More thougths, bibbiddy bobbiddy

Today I learned some Japanese sign language (“finger language”) from one of my special students (she has some sort of mental disability). Then we sang together with a CD a crazy version of “ABCs” then “twinkle twinkle little star” then the real version of “ABCs” and, I tell you, for the first time in my life I discovered that those two songs have the exact same melody. I had no idea! Then we sang take me out to the ball game, Head shoulders knees and toes, Who's afraid of the big bad wolf, If your happy and you know it”(that’s a great song), bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, which was hard to sing, and then, Country Roads, which is also a karaoke favorite here. I am currently listening to a kid’s version of bridge over troubled waters in the teachers’ room. (These are notes form my notebook). The vice principal just gave me English Newspapers from the past three days, and, considering I haven’t been keeping up, I put down Harry Potter and the order of the phoenix and flipped through them enthusiastically. My shoulder is still sore from carrying taiko (I heard that ten people were severely injured this year from the festival.) . Before I dive into the paper and my thoughts, some interesting observations. Everyday the food ladies, dressed in surgery-style uniform, truck in all the school food from the city kitchen, and use a type of lazar gun to measure the temperatures, (to make sure no one will get burned). Then, they prepare one meal for the principal, who eats it alone, thirty minuets before lunchtime, to make sure it is safe.

A 12-year-old boy confessed to beating his mother to death (he hit her several times in the neck and she fell over onto a table) because she told him to get out of the house if he did not feel like studying at about midnight on Tuesday. I bet he didn’t mean to kill his mom. Poor kid. Rumsfeld visits China, and so does Snow, and both I bet forgot to talk about Tibet. China (as well as half of Japan) is angry with Koizumi (this story has been front page all three days) because he visited a shrine dedicated to dead solders (some of which were probably morally corrupt). But war victims all the same in my book, even if they did rape and pillage. Greenspan visits Tokyo, and America doesn’t want china in space. Speaking of space, please check out the link to information about aliens.
September was the hottest month on earth since 1880 (hence the hurricanes?) A butterfly flutters past an open window, and a cool breeze carries in the fresh breath of fall. Today is such a beautiful day.

And Saddam Hussein’s trial begins. I see a picture of a mean, grumpy old man, who allegedly ordered the torture and killing of hundreds if not thousands of human lives. And suddenly I feel moved to hug the man. Why this sudden care for this old dictator. I consider compassion; I consider his own humanness, that he too, like me, wants happiness and doesn’t want to suffer. I think that maybe he regrets what he did, but that doesn’t matter. God is working that incarnation out. (He is connected to the earth, and we all grow together from catastrophe.) And if Saddam doesn’t regret, all the more reason to love him. Not pity. Not arrogant I'm better than your poor, ignorant, suffering ass. But compassion, where, I know what is it like to be blind. To be trapped. To project. TO want power. To want happiness. He just is not yet capable of seeing and loving. I don’t want him to die. I don’t want the death penalty. But why not?
I consider Ram Dass’s idea using the image of a television with different channels. And we can see and meet people on different channels. He says we all live on a number of plains of reality (like how you dreamt last night and then woke up to this reality. That was one flip of your receiver, your TV receiver).
For the most part we are 1 or 2 channel receivers, or we live in one or two channels. The first is bodies. We see men, women, hair, body size, shape, features: the physical plain. You meet other people on that channel, and you identify, to some degree, with that channel because you dress it and bathe it and use it to go to work. Physical reality. Channel two; we have personalities and social roles. You’re cranky, you’re peaceful, you’re a mother, you’re a lawyer, you’re a doctor, you like music, you kill people, you lecture people, you help others, you don’t do anything. That is real. Those are real psychosocial positions and realities, and you meet othr mothers, other workerss, other personalities and social roles. Now, if you shift channels again you get to the soul. The thing behind the personality. And here you see just souls. You look into another person’s eyes and you see another being in there, just like yourself; a being that is in a package made up of their body and personality, but is not exclusively those things. You look through the veil of individual difference and you see a being just like you. On that channel we are a group of souls that have met here in our vehicles to do some sort of work, or play, or something, we don’t know, I don’t know, but we seem to be playing out a type of drama. And souls are not good or bad, they do good or bad things on the other channels, but a soul is just a soul. So you cant hate people, you can only hate there actions, because the are just fellow souls, fellow beings on the earth like you. Interestingly, if you change the channel on more time you begin to see that behind all our separateness there is Unity. You look at another dnyou see part of yourself. All our souls are made of the same substance, the same beingness. There is only one of it, and we’re it. This is all permutations of one stuff. You can call that stuff many names because it doesn't have a name. Call it energy. Call it Consciousness, Emptiness, God. Love. (In fact, we will kill each other over what to call it.) Some traditions, like the Jews, refuse to call it anything. I think Paul said God is the All in all. The All. In All. The Isness. The I AM. The One. Behind the many there is the One. (Before the many, before good and evil, there was only the One. The Alone. One more channel and there is no longer “the One” there is no longer God, there is just this. Here, Now. (for in order to see a “One” you must be a separate entity that can SEE the one. I wont get into that stuff right now. The point is that as human incarnates we have all these channels. We have access to all these channels and we can meet on all these channels. And I think I just met Saddam Hussein on the soul channel, where he is a being like me. I know him because there is a channel of reality where him and I are the same Self.

Tonight some Mormons are coming over to read me scripture. I invited them. I think I will talk to them about this kind of thing, and how that relates to god’s plan.

At home I found the new book by the Dalai Lama waiting for me. “The universe in a single atom.” With a quote from The Great Flower Ornament (an ancient Buddhist text) “In each atom of the realms of the universe, there exists vast oceans of world systems.”



the pics are from the festival at Ikku shrine (the shrine with the 1000 year old trees), and our neighborhood taiko parading around my appartment at night. This weekend i am hiking in the mountainns of my neigboring prefecture with some buddies. you will be updated. Be well.