Advertising without saying a word

On 7/28/2004, In General, By site admin

Buddhism has never been an evangelical religion. We do not go around holding tent retreats or host vibrant speakers to come and inspire us to spend more time on the cushions. This kind of theatrical approach would attract the wrong crowd entirely.

This practice is a deeply personal one, it is really not a spectator event. There is only personal performance, not some kind of charismatic showcase. The practice is couched deep inside, and that is where the fruits are realized as well. If you are running around hollering about zen this and enlightenment that, well that is just an act. The real change happens deeply, and personally. The perspective is such that you can relate, it is not a condemnation or a plea to repent. It is a deep understanding and a keen awareness that words are nothing. It is something best done for yourself.

If begging and pleading ever inspired anyone to do anything different, it is still because the person freely made the decision to change on their own. The only thing we can do as fellow practitioners is to set a good example and participate along with them. This assumes we are earnest in our own practice and have developed the compassion necessary to help others without getting caught in an ego fest.

To really make an impression, we simply be ourselves. When it is an act or grossly exaggerated to the point of nausea, all we do is show how well we pretend. When our practice is natural and our attitude is clearly from a compassionate center, how can that not be obvious? It is not a temporary mode or a role that it played. When we really understand that there is no self, we can operate freely with skilled and appropriate means.

This is our witness, this is our viral peer-to-peer trust based network marketing scheme. The best marketing plans are the ones that are not planned.

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

Salt of the Earth

On 7/21/2004, In Personal, By site admin

I recently spent some time in a small southern Arkansas town. In places like that you can rekindle a fondness for friendly locals if you are not careful. I am accustomed to getting some pretty good service in the big city. In fact, it was my impression that people come from out of town just to get a taste of it. I need an occasional reminder that things are different “out there” in the surrounding towns.

I needed a new cell phone antenna because I am a busy klutz and have not had time to stand in line for a repair when it would be much easier to just buy a new one. It just so happened that I was working right next door to a Cingular agent. I was killing some time for something else to get fixed, so I stepped next door just to see what they had in stock.

Inside the window sat a short, middle aged woman. She came over and greeted me with a smile I had not seen in a very long while. I showed her the loose stub they call an antenna, and she casually reached behind her and pulled out the exact model I needed. In a daring feat of customer service, the same woman pulled out a torque wrench set and started taking my phone apart! With a steady pace and a determined manner, she gingerly opened the phone with a stripped wrench and held a friendly conversation at the same time. Her young son appeared every now and then. It is summer, and the offices teem with children in towns like this. I could see from her son that her dark roots didn’t need those highlights when she was that age. While she was talking to me, she and her son were playing the distraction game out of my eyeshot. This was too much for me to take, I had to step back to the shop. I left my phone in capable hands.

In a just few minutes she came next door with the phone perfectly assembled and a credit card approval agent on the phone for my zip code. With a signature I got a pink receipt and another smile of thanks for doing business. That was the complete package. A repaired phone AND a friendly rep, what more could I want? She didn’t even charge me for the install or the delivery. That was astounding.

Meanwhile, back at the store…I called the CELL PHONE number of the local Alltel repair man, and he was back in the CO in about 20 minutes. I can’t even imagine such a thing in the big city. I asked him if he was going to somehow hand the trouble ticket back to the big carrier, and he said he had no idea how to do that. He tried to call and speak to a human, but his efforts were stored is a voice mailbox somewhere in Texas. We both sighed, and went about cleaning up. It was 9pm and the shop owner had hung in there with me all day. He had been patiently answering phones to explain that they could blame lightning, and someone all the way from Little Rock was actually there working on it. It would have been really easy for him to blame us in a pre-recorded answering machine message, but he assumed his part in the situation as only someone from that town could do.

When all was said and done, the people of that small town had their internet back, I had a three bar cellphone signal and a four bar understanding that life is seasoned by salt of the earth people.

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

Lake Trip

On 7/14/2004, In Personal, By site admin

It started innocently enough- A simple request to tag along on a campout one weekend. We could finally be introduced to the gang my office friend has been sharing so many funny stories about. The legends would finally be made real. Well, because of the nature and occasions for the stories, I was prepared for a wild weekend, and I was not disappointed.

As soon as we drove up and had our tent setup, the group was just getting off their boat. Apparently there was a little alcohol on the trip, so you need no description of the mess they were in. The rest of the evening was cooking dinner, loud talking, more drinking, and beeping punctuated by uproarious laughter until midnight. There was only one visit by the ranger, and I was in bed around 11pm.

However, a select few decided to just stay up most of the night, and they eventually ran out of prepared food. They cooked a little early breakfast and finally settled in for the night on full tummies. Unfortunately, their premature venture into breakfast caused a big breakfast emergency while they slept in. When the pieces came together and they were branded perpetrators, the stewing drama was to reach a full rolling boil before any coffee got hot.

Naturally, the explosion was a result of a confluence of simple things. Bacon was eaten, and someone fell off the wagon. These simple things are not difficult to understand in the context of the moment. The responses were the workings of missed expectation, and therefore defy explanation. Wives were angry, everyone heard excuses and speculation but agreed that they were all adults. So, it turns out, we all want to get together again.

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

Independance in 2004

On 7/5/2004, In General, By site admin

Independance Day is not a unique holiday for America. Technically speaking, some countries may have many such days throughout the year. The issue always centers around the idea of an original owner. In our case, it was the British. Many countries contributed to our population, but it seemed to us that the British monarch was too strict to bear any longer.

Regardless of origin, the future Americans agreed by common life to become something other than what their immediate past would indicate. They literally changed identities. It was a bold move at the time, but it does give us a good example of just how shallow and tenuous identities really are.

Today, changing citizenship is largely a legal matter. But, we still maintain that there is a strong American identity, and some things people do is un-American. I believe we can understand that personal liberty is the priority, but we still want everyone to match our commonly created idea of a moral, upstanding citizen. If you don’t know what that means, how can you really be an American?

I would assert that people with integrity, fair morality, and an open mind embody the true American spirit. The idea of “American” originated from those traits, not the other way around. If you do not have these traits, you are actually no worse off than anyone else. Each person has this capacity naturally. It is just a matter of expression, of being able to manifest these traits in the natural course of a day.

The thing is, the citizens of every country believe the same thing. How do we get turned around? It is the attachment to a single static image. If anyone is figured as different, there is the divide. This is the entry to the political world. The way we divide people is infinite, it knows no boundaries. We use every possible distiction to turn people into classes.

The only way we as a country can truly become united is to transcend these distinctions. The features that set us apart are never going to go away, but they can be seen for the arbitrary divisions that they are. When seen in this light, they lose the potency to tear us apart and set us against each other. When this happens, how could we not see that even our own country is an arbitrary division? Maybe then we will be ready to move into the domain of a truly united people. We can only be independant when there is no unity.

 
0 Comments
Leave A Response
Go To Top »