I opened my cupboard to get something, and a bold little mouse literally jumped out at me and scurried quickly away behind the refrigerator. We debated what to do, but quickly decided the only real solution was to get some mouse traps. To date, we have now killed eleven of these cute little mice. I feel bad about it (though Alan doesn't, I don't think), but frankly, those damn construction workers, er, "landscapers" forced us to commit these small animal murders. And now they are using a tool that sounds like a jackhammer to tamp down the earth over one of their filled in trenches. This is the ultimate anti-garden so far if you ask me.

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Dalai Lama at Center of Scientific Controversy

According to the New York Times, "544 brain researchers have signed a petition urging the society (for Neuroscience) to cancel the lecture" that was scheduled for next month in Washington, DC where the Dalai Lama has been invited to talk with neuroscientists. However, "Dr. Carol Barnes, president of the neuroscience society, says she will not cancel the talk or change the schedule."

Here is an excerpt on the positive aspects of meditation mentioned in the article:

"In the past decade, scientists and journalists have increasingly taken interest in meditation and "mindfulness," a related state of focused inner awareness, topics once left to weekend mystics and religious retreats. The Dalai Lama has been working with a small number of researchers to study how the practice of Buddhist contemplation affects moods and promotes a sense of peace and compassion.

In one widely reported 2003 study, Dr. Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison led a team of researchers that found that 25 employees of a biotechnology company showed increased levels of neural activity in the left anterior temporal region of their brains after taking a course in meditation. The region is active during sensations of happiness and positive emotion, the researchers reported."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/19/national/19meditate.html

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Dalai Lama Visiting Stanford

The Dalai Lama is giving several talks at the Stanford University campus this November 4 and 5, but all of these events mysteriously sold out long ago according to the official website. I successfully signed up for the lottery where I was promised a shot at free tickets to see the Dalai Lama, but of course I didn't "win" any tickets. I would gladly pay a reasonable price for a ticket to see His Holiness, but it seems that this isn't going to happen. Oh well, I guess I'll have to watch him on the live webcast like most everybody else. I believe the webcast will be available from this page (so mark your calendar):

http://dalailama.stanford.edu/video/

I should add that to me His Holiness the Dalai Lama is perhaps the most positive role model we have currently living in our world today, so I would give anything to see him in person. Here is a pertinent quote by Tenzin Gyatso (a shortened form of his actual Tibetan name) from "The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom":

"Our feelings of dissatisfaction, unhappiness, loss of hope and so forth are in fact related to all phenomena. If we do not adopt the right outlook, it is possible that anything and everything could cause us frustration. Yet phenomena are part of reality and we are subject to the laws of existence. So this leaves us only one option: to change our own attitude. By bringing about a change in our outlook towards things and events, all phenomena can become friends or sources of happiness, instead of becoming enemies or sources of frustration."

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