Thanks for the page number, Zyph. I read it on the Kindle so I didn’t have the page number. I will add it.

To have to wait for external inquiries betrays a lack of diligent morality from people who are supposed to know how to behave.

dhIh !

Due to our inner angst, some valid reflections occur. Also contaminated perceptions occur. By contaminated, I mean to say, we add our own projections, our own arguments, our own deluded attempts to validate that we have a self, and that the endless rumblings of our self are correct as opposed to someone else’s self who sees things differently. We project supposed answers and cultural illusions, as well as emotional and karmic turbulence. (If someone doesn’t believe in karma, I suppose they will just have to censor that part out). We argue endlessly about the correctness of our view; or how we don’t accept someone else’s view, Each of us looks for other “authoritative figures: to validate ourself while we add a lot of presumption, speculation, and habitual responses.

We are all wounded. We all make mistakes.

Whether someone is called a tulku or not, even by an authoritative source, in my opinion is not very important; not so much as how we defer to someone without our reflection and analysis. It is after all just a title, one which we endow with great significance, if we are hypnotized by titles and authoritative figures. Has that person helped us to watch our own mind and practice compassion? Can we acknowledge the good as well as the bad? Can we acknowledge the destructive and well as the constructive?

People who have had lovely relations may end up in divorce hating each other. People who have had mixed experience in their relations may remain in them, though possibly dysfunctional or end in divorce, without acknowledging both the good or bad. Many relations in this world are a mixed bag. Of course, we continue to look for the “perfect relationship” and feel at east with those we can trust (whether or not they are in fact worthy of that trust; and sometimes even, whose to say? It’s sometimes an issue of the eyes of the beholder; or one’s own direct experience; or how one admits the validity of someone else’s perceptions though different from oneself).

People look to punish their mates and ex-mates; their friends and ex friends for trespasses. Some find it most important to find grounds for a lawsuit to be recompensed, as if these values are always so easy to assign, and juries always find the truth and are always just. We want to make ourselves happy or at least obtain vindictive satisfaction and sometimes a significant measure of wealth to make ourselves happy – us the victims against our so called victimizers. But will others also be harmed in the process of getting even, extracting confession, and obtaining recompense? But will you do any better and exercise greater compassion than the person you have labeled a perpetrator? Well, that depends on lots of things, doesn’t it? Of course some of us may insist on punishment and retribution, only compounding and extending pain. Are we able to look on ourselves and others lovingly, and with our own mind and actions, effect healing in self and others?

What matters is our motivation, our kindness, whether we manage to look at our own pain and others pain with compassion, and are able to exercise wisdom and compassion to effectively accomplish healing in as many as possible.

All of our endless browbeating, stirring the pot, criticizing others viewpoints (frequently the same people over and over and over again), – does it accomplish this purpose of healing ourselves and others? Does it create more and not less compassion in the world? Or simply leave the holder of a particular view with their determined conviction to be right above all others?

It seems to me that we, meaning almost all of us – have endless neurotic addiction to stir the pot, never giving our own mind’s muddy water a chance to settle.

Are we able to sit with all of these terribly uncomfortable feelings, the negative ones – to sit and sit and sit and experience them and observe our own minds, and allow some kind of unconditioned natural healing to take place? And are we able to appreciate others – even those we feel hurt by, or those who have different views?

My apologies to anyone I may have deeply disturbed with my own mental musings. May each of us and all beings find genuine peace and contentment.