Mind activities of a Stone boy

I just came back from Garrison Institute's retreat with Gehlek Rimpoche. Thank you both for encouraging me to go there. It was really a wonderful surprise for me. I am deeply touched by his teachings and the love and support from other participants. The Rimpoche showed me tremendous compassion and wisdom. The participants impressed me very much, too. Most people that I met seem quite advanced in Tibetan Buddhism practice already. Also, most people I met (and I met quite a few of them) there were married and in relationship, which sort of contradicted my belief that many would be single. It is a sign of a healthy sangha, I think! I had a good fortunate to meet with Rimpoche in a small gathering (about 15 people) for about half an hour. I sat directly across from him maybe 15 feet apart. And I could sense an uplift energy in me directly coming from him. It was so unusual and energizing. Later on, I asked a couple of people who were in that small gathering and they all told me the sam

(Quoted from here ) We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time. - T.S. Eliot Let go of the past! Let go of the future! Let go of the present and cross over to the farther shore of existence. With your mind wholly liberated, you shall come no more to birth and death. - Buddha "All conditioned things are impermanent" - When one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering. This is the path to purification. - Buddha To gain that worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else. - Bernadette Devlin Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play. - Heraclitus We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves. - Buddha I teach that the multitudinousness of objects have no reality in themselves but are only seen of the mind and, therefore, are of the nature of may

Tonight I came back from a friend's office. He asked me to install a contact management software on a 5 year old Celeron powered laptop with 384 Mbyte RAM. The laptop is painfully slow. Every mouse click takes a painful few seconds to respond. The contact management software requires at least 512 Mbyte RAM to run. I suggested that it is time to get a new computer. But he won't listen to my advice and still would like to try to install that software on it. This decision eventually takes a toll on my patience. I could hardly hide my reluctance to work on this machine. I just wanted to leave and go home, but another friend of his, who is also none techie, was also there and kept asking me questions on why it didn't work. I answered his questions half heartedly. It was very stressful. Stressful to the point that I couldn't help but show my stress. What a bad experience is this! How would I maintain my equanimity in a situation like this? Is it possible?

Yesterday afternoon I went with a close friend to my garden to pick up some plants to be transferred to her garden. The spearmint plant that I planted the day before was dry and withered by the sunlight. I planted that spearmint on the spot due to accidental uprooting it while I was picking some of its leaves. The day before we also brought back some spearmint and peppermint leaves and branches in the house. They were drooping on top of piano now but still in a relative good shape. We all know that plants can't live without sunlight. Yet, a strong sun ray will easily burn off a delicate plant. This teaches me that things would flourish only in the right condition. But, what is the right condition? Even though sun, water, and air are crucial to plants, plants can only flourish with right combination of each element. Perhaps, balance is the key. This is really how things are in general. I could extrapolate this to human relationships. People only meet with the right conditions and th