A repost of one of my facebook posts

'It seemed to me that men were born only to grow old, to live out their span, to acquire experience. Men lived to acquire experience; the quality of the experience was immaterial; pleasure and pain--and, above all, pain--had no meaning; to possess pain was as meaningless as to chase pleasure. And even when the illumination vanished, became as thin and half nonsensical as dream, I remembered that I had had it, that knowledge about the illusion of pain.' ~ VS Naipaul, A Bend in the River

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My comment on this post on facebook back on  06 April, 2015. (Edited)

'The unity of experience', 'the illusion of pain' are, for me, like the interplay between sadism and masochism, the former begetting the later desperation standing on two different rawness defined by endless self-interest. The illusion, however backed by some sentimental or spiritual ground at last, is as variably risky as the interpretation of a presented idea of any. It's up to if the aggregated experience is workable, though desperate, through one last crash course for some sounder illumination or not, and for which, I think, the need of paramount importance is a workable ground of philosophical enlightenment which is itself heuristic, ever learning, adjustable and thereby robust ever. 

His Holiness the Dalai Lama In Conversation with Greta Thunberg and Lead...

'Feedback loop', 'refreezing' to let remain the permafrost of Artic to Tibetan plateau to let do their natural job, 'reforestation' for balancing the sucking in of carbon and releasing of oxygen for our being able to live on this only life-supporting planet so far, 'educating ourselves' on such matters related with the existence of humankind with something grander of meaning than an animal: the former is sort of abstract as the coining of any idea is before getting to it with some sense of personal experience, but it does matter in being familiar with how we live and crave for, more needs, more such needs that aren't worth-craving for at all as we somehow tend to get to it at the end. Yes, it's rather an abstract idea than just a concrete, materialistic entity of being able to satisfy your demand with a diamond ring or something concrete like a Ferrari car; it's. It's about the reaction (feedback) of abnormal melting of permafrost of the areas as of the cause of fossil oil emission (from rigging for it, refinery plants to personal usage to those irresponsible acts), and thereby the release of excess of carbon into the air that turns out into 'heat trapping gas', namely 'greenhouse gas', as of the want of proportionate challengers in balancing it. So, the network or the cycle of cause and effect (loop) of the same reaction experienced in the sense of 'heatwave' or any across the globe, by every individual. Though the webinar was sort of carried out in haste as of the trammel of time now, it's worth-joining and learning for a Tibetan like myself, displaced, in exile. 

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Someone predestined to be the prey of our instinctive prejudice

In our life, there can be someone who is familiar to us in a way he or she comes within our sight on an irregular basis, but we have already had a sort of predisposed attitude toward that particular person, given his or her reserved manner, pertness, vanity, affectation, or sort of obtruding himself or herself as having something to shine over us, such attitude that we can’t get on with him or her ever. And, when chanced to stumble on with him or her face to face followed by some gestures of conversation or floundering to make such, we thereafter take the encounter as something far less than an encounter of such with a complete stranger, which can sometimes turn out into more closeness later on. It’s so true that it’s more of our yielding ourselves to the excess of our predisposition of such, so absolute to us. It can be true also that, if chanced to know him or her more, he or she can turn out someone stark different from our blind, sort of instinctive calculation on his or her being, like a character certificate generated by our own way of judging. But how such a thread of seemingly fixed mental forecast on someone particular but not on many others?   

Assuming to be getting connected to the coiner’s intention

The English word 'impression'--rather than an impression left by a thumb of its lines like on a piece of paper--renders its meaning full in the sense of subjectivity, its projected colorations. It's, then, proven there already, the medium, the transmission, the means of getting to, the means of dealing with our life. It's, in essence, enshrined in the cocoon of this word, what it's in reality. So do try to slow down sometimes, and see how you paint rather than being there in such a solidity--objectively, minutely, uniformly, stark naked to be hogged down. 

Keep learning on

The two things I find: the first in myself, the second in others

Retentiveness in the form of a reflex of being able to replicate an intonation of mouthing a prayer, its personal hymn, even after many years…

Living down or being able to live oneself down through the course of time, after the initial period of infatuation, alacrity, alertness....

A piece of verbiage

Inuring to, getting oneself inured to a situation like letting an adventitious element interpolate into one’s illusion of eternal coziness, the things dear as the prime props of one’s life to be swapped by something extrinsic. Or a love gone awry through our commoner’s caprice, narcissism, ego, self-absorption, want of self-command at the nick of time, and then on to this desperation called forming a habit, namely indifference that Marcel Proust qualified with the epithet ‘cruel’ but a means of survival after all. But can habit in general be more or less affected by the same process of causation, given its strong element of ‘cognitive inertia’? Here, the most beautiful thing called empathy should be invoked into defining if the same habit, like getting up early in the morning, is tinted with its splendor or not. If yes, then it can no longer be labelled as a state of such desperation, I think. 

As Proust’s fundamental belief or as the prop of his own life, it’s something like lacking the prime backup, the exigency, to deal with the changing, deceptive external world--to do without the means called art. That counts, really, as unconventional in the true sense of the word but just above the common run of sentient, language-oriented beings. He could be feeling sometimes how someone without such a means could be living, how his or her life could be barren--’chiaroscuro devoid of poetry’. 

And for me, despite myself being a fledgling aficionado, I wonder how one could deal with such flurries within and without--such colossal needs, with such a tiny heart--without a firm footing acquired through long, long labor that delivers oneself into a face-to-face encounter with the awareness of the reality universal rather than just palliative. 

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The proximity in space and time does matter so much, given the facts that a painter does know much more about a flower than someone like you and me, someone who peruses it superficially, that having a consistent mindfulness does make a huge difference in connecting to the reality, that a chain of scurrying ants as viewed from a distance isn't of such an order and discipline as observed from a close quarter rather errant--the one before, who misses a single step, being trampled on by the following one; no place for thinking for the one before but to keep oneself going on to the end, up to the extremity of this uncertainty, life.

Sinicization of Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhism: Fact or fancy

The recent much hyped news about the transformation of Tibetan Buddhism, namely Tibetan Buddhist Studies, into that of China’s version or adapted into the needs as per the party’s propaganda tools, for its hypochondria of sky-falling paranoia of detecting a more powerful attraction above it and its shallow philosophical grounds, as could be learned from the suppression of Falun Gong movements or sect throughout China, what could be so confidently presented just as a generality is that Tibetan Buddhist Studies (Science of thoughts and emotions to its arrays of knowledge fields including, as the major factors, ontology, epistemology and training of minds) is so much or far above socialistic ideals brimming just along a blurry horizon of just perorating but not of praxis, for being a commoner, self-interested one. We have far sounder evidence related to coherentism, shared knowledge that can be postulated so much by why a Westerner is that interested in our mindfulness training (physical body, feelings, core mind, and the reality), and heuristic approaches for self-liberation first. 

But the sinicization of Tibetans, though being more than farfetched, is an interesting matter, granted that a commoner’s mind can be lured by mundane pleasures or this-life-related, matter-of-fact glitter and glamor, so obtainable, if one could betake oneself to the fray. Then, despite stark impossibility, once formed and molded as a hardy cast as thus, as a run-of-the-mill Chinese now, China could arm herself with the highest altitude dwelling legion of brave herders of warrior instinct. We had been merciless once. Mark it! 

While jotting it down, these odd notes, I happen to get struck with a sudden thought. What, could my late  beloved mother have ever envisioned his only son could be that cranky, staying in an alien land as a guest, trying to convey his deep seated feelings through an extrinsic means of expression? So unfortunately, the first alphabet I learned back then when I was seven was ABCD rather than ཀ་ཁ་ག་ང་།, ABCD each displayed on a smooth square wooden card by a Bhutanese English teacher, maybe named Sir Mencha, for us, the snotty village lads on the plank floor, to be identified by pronouncing it aloud. The crude, axe-hewn, weathered dark wooden shingles roofed oblong shack housing some four classes, with a balustraded verandah of wooden balusters raised from the ground level reached by wooden steps on its either end; it stood just at the foot of a scrubbed over hummock, with the strays of bushes at hand’s reach from the back windows: I am ephemerally once there, when she lived.  

What is the origin of your nationality?

For a Tibetan, now, at this dark juncture of our national history, each and everyone of us, above 17, hasn’t such an alternative or privilege to claim oneself as ‘apolitical’, for we’re born an oppressed one, or a political refugee. Then, does it really make sense to place our livelihood in terms of ‘better life’ or ‘standard way of living’ as the top priority? How is it, if we, too, tend to yield to the same thoroughfare like a run-of-the-mill Chinese, namely the money-making-machine way as one’s way of life?