Friday, July 18, 2008

Seasonal Check-in

All important me, school photo, 1964, Age 5

Soon after my last post a Tibetan family moved in with me unexpectedly.  You know, Tibetan dharma people have a keen sense of modesty, and it felt plain wrong to go on reporting on my life for the world to see because I have been so closely intertwined with them.

I had a related conversation with a lama I encountered this morning.  I recently volunteered to scan a group of old photos he carries with him into my computer.  They have unique pictures of some of the great Nyingma masters of the 20th century, and I was sad to think they might be lost.  Of course, I haven't shown them to anyone.  I offered to make CD's of them, so the lama could give them away as gifts.  In a conversation this morning I found that idea was not warmly received.  The lama was concerned that the photos would end up in the internet, posted in association with his own name.  It might then be perceived that he was trying to increase his own status by linking himself publicly to these high lamas or siddhas.

Certainly, there are a lot of examples of this on the internet.  Sometimes it seems from lama's websites that the most poorly regarded lamas have the best teachers, because they have pics of all the great lamas with themselves.  

This, of course, makes me nervous about my blog--and also a personal journal I am keeping of my life in the Vajrayana--like a Carlos Castenada or Lynn Andrews adventure, except true.  Since I was about 16 years old I have written for publication, and I was an early heavy utilizer of the internet even before the WWW--so writing and sharing like this is an enjoyable habit for me.  But how often am I simply boosting my ego, versus writing for the benefit of others?

Egotism is the hardest emotional affliction to see in ourselves.  It seems that many of us are finely perched on a razor thin fulcrum between excessive pride and low-self esteem.  It is as though this is a see-saw for us merely because we only experience these two dimensions--positive versus negative self esteem.  Or is that one dimension? The dimension of Buddha nature--the indwelling potency of sentient beings that can neither be enhanced or diminished, merely revealed or obscured--is unknown to us.