Snow Lion in the mail

As the weather cools each year I get a mailing from the Snow Lion. That's a Tibetan Buddhist publishing company. This year it is no different. A big three part catalog arrives via USPS. Our mailman must shake his head at times.

I'm now catching up on what Jeffrey Hopkins has been writing, all of the places the Dalai Lama has been visiting and of course all the new Tibetan literature and stuff. I use the word stuff rather interestingly to say the least. For a mindset that doesn't want to get attached to things there sure are a lot of things not to get attached to.

Buddhism is really about change and dealing with it. Everything changes. I can't think of anything that doesn't change. Some of us get a little bit attached to thing and don't want them to change. Others don't like the way things are and get attached to ways we hope they will change. I look at a mountain and at first think it doesn't change but then I realize that it changes with the seasons and that slowly it is washing toward the sea. Even the mountain changes. I'm just changing a bit faster.

I think one of the things that we're having in this time and age is dealing with the change that seems to be happening faster and faster. I'm not so sure that change is any faster as much as it is we can see it so much faster and we are forced to deal with it. Last year we had that big Tsunami. Everybody heard about it so fast. We saw pictures of it. We saw the death and destruction. A little more than a hundred years ago it would take months before we knew about it. The same thing can be said about wars and poverty and the neighbor down the street. I'm 1.6 seconds away from anyone with an Internet connection. THAT is change.

Change is experienced faster. It overwhelms us. We didn't evolve fast enough to deal with it. So much for "intelligent design." I alwso think that conservatives don't like change. They are more attached to the things they like.

The Tiep Hien Order has some interesting teachings:
http://www.iamhome.org/14trainings.htm




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