• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 694 0

too much of it. And watch out for the people who tell you they’ve got it and you don’t. And especially watch out for the people who say they can give it to you. The main rule of thumb is to use those critical thinking skills they taught you in school. Whether you have a background in Buddhist “scholarship” is entirely irrelevant. The fact is, it’s hard to find a group of people who misunderstand Buddhism more thoroughly than Buddhist scholars. And often, the more renowned the scholar the more likely he’s got his head firmly wedged in his ass. Question what you read and hear, question deeply and continually. Don’t accept anything because other people believe it, or because it’s expressed prettily or because it’s been around for twenty or two hundred or two thousand years. And by all means, question this, too. But go all the way with your questioning: Question your own conclusions, your own judgments, and your own answers. Look at your own beliefs, your own prejudices, your own opinions—and see them for what they are.

If you don’t do that, the truth can never appear. And if it doesn’t appear in a way that you can personally grasp it without reservation, this whole world hasn’t got a chance in hell.

But if you really thoroughly question everything, if you pursue your questions long enough and honestly enough, there will come a time when truth will wallop you upside the head and you will know.

But let me offer a warning, which like everything else I say, you are totally free to disregard: The truth won’t be what you imagined. It won’t even be close. And you may well wish you hadn’t chased it so long. But once you find it you will never be able to run away from it again, and you will never be able to hide. You’ll have no choice but to face up to it.

DORK-BOY the GODHEAD

All of my life spent wondering who’s hiding behind this face of mine.

“ORIGINAL ME” BY ALL FROM THE ALBUM BREAKING THINGS

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES SUCK. It’s so easy for them to become self-centered, self-absorbed exercises in self-importance. And besides that, autobiographies inevitably promote the very un-Buddhist view that human beings are individual entities acting autonomously from the rest of the universe. That’s crap. You only think you have a mind of your own, buddy. Ain’t no such thing.

But sometimes some autobiographical details have their place in a bigger picture, so I’m gonna share a few with you here. How about if I start with a heartwarming little story about a spiritual master I once knew?

BACK IN THE EARLY ’80S, I was yer typical pimply-faced college dork-boy attending my first semester at Kent State University—a campus whose dubious claim to fame was the slaughter of four students by the Ohio National Guard during a 1970 antiwar demonstration. Like lots of people my age, I was searching for a spiritual path. One day I saw a flier saying the Hare Krishnas would be holding free vegetarian cooking classes on campus. Now I’d been a fan of The Beatles since junior high and knew George Harrison was deeply into the Hare Krishnas. And, because the foreword was written by George Harrison, I even owned a copy of International Society for Krishna Consciousness founder A.C. Bahaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada’s book Krishna: The Supreme Personality of Godhead. So I knew the story of how Prabhupada, a poor but devout Indian monk, had come to America in the early ’60s and succeeded in winning converts all over the West to his charismatic brand of Hindu mysticism. Beatle George had rejected Transcendental Meditation in favor of the Krishnas. So I knew I had to check ‘em out.

The guy who ran the cooking class happened to be the head of the Hare Krishna temple in Cleveland. He was an Anglo-type but he went by some Indian “spiritual name” I can’t recall. I do remember him telling us how this “spiritual name” was chosen by his spiritual master for its resemblance in sound to his “karma name,” which was Terry. I was real impressed with this guy. He had the saffron robes, the shaved head, and that mellow spiritual way of talking that let you know