View allAll Photos Tagged finally
... things were restored to normal but you can see who was the hardest and the last to get out the door !
I feel like I am finally losing the pregnancy weight in my face. This is a VERY slow process.
I think that I don't look a day over 21 in this picture. In fact, last week while I was out, this old man accused me of skipping school. How wrong he was! But I didn't want to disrespect him by asking how old I look, and correcting him with my real age.
Shinjuku Prince Hotel. The room is pretty big and enough for me and my friends to hang out together at night too. Who said Japan hotel is so small!?!?!
FINALLY my washing machine is fixed. I have never been so happy to be under mountains of washing, as it is no longer dirty but CLEAN. This is only temporary happiness, don't worry I'll be over it shortly. (It was, embarrassingly, one of my hair grips that had got lodged in the pump which caused the machine to keel over. £75 it cost me. No, I did not tell my husband it was one of my hair grips.....)
And my 'Auntie' skills worked... she eventually crashed out, but I wasn't banking on her falling asleep on me! Everything suddenly ground to a holt.
Bless her, aren't they great when they're alseep! (killed my arm though...)
i finally got a whole day to myself! after everything that has happened i needed this 'me time"! i got to enjoy my gift and take pictures all afternoon! :) ( which will soon make there way onto flicker)
we almost wore IzzytheDog out...she stopped to rest long enough for me to get a half decent shot of her.
Finally we come to the conclusion that form is just form and emptiness is just emptiness, which has been described in the sutra as seeing that form is no other than emptiness, emptiness is no other than form ; they are indivisible. We see that looking for beauty or philsophical meaning to life is merely a way of justifying ourselves, saying that things are not so bad as we think. Things are as bad as we think! Form is form, emptiness is emptiness, things are just what they are and we do not have to see them in the light of some sort of profundity. Finally we come down to earth, we see things as they are. This does not mean having an inspired mystical vision with archangels, cherubs and sweet music playing. But things are seen as they are, in their own qualities. So shunyata in this case is the complete absence of filters of any kind, the absence even of the "form is empty" and "emptiness is form" conceptualization. It is a question of seeing the world in a direct way without desiring "higher" consciousness or significance or profundity. It is just directly perceiving things literally, as they are in their own right. --- There is a story that when the Buddha gave his first discourse on shunyata, some of the arhats had heart attacks and died from the impact of the teaching. In meditation these arhats had experienced absorption in space, but they were still dwelling upon space. Inasmuch as they were still dwelling upon something, there was still an experience and an experiencer. The shunyata principle involves not dwelling upon anything, not distinguishing between this and that, being suspended nowhere. --- If we see things as they are, then we do not have to interpret or analyze them further ; we do not need to try to understand things by imposing spiritual experience or philosophical ideas upon them. --- The interpretation of shunyata which we have been discussing is the view of the Madhyamika or "Middle Way" philosophical school founded by Nagarjuna. It is a description of an experiental reality which can never be accurately described because words simply are not the experience. In fact, it is dubious that one can even speak of "experiencing" reality, since this would imply a separation between the experiecer and the experience. And finally, it is a questionable whether one can even speak of "reality" because this would imply the existence of some objective knower outside and separate from it, as though reality were a nameable thing with set limits and boundaries. Thus the Madhyamika school simply speaks of the tathata, "as it is". Nagarjuna much preferred to approach truth by taking the arguments of other philosophical schools on their own terms and logically reducing them ad absurdum, rather than by himself offering any defnitions of reality. --- Chogyam Trungpa / Shambhala Publications