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The talk below was given on 31 October 1994 at the regular Monday night Dzogchen sitting group in Cambridge, MA.
Happy Halloween, everybody. You can take off your masks now. We're not what we think we are, are we? It says in the Surangama Sutra (sutras are scriptures, spoken by the Buddha himself) that things are not what they seem to be, nor are they otherwise. I don't know if that's a trick or a treat -- maybe it's both. You tell me!
We are not who we think we are; but who are we? Has anyone ever wondered? Of course, we have all wondered in different ways. We are not what we think we are. We are not just what we think we are; also, we are not just what we think. Why are we so identified with thought? There is so much more to us than just what we think; what we think is just a part of ourselves, but what about the rest? The rest is often overlooked as we look at life through the conning tower up here in the brainpan, above the eyebrows, the view from the penthouse. What about feeling things through the heart or the hara (naval center)?
Who or what are we, anyway? Who is experiencing one's own experience? Who or what, I should say, since it is transpersonal, and not really personal.
Who or what is experiencing one's experience? My Korean Zen master used to say: "What the hell is it?" His main koan was called a huado, or main word. It looks nice there, boldly calligraphed in Korean as a scroll on the wall. We don't always know what it says, but what it says is: "What is it?" That's his whole teaching. This gets to the bottom of our basic question: What is it? What the hell is going on? What is this? Who is this? That's what the translation of the huado implies. It is a fundamental existential question, turning our exploration inwards.
Who or what is the experiencer? Who or what is trying to meditate, is trying to control thoughts, is feeling distracted, or however we feel? Who is feeling dissatisfied; or, for that matter, who is feeling blissed out, or wonderful, or even awake? Sometimes I think we should start learning to look as enlightened as we can, just to see how that would be. Would that be different than we are? Really? Would we be sitting like this, smiling idiotically all the time, like Alfred E. Newman meditating? Trungpa Rinpoche once said, in one of his most famous, oft-repeated dictums, that enlightenment is the greatest disappointment of all. So prepare to be disappointed. Of course, it's funny when you're there, but when you're not there it is a little more disturbing. It was his intent to disturb us, to provoke us, all the way there. And Trungpa Rinpoche is still disturbing us. He died six or seven years ago, but his books are still coming out, his Bodhisattva activities, a new book every year. I recommend them highly.
Who or what is experiencing our experience? Is it our thoughts? But what is thinking? Is it our mind, our body, our soul, our spirit? Is it our parents, as if one is on each shoulder living through us? There must be more to life than that. Of course that is a small part of us; you can't deny it.
When practicing this cutting-through meditation in Dzogchen, we want to be very sharp and alert and present in the moment, moment after moment; with total presence of mind, not absent-minded. Then we shout, even if our ear drums pop, so in that sharp pain we might experience a moment's wakefulness directly for ourselves -- not for our invisible parents on our shoulder, and not just what we think we should experience when we meditate -- but we experience something fresh, naked, and unimaginable, stripped of all preconceptions and ideation.
We sometime say to ourselves, secretly, "I should be enlightened," "I should be blissful," "I should this, I should that." So many shoulds. We should on ourselves, like shitting on ourselves. But all there is to do is to experience things as they are and ourselves as we are. That's the whole import or intention of the Dharma teachings. You can call it by fancy names, like Buddha-nature or the natural state (as we say in Dzogchen or Mahamudra), original nature, or freedom for that matter; but it all comes back to things just as they are.
Let's directly experience things within and without ourselves, as they are, as we are; in the present moment, which is the only place we can ever be. Even if we're fantasizing about the future or remembering the past, that's a present activity. Don't overlook the present awareness component of that remembering or planning. Come home, again and again, to the present. We may momentarily feel fragmented, distracted, lost; but we are always present. So keep showing up, again and again; don't cop out.
In life, we may keep looking for the right answer, but there is no right answer. That's the answer! You keep on going deeper and deeper, peeling off layers of the onion until you find the nut at the center of the onion, called sunyata in Sanskrit or mu in Chinese. It's a hard nut to crack. We keep peeling and peeling ourselves, unmasking and unmasking our persona, our ego -- first the body, then the mind. Then deeper, the psyche, the spirit, whatever we call it; our inner, subtle energies, seeing through our meditative states, continuously letting go and unmasking and unmasking. Halloween after Halloween, every day. Ultimately arriving at our original, unprocessed natural state, our genuine being. That is Buddha-nature, our true nature.
I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but we practice this in the dream yoga, the six yogas of Naropa. First you start with a mirror. (You can go a long way with mirrors; everything is a mirror, actually. Wherever we go we see ourselves.) Then you get another mirror and put it here behind yourself, and then you start to get two or four of you. If you angle it and go into the corners, you can get four or sixteen or sixty-four of you; a lot of images of your face. Suddenly, you seem to become a multi-headed, multi-eyed deity. Move your own eyebrows now, and you might think it's not much movement; but in those mirrors you'll see sixty four or one hundred and eight eyebrows fluttering. It can blow your mind. This experience can help break up some of one's fixed mental formations. Then you start to gradually come out of it. From one hundred and eight to sixty. Now getting back to four, to two, to just one of you. Of course, if you're schizophrenic you get lost in there, but if you have a stable healthy ego you'll find it very interesting, very helpful.
Which reflection is the real, original "me"? The fourth or eighth eyebrow moving there, what's the difference? Who are we, anyway? Are we many, are we one, or are we none? Do I exist at all? And if so, in which precise place or form? Just talking about it doesn't make it, I assure you; try doing it, and I think you'll have an interesting experience. You can also heighten that experience with various tricks, whether by intensive breathing, psychedelic experiences, or otherwise. You can start talking to all those other beings. First you start by praising them and see how they feel about being praised by others. That is part of the dream yoga practice, recognizing that praise is like a dream. Then you start criticizing and berating them, and see how they feel being criticized and berated by others. Then you see that praise and blame are just like a dream. Pleasure and pain, loss and gain, fame and shame, praise and blame; these worldly winds are like echoes, mirages, and dreams. We need not mistake them as being real.
You might feel upset in your body. Who are these others doing the criticizing and blaming? You're just doing it yourself looking in the mirror (and you can go deeper and deeper in this, how beautiful you are, how ugly you are, how you're going to die). Yet notice the reactions that you can provoke when you hear these empty hollow echoes. It's a very good costume party, a masquerade party, like a Halloween ball. This is part of deity yoga when we, in tantric sadhanas, visualize ourselves in these ways.
Moreover, by intensive breathing and visualization practices, and by intentionally arousing passion and then inhibiting orgasm, we can stir up from the depths our unconscious and become more aware, just as everything in the rear of our car flies forward when we abruptly brake the speeding vehicle. But please be careful when playing with such powerful practices; they can be dangerous.
The mind is an excellent mirror, actually. You hardly need an external mirror. In your own mind, try to conjure up that you're talking to yourself -- visualize, imagine, conjure it up -- and see the effects. Explore for yourself how empty and meaningless are your habitual reactions to illusory feedback, such as praise and blame. Through such investigation, the whole notion, the solid notion of others and oneself, might become more diaphanous, perforated, transparent, and you arrive at a more spacious and easy place with yourself. This is where tantric visualizations lead. They are powerful ways of loosening and retooling your self-concept.
Then we have to take this into life, by applying it in life. Let's start to see through some of the echoes we hear around us. As it is said in the Diamond Sutra, "See everything like a dream, like an echo, like a phantom or mirage." This is a way we can practice applying it, so we get used to it. We can in this way learn to have a little more space to choose before just blindly reacting. We can be aware of how much of that echo we need to take in and how much we don't. Through enhanced awareness, you get to vote also, not just being bossed around by habitual propensities. There is no need to continuously be caught up in the stale, old patterns of thinking and relating; thinking you're good enough or not, beautiful or not, worthy or unworthy, young, old, whatever. Usually, we just react and feel caught in situations, in the reactivity of stimulus and instant response. With this practice you become more proactive, more free, and can consciously play with waking, daytime dreams as well as night-time dreams. You can also provoke feedback from the universe that can liberate your own sense of being bound by circumstances. As Tilopa said, "It's not outer circumstances or conditions that entangle us, Naropa, it's internal clinging and fixations that entangle us." This is quite profound.
In Tantra we find ourselves celebrating, appreciating everything as part of the path, and intentionally play with reality. To genuinely celebrate implies to be grateful for and appreciative of everything just as it is. We don't necessarily need to withdraw from the surface of appearances and everyday things to find something deeper. We can just enter freely through everything, knowing everything as transparent, everything as clear light, everything as luminous. Marpa, Milarepa's guru, said, "Yes, it's true that my klesas (negative emotions) are as if engraved in stone." (Don't we all feel it's hard to change our habits?) So Father Marpa said, "It feels like my kleshas, my negative emotions and hang-ups, are engraved in stone. But even stone won't be there forever; it is clear light. They are luminously transparent, even now."
This is the higher teaching. You do not have to sandpaper the stone for the next three eons. The freedom to transform the evil stone into a prayer stone is right here, right now. We can turn all our worries, our neuroses into a prayer, into an affirmation, into clear light, which is their true nature, anyway, from the first. Just like the children are going around trick or treating tonight, dressed up in bizarre costumes, we too can enjoy our own foibles, weaknesses, and peculiarities, in the light of self-knowledge.
My partner, Kate Wheeler, is at home right now enjoying it. She's just waiting for the kids; she loves when they come to the door. She runs downstairs with candy in one hand, wearing a mask and my Tibetan capes, hoping to scare them. And sometimes, they scare her, although she knows it is just a game. So I ask you to ponder this: Is the fear real, or unreal?
How fearful we are of life. We are afraid of the shadow side, afraid of our anger, afraid of our kleshas, the conflicting emotions within us all. We are not just seeing them as prayer stones, as mantras, as like characters on-stage; rather, we hold them as barbed wire entangling our hearts and minds. Actually the mind itself is clear light and barbed wire can't harm it at all. Yet we feel so identified with these habits and hang-ups that we too often feel we can't get rid of them.
There is an old Hassidic saying: "Love your bonds (not your mutual bonds!) -- love the things that bind you, love your chains and be free." Love means to accept unconditionally; it doesn't mean you have to like them. But we don't have to get rid of them also, for that preference is just one more chain. That's why the Third Chinese Zen Patriarch's poem begins with: "The way is not difficult for those who have few preferences." But don't just leap simplistically towards preferring to have no preferences, since that's just another preference. Love your preferences, cradle them like your own children, and be free. The Third Patriarch goes even further: "Do not seek for truth. Merely cease to cherish opinions."
I don't know if you know any people who you believe are enlightened. I have known a few, and they all have their own preferences, their own individual, person style. They like Tibetan food, or one kind of sweet and not another. This tells us that enlightenment, freedom, Buddha-nature, lives and expresses itself through each personality. Each of us is different, thank God; not uniformly bland like nirvanic cream cheese. It is much richer than that, more like blue cheese: smelly, rich, varied, marvelous, inconceivable. It even expresses itself through our personalities -- yes, even yours and mine -- as contorted as they might seem momentarily to be. Human nature is Buddha-nature.
When we look into who or what is experiencing, let's not stop short and accept some facile answer. Maybe we've read some Buddhist books, so we know about the teaching of anatta, "no self"; that nobody's home. "The lights are on but nobody's home." That's a good joke, and a meaningful one, an example of enlightened humor. The awareness light is on, but nobody particular is home.
Let's go deeper. Who is thinking that? Who is thinking that witty remark? We might find we don't know very much, and that not-knowing can be quite liberating. Not-knowing is a good balance to all our knowing. How about a little not-knowing and mystery to leave some room for wonder and experience of what's beyond the rational mind? We think so much, yet we know so little... Less than one percent of nothing.
Once someone asked me what I had learned in twenty years of Buddhist practice and I spontaneously said, "I'm not what I think I am." Perhaps that sums up the 84,000 teachings of the Buddha. We are so identified with who we think we are, that it limits how we can be, determines how we live, and conditions how we react. We limit ourselves totally. So I'd like you to consider bringing into your practice this kind of question. It's part of the preliminary practice for Dzogchen itself; it's part of the rushen practice. It's called separating the finite mind from the infinite Buddha-nature, or distinguishing between sems (mind) and rigpa (innate awareness) by seeing who or what is experiencing. Is it just me experiencing me? We usually conjure up or visualize ourselves -- such as me, an American male, or whatever. Then we feel that "I can do this, and I can't do that. I'm an American. I'm male. I'm like this; I'm like that." But we're not just that, are we? There is a lot more to our story.
Did you ever experience yourself as something else? I'm sure you have, in some moments of your life or perhaps in a dream. So why do we identify so much with this one particular imagination, this visualization? This one identity is just another self-concept; we could easily enlarge upon it, or vary it, or dispel it totally even, if we so choose. That's why it's fun to put on a costume, put on masks, go to costume parties, act in theater plays, and so on. It lends a different perspective upon ourselves and who we habitually think we are and must be. If you alter your consciousness, you see that you don't have to spend your whole life wearing the clothes your mother bought you, figuratively speaking, and can become any number of possible things.
We are not what we think we are, most certainly not what we think. Don't be so identified with thoughts, for thoughts are a good servant but a poor master. The problem is that we are too much in their thrall.
That's all I'm going to say tonight. It's Halloween. We should get home before our houses are destroyed. Someone already trashed our pumpkin before Halloween even, which was sitting on our front porch smiling benignly and minding his own business.
Any questions? I'd like to open it up to questions, and perhaps Dharma dialog.
How helpful or irrelevant are drugs to meditation?
Not necessary, somewhat tricky, but definitely not irrelevant. Drugs are real problematical nowadays. For one thing, many mind-altering drugs are illegal. Some are also problematical from the inner point of view. They can be unhealthy, destructive, addictive, or just give you a sort of unreal boost. On the other hand, an unexpected inner boost or shift of some sort can be helpful. I got a lot out of psychedelics way back when, but I don't do them any more. I think you don't want to become a yo-yo, who always has to go up and down. We are here not just to get high, but to become free.
It is true that you might experience something through a drug-induced experience, such as something that you read about or heard about from mystics, which would be hard for you to experience on your own at this point in your development. That experience might strengthen your faith or your aspiration to encounter that experience directly, and to live it. Whatever you want to call such experiences -- glimpses of God, realizing the light, and so on -- it might be a slightly unreal means to a genuine experience. Then the challenge is to integrate that experience more naturally, so you can plumb it further and have it pervade your life without the unpredictable, yo-yo-like effects of the drug, the mushroom, the alcohol, or whatever intoxicant you use.
Meditation is a yoga. A spiritual awakening is all about a more natural, deeper high. Ram Dass used to talk about getting high but now he talks about getting free. There's an important difference here: getting grounded, not just blasting off. Becoming the ground. Coming home, not just escaping to another place.
Can you speak about renunciation? What about responsibilities such as children, home, and family?
Milarepa said that to give up one's homeland is half the Dharma; but since you added home and family, it's probably an even larger percentage. But it doesn't necessarily imply suddenly, impulsively, dropping everyone and everything. What renunciation really means is letting go, openness, relinquishing the tight-fisted grasping. The heart of renunciation means allowing rather than controlling; letting go of the controlling and the contrived, selfish manipulation you do in order to get what you think you want. We try to see through the manipulation so that we're less invested in the fool's gold of materialism, of spiritual materialism, or anything that we believe is going to save us or make us happy for ever.
Trungpa Rinpoche, whom I love to quote on this, said "Usually we think of renunciation as celibacy, poverty, obedience, shaving your head, going off somewhere and leaving everything behind." Trungpa Rinpoche gave a Tantric, nondual interpretation of renunciation: "Renunciation means to let go of holding back." Can we let go of holding back? Can we relinquish our fears and defenses? It's easy to dye our clothes the colors of sanyas, or renunciation, but better to dye our heart. That would be truly meaningful and transformative.
Renunciation is not a word I like to use a lot in the West. It is not very popular, for it has associations of sacrifice and hair shirts, and sleeping on the cold floor eating bread crumbs and water. I think of it more like world-weariness; when you've had enough, done it all, then enough is enough! You've grown genuinely tired of it. This is not necessarily an ethical issue, but more of a practical one. In Tibetan the word is very interesting. It means the arising of certainty, which has a highly positive valence. It doesn't mean throwing away your life, your wife, your husband, your kids, your career, your health, and flagellating yourself in various ways. It means the arising of inner certainty. For example, drinking salt water does not alleviate thirst, so when you know that, you don't have to renounce drinking salt water when you're thirsty; it just doesn't make sense so you naturally relinquish such an action. It doesn't help, so you effortlessly renounce it. When you have inner conviction and spiritual certainty, what is there to renounce?
In subtler levels, in our lives, through compulsive sexual relations, drugs, alcohol, incessant greed, and ambition for success, whatever addictions, subtler and subtler --spiritual highs, specially induced states of mind -- you become increasingly more certain of what is crass and what is gold ("all that glitters is not gold"). Some is brass, some is fool's gold; we invest in fool's gold to our own detriment. When you find out it's fool's gold, do you have to renounce it or do you naturally have certainty arising about its actual value? Therefore, it is simply a matter of enlightened self-interest to give up what is useless and harmful, and to adopt what is helpful and useful. That is why the Buddha said:
"Adopt and cultivate what is wholesome and beneficial;
Relinquish what is harmful.
Purify your heart and mind;
This is the way of enlightenment."
It is not about believing anything, or following anyone else or adopting ancient dogma. This way is about self-discovery, exploration, and personal experiences.
The way the Tibetan idea was translated from Sanskrit was not sacrifice, but more like the ridding of excess baggage. We have to pay for every kilo of excess baggage, so sloughing off the excess is not a very dire renunciation. Buddhist teachings strongly emphasize notions such as non-attachment, renunciation, simplicity. This is not because Buddhism is pessimistic, but because it's practical and realistic. Everything is passing and changing, so resistance or holding on to fleeting things and relationships is ultimately unsatisfactory. These are the first sublime truths the Buddha taught; they're just the facts of life, not some holy ontology or mythology about the beginning of the universe. These are the facts of life: If you want to suffer less, than resist less, grasp less, identify less with ephemera. It is very unsatisfying to hold on to what is ungraspable. When we see how our daily life goes, you might find that you come here to meditate, you don't usually meditate in your office; so this is a little bit of renunciation, like a brief practice visit to a monastery in traditional Asian cultures. Sometimes people go to a monastery or ashram for a long period of time, like I did; you can go to Asia and see how the external reorientation towards renunciation, letting go, relinquishing, gives room for other things to come in to fill your consciousness, and your life and your time. It is rarely boring, I can assure you! That's why Milarepa and Patrul Rinpoche in the excellent new book Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones say that giving up one's home is a large part of the Dharma.
To simplify our life really deepens and broadens our Dharma. What does simplify really mean? Does it mean to live naked in the forest all year? Or does it mean to let go more and more of your demanding mind, of selfish striving, and volitional manipulating? To be more and do less. And ultimately, to go beyond doing and not doing, for deep Dharma includes both. I want to repeat what Trungpa Rinpoche said because I notice that a lot of us suffer from holding back. I notice in Buddhist sanghas a lot of talented and brilliant people who become stunted, like bonsai. They could be great, flourishing cedar or pine trees, but they stay small and tightly reined in because the pots they allow themselves to live in are too small and their roots and branches keep getting trimmed. Such individuals are like pines or magnificent cedars, but grow tiny -- beautiful, elaborate, and gnarled, but not exactly what God intended pines and cedars to be. So let's not squelch and squander our passionate nature, our creativity. Restraint and self-discipline is an important part of spiritual practice, but it must be balanced.
What we have to renounce is this holding back, according to the crazy wisdom master Chogyam Trungpa. (Read all his books, if you can. They are very timely, I think.) Let go of holding back. We hold back due to fear. We are afraid of our negative emotions such as anger, and also afraid of our positive emotions, of being open, vulnerable, and loving. It seems much safer to package it all, to maintain a shiny, stainless-steel persona, and stay behind the armor. You meet people at parties and ask each other: "What are you? I'm a professor." It's a package deal, safe, but slightly stale. "Oh, nice to meet you. Now I know who you are." Of course, we have hardly encountered each other at all, but we leave it at that and move on. There are so many other levels to meet on and identify with.
I don't know each of you well enough to know what language, what set of words to use; but in the language of Tantra we talk about celebrating, dancing with life. We don't always emphasize how horrible the world is. Trungpa Rinpoche used to say that many people have given up the world because the world has given up on them, which is not renunciation, but more like sour grapes. An example would be like if you can't make relationships work, so you become a monk or a nun out of avoidance rather than true world-weariness. Trungpa wasn't talking about great monastic traditions; he was talking about Westerners running for an escape hatch. They try being a monk or a nun for a few years, perhaps at a very early age, before even experiencing the world, and then try something else and then move on to something else. Monasticism is training; it's also a celebration of the completeness of being solo. There's a lot of juice in it, for the right person.
On the other hand, Trungpa said that nostalgia for samsara is bullshit; we need not give in and go back to more worldly ways, which are just as well left behind.
In the Vajrayana we say that the greatest way to accumulate merit is through celebrating the Vajra feast, or ganachakra (tsok) offerings. In some other schools they would say the great way to accumulate merit is to feed monks and nuns, or circumambulate a holy place, or generate loving kindness through compassion mediation, or just to meditate. In the Tantric Yana it says to have a Vajra feast -- not just eating but enjoying all the senses, eating, drinking, sex, all the sensual contacts as sacred, as part of the mandala -- is exceptionally meritorious. The Vajra feast is a good way to integrate them, not to cut off all those roots and have just one great root, the intellect, growing on your shoulders but not very embodied. We hold back a lot, due to fear of ourselves, fear of our own base nature, due to seeing how we are or fear of how others might perceive us. For example, we might be afraid that others might not love us if they really knew how we are, not a nice spic and span person but a spider lady or monster man. We can't let ourselves go, for then "they" might see. It's important to live, dance with life, and let the energy flow through us, not constrict around these fears.
What kinds of meditation on death in Nepal did you do?
This is a good subject, very important. When we're getting together here, we are having a group meditation so we keep it essentialized; we stick to the heart of all the practices or awareness meditation. However, one usually doesn't practice deep meditations without some specialized knowledge, and in our tradition we go into those things more. What's called the foundation practices in Tibetan Buddhism (ngondro) includes the four mind changes; the four things that turn your attention and focus from the outside, conditioned, worldly phenomena towards something deeper, the spiritual life. Contemplating our own mortality and everyone's is part of the mind-change called "death and impermanence." There are a lot of teachings on that in the Buddhist tradition. It is very helpful in appreciating our wonderful opportunity here and now to meditate on the immanence of death and impermanence. Then we can reprioritize things in that light.
There many examples given regarding impermanence, such as how the body is impermanent, the mind impermanent, the emotions impermanent; how we die every moment, how the seasons turn and change; and so on. Everything that is born dies; all that is conditioned falls apart; all who are gathered are separated. There's a whole sequence given in traditional ngondro teachings, with dozens of examples to reflect on: the outer universe that passes and is impermanent, all the beings which inhabit that, and all beings -- not just human beings but everything, insects, and so on. We will all die; let's reflect on this. Even enlightened beings die; Buddha died, Christ died. The young can also die. You can die unexpectedly, not just from disease, but from a car accident. So we reflect on these in an orderly fashion every morning at the beginning of our meditation session, as part of our ngondro practice.
As Buddha said, "Just as the elephant's footprint is the biggest footprint on the jungle floor, death is the biggest teacher. Death or Yama Raja, death personified, drove me to the peace beyond birth and death." The remembrance of death inspired Buddha to find that which is unborn and undying, beyond fear and death; the wisdom of deathless peace. Death is an important contemplation; death was Buddha's guru, not some human person.
Carlos Castaneda's guru Don Juan said, "You should always keep death on your right shoulder." Remember that death is always waiting for us; we cannot escape from that. If you remember that, you'll reprioritize your affairs; you won't procrastinate: "Oh, I'll do it later," or "I'll do it when I retire." Tomorrow never comes. We realize it's now or never, as always. Death is a very good reflection to keep on our shoulder, in the forefront of our consciousness. Look into the four mind changes. (You can read about it in Patrul Rinpoche's Words of My Perfect Teacher.) We actually do that in every morning session -- including our breath and feelings and thoughts -- and meditate on this precious opportunity we have in this life, endowed with health and vigor, so that we don't squander it.
We also look at death, rebirth, karma, and cause and effect, and learn how cause and effect works in our experience. According to the sutras, you meditate on corpses, on decomposing bodies, on shit-filled maggots (rather bizarre but illuminating), on disgusting fluids from the body (this little bag of pus and blood), and whip yourself into a frenzy of renunciation and disgust, if you are so inclined.
Then you can go into the graveyard contemplations. That's not the kind of meditation I'm going to teach on Monday nights. In the East you meditate in graveyards (here graveyards are beautiful parks you stroll around in), but in the East there are pieces of bodies and jackals eating them, and there are grave robbers, and vultures. In Tibet they practice sky burial. I expected to find windswept bones with a half crazy old man, but what I found was an 18 year old kid whose job it was to cut up the corpses. He had a postcard some tourist had given him of the Empire State Building. But it was a harrowing scene, with dismembered corpses strewn about the mountaintop.
We are all going to die, aren't we? But are we each going to really live?
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