Nothing

June 23, 2010 at 2:22 am (food, General House Cleaning, Nothing)

I went to the store. The cheap store. As I walked in, I saw the friend of a friend and said hello as he passed by. Then I heard someone call my name. I looked around but didn’t see anyone. Then I heard my name again and I saw my friend who was the friend of the friend’s friend in the refrigerator section.

I said, “Hey I just saw your friend.” He said, “Yeah, we came together.” I said, “You shop with your friend?” He said, “Dude I am not gay.” I said, “OK, I believe you, but I wouldn’t care either way.”

I bought some non-organic blueberries, strawberries and yogurt.

I was standing in line behind a man standing back from an older woman who was in front of him. The older woman must have been a smoker and got lip cancer because a lot of her mouth was cut away and she was drooling some. The man in front of me was visibly upset by this. I wanted to say to him, “Don’t you feel lucky at this very moment?” Like the story of the guy with no shoes being upset until he saw the guy with no feet. The woman with no mouth was with a very happy middle-aged man who I guessed was her son. He was putting package after package of napkins on the conveyor belt at the cash register.

When I got home I put my fruit and yogurt away and went to the laundry room. My clothes had been in the dryer while I was gone. I love to multi-task… it gives me time to do what I love best, which is nothing.

When I brought my clothes back to my apartment, I noticed my cell phone blinking indicating that I had a message. But I didn’t listen to the message right away because I wanted to fold my laundry and put it away before it got wrinkly. Just as I finished the phone rang and I answered it. It was another friend. He said, “Dude, I’ve been calling you and calling you… where were you?” I told him I was at the store. He said, “Why didn’t you answer your phone?” I told him I did not take my phone with me to the store. He said, “Why not?”  I said, “My phone already has everything it needs. “

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directions, not destinations

June 3, 2010 at 3:18 pm (Uncategorized)

Like being lost on a one-way street.

I heard a man say, “Humanity’s occupation is to die.”

As grim as that may have sounded at the time, it made me feel at peace.

How could I fail?

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Why sing along with Dharma Gypsys?

June 1, 2010 at 3:22 pm (General House Cleaning, Hindu, Kirtan, Music, Pop Culture, sanskrit, Yoga)

Why should you sing along with Asato Ma (track #1 from the Dharma Gypsys Volume One: Music for Yoga Meditation and General House cleaning)? And What do the these words mean?

The fact that the words to this song are not in English is to your advantage. Knowing a word in your native language comes with a lot of baggage. Take the word God. It has a mountain of baggage attached to it, especially here in the west. So singing or saying something in a foreign language removes that mental baggage. It’s hard to pollute something consciously if we don’t know exactly what it means. But subconsciously, it is reaching us.

We want to get back in touch with the place we have forgotten but have never left. The universal mind. The collective consciousness. Where everything that has ever been or is ever going to be is available to us. Einstein talked about it. And you can have the same information Einstein had, hear the same things Beethoven—a deaf man—heard. How do you think Jimi Hendrix—an American man in his twenties—redefined the guitar forever? Sure he practiced a lot. But there is something else. The undefinable, the thing Jimi himself may not have been aware of. Like a medium, like a conduit of light and things better left unnamed.

You are part of the whole. The whole world. In fact you are the world. But our brains and ego—and the mental chatter produced by that pair—are deafening. It’s going to be easier to get into our subconscious if we can’t mentally define and label something.

So as we hear without listening, as we create without defining, as we sing along with words we do not understand because they are not in our native tongue, we can  receive the meaning in it’s purest form. No labeling. No defining. Only direct contact with the source.

So do you still want to know what the words to Asato Ma mean?

Asato Ma Sad Gamaya
Tamaso Ma Jyotir Gamaya
Mrityor Ma Amritam Gamaya

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