Particularly, today we are living in such a time, you know, everybody knows what happens everywhere. Almost next minute everybody will know what is happening, good or bad. This is the 24-hour news cycle, which makes our life very different from the good old evening news or morning news paper. That was a reasonably relaxed life. Today, no. Everything is known within the minute.
By the way, we knew the moment the Supreme Court made a decision about Obamacare. Everybody knew immediately, even though you were not watching TV or listening to the radio. By the mouth of people, everybody knows. So it was with the LGBT decision, for both of which we should congratulate people. A lot of people think the LGBT is wrong, but that’s their conservative thinking or their old-fashioned thinking.
They can’t keep their mind up to date. That’s their problem. But a lot of people think that something great has been done. No, nothing great has been done. Simply, you give those people the equal right as you and I already have. You give them the equal right. If you are American, you should be entitled to everything equally. That entitlement that was somehow held back by society, has been restored.
Nothing great has been given. I mean it is good, no doubt, but nothing great has been done. They have got the rights they are entitled to. That should have been done years and ages ago. But they just got it. Hopefully we are going to be able to maintain them in every part of the States. So, that’s that and people should really do that. All these things happen. We have a such a life where everything is totally known by everybody all the time. That means our mind is much, much busier. All this junk information is filling us up totally.
If you are looking for certain information, if you look at the right place, yes, you get it. But, I was not looking at the right place. Two days ago I was looking at the Supreme Court decision, and wanted to see which judge was the tipping point. I didn’t know it was Justice Kennedy at that time. I spent hours listening between Fox News, CNN and MSNBC and what information did I get? It was full of junk, honestly, lots of commercials. The commercials are louder and they hit you stronger. If you try to review what you learned, you get all these commercials, pop up one after another in your head. So I didn’t learn it was Justice Kennedy, until I went to Al-Jazeera. They showed the picture of how the decision was split. It took me an hour to find out. I didn’t ask anybody. I couldn’t look at the internet. That can easily be done, but I don’t see well, so I didn’t. So I kept on watching the TV as source of information, and spent one hour to find that out, and that there is a lot of junk filling up your mind.
So much junk is really knocking all our senses in front of us all the time: hearing, seeing, smelling, touching, everything is junk. At this moment, if you do not know how to concentrate, you are depriving yourself of a great opportunity, the opportunity not to be great, but to live a normal life, to be a normal person, to be the right person for your next door neighbor, just a normal person. For that you need a little more concentration.
Then to go beyond that, you need focusing. To go beyond that you need shamata development. That is one of the three important points that Buddha said you have to train yourself in: morality, concentration and wisdom. So if you want to know more detail about focusing and concentration and meditation, then I have a transcript called GOM, which is meditation. In my opinion – I am blowing my own trumpet – this is one of best meditation handbooks available in English. It is based on true tradition and the experience of many people. So you people have that opportunity available with you.
~ Gelek Rimpoche, Jewel Heart Ann Arbor, June 28, 2015
