Poetry as practice.

For all my Buddhist and writer friends –

Acharya Sherab Gyaltsen, last night at Nalanda West, where I’m taking a class on the nature of mind through the Nitartha Institute. He’s visiting from Boulder, CO, where he teaches at Naropa Univerisity. My paraphrase/interpretation, of course:

Seeing a dancing Padmasambhava would be an illusory experience, much like seeing floating hairs that aren’t there when you have an eye affliction. All the cultural trimmings we’ve fallen in love with in Tibetan Buddhism — the iconography, the mantras, the visualizations, etc. — are distractions from the hard work of analyzing our minds, uncovering the veils of perception that obscure pure Buddha mind.

That in itself is revolutionary. For me, anyway. But the A-HA! moment I had when he said that took it a step further. And took me many, many steps backwards, to Redlands, my sophomore year of college. Ralph Angel — my brilliant, early poetry mentor — telling me to drop the veils obscuring what I should really be getting at in my work.

So there I am again. Or here I am again.