Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Closed for Lent

No, seriously. Made the decision tonight during the Ash Wednesday service. It's Lent. I'm out.

Expect occasional postings of prayers and scriptures, nothing more. And I emphasize occasional.

And no dissing the Virgin Mary while I'm gone! I mean it!

I will be watching.


Well, all right, I'll leave you this; but just because I like it:

Taken from comments at First Draft on Ash Wednesday, 2007.

"It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of ego. This means stepping out of ego's constant desire for a higher, more spiritual, more transcendental version of knowledge, religion, virtue, judgment, comfort or whatever it is that a particular ego is seeking. One must step out of spiritual materialism. If we do not step out of spiritual materialism, if we in fact practice it, then we may eventually find ourselves possessed of a huge collection of spiritual paths. We may feel these spiritual collections to be very precious. We have studied so much. We may have studied Western philosophy or Oriental philosophy, practiced yoga or perhaps studied under dozens of great masters. We have achieved and we have learned. We believe that we have accumulated a hoard of knowledge. And yet, having gone through all this, there is still something to give up. It is extremely mysterious! How could this happen? Impossible! But unfortunately it is so. Our vast collections of knowledge and experience are just part of ego's display, part of the grandiose quality of ego. We display them to the world and, in so doing, reassure ourselves that we exist, safe and secure, as spiritual" people.

But we have simply created a shop, an antique shop. We could be specializing in oriental antiques or medieval Christian antiques or antiques from some other civilization or time, but we are, nonetheless, running a shop."

-Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Cutting through Spiritual Materialism

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