One More Epicycle

I’m currently struggling to overcome a mysterious energy-sapping will-to-live-destroying illness which makes it hard to eat, lie down, stand, sit, walk, sleep, and so on.

You know, I’ve never been as sick in my life as I’ve been since I came to London; I suspect it’s all the weird European bugs meeting my spleenless immune system. Timing couldn’t be worse, as the last few weeks have been very busy. The brats are back in full, and I have to cover a friend’s tutoring duties while he’s off serving a mandatory three-week stint in the Turkish army, of all things. Never rains but it pours!

So I’m trying to think of happier times, and one was a few weeks ago when I managed to drift into some weird perfectly awake and lucid but somehow not-quite-there state.

For reasons it would take too long to get into, I was reading about various controversies involving Stuart Kirkpatrick, son of the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN. He’s also known as Traktung Rinpoche, and some believe him the reincarnation of Do Khyentse Yeshe Dorje, a nineteenth-century mystic.

I don’t believe in any kind of Buddhism. I don’t think the meaning of life is escape from suffering (“He suffered under Pontius Pilate, and was buried”), but instead the presence of love (“Love one another as I have loved you”); I don’t believe in reincarnation or karma, and reject the idea that if something bad happens to you it could be because you’ve done something bad in a past life (“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned. This happened so that the works of God might be revealed in him”); and I don’t believe that the universe is any kind of illusion (“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good”).

For what it’s worth, Traktung Rinpoche’s answers to comments and questions generally run like this [typos in original corrected]:

Q. But “you” are sitting here talking to us.

Traktung Rinpoche: No, I am not. It seems that way to you because you insist on the narrow “point of view” implied by the uninspected tendency of awareness to identify with consciousness, Beingness and body mind. All these arise co-emergently. Bam! All at once, consciousness, Beingness, and world arise as a single whole. The result of a little mistake in awareness. If you take the trouble to inspect, perhaps you will have to first strengthen the tool of inspection – that is all the spiritual path is, strengthening the tool of inspection – then you will discover something most amazing and all of your comparative competitiveness will dissolve.

Well, then!

In any case, I was learning about the complex relationships between various streams of Buddhism in the Tibetan community and their counterparts in the West, especially some movements which take different attitudes to “form” than I’ve always associated with Buddhism.

And while I was doing this, I was listening repeatedly to a terrible earbug of a song called “Hip Hop Vegetable“, which is honestly about vegetables. If I believed in meditative states I’d swear it drove me into one. Really, I’m sure the song is just very relaxing, with warm, friendly lyrics and a catchy tune; but it felt very, very strange.

So if you find yourself about to read up on Vajrayana Buddhism while listening to soft J-pop about produce, don’t say you weren’t warned!