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Season's Greetings From Down under
Shoshin1
Sentient BeingOceania Veteran
It was an overcast Christmas morning, however the clouds soon dispersed
Season's greetings folks ...
Christmas is a special day, a day to remember Baby Cheeses.....and how nice they are on crackers 
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A very merry Christmas to you all… it is a chill morning here at -4 degrees Celsius.
This is the closest I got to the Jesus story this year, my selection of Christmas tree ornaments placed out on the window sill. Kinda a mini nativity play.
I will be listening to Carols, watching a film. Eating whatever scraps we can scrooge together and I am finally gonna open the port for the Baby Cheeses mentioned by @Shoshin1 on choccy digestives (well it is Christmas)
I will be watching the Queen/Kings speech, hoping for abdication and selling of countless generations of thieving. What a great Xmas present that would be.
I will be sending whatever messages of goodwill I can muster to family and friends.
And hope to continue why mantraing to enter the Purelands to cause some wake up there...
Have as always a wonderfilled day...
Tao bless us, every one!
Happy Boxing Day!
I was with my aunt yesterday for a Christmas lunch, had planned to go together with mum but she wasn’t well, and so I went by myself to bring some flowering Helleborus plants and chocolates. We had a long talk of about an hour, about how to create social networks when you are older. She lost her husband to cancer a few years ago, and has just been pensioned from her work. So she has lost a circle of colleagues as well as daily occupation, on top of her husband.
Happy Third Christmas Day!
It comes after Boxing Day so… And my cousin is coming over to visit today.
I knew that being a Christian was beneficial. We started our Christmas in November. It has been less frantic and more relaxed for sure. Since doing more Christian style meditation and mealtime sharing, I am wondering what sort of Xtian-Buddhist I am.
I am reminded of a meditation used by a Christian desert mystic I met years ago. Sweeping away everything that was not God. This morning I was sweeping away meditation, all thoughts, mantra, prayer etc. Soon there will only be clear light or Nothing.
Seems good to me... as that slowly dissolves...
Have a Buddhaful season folks
Yes, ‘tis the season to be merry… but I came across this the other day:
“If the holidays have ever made you feel pressured, guilty, or oddly exhausted…
You’re not broken, Chris.
You’re responding to something designed to make you feel this way.
Relief comes when you realize this.
So does permission to relax.
Let me show you how deep it goes.
What if the most famous figure of Christmas wasn’t created by religion…
But by a soda company?
Sounds crazy, right?
Yet, that’s exactly what happened.
Before Coca-Cola stepped in, Christmas was a quiet church holiday.
Easter was the big deal. Resurrection. Drama. The main event.
Christmas was a simple birth story.
Beautiful.
Definitely NOT built for a global shopping frenzy.
Then Coca-Cola looked at their sales numbers.
Summer: booming.
Spring: fine.
Winter: no one drinking cold brown sugar water.
So they asked the most dangerous question in marketing:
“How do we change what people feel?”
They took St Nicholas, once thin and dressed in green, blended him with old folklore, made him older, jollier, and dressed him head to toe in Coca-Cola red and white.
Then they flooded the image everywhere.
Billboards.
Magazines.
Packaging.
Repeat a myth long enough… and it becomes “tradition.”
Slowly, Christmas shifted from:
“Quiet reflection”…
To shopping, pressure, guilt, and emotional spending dressed up as “holiday spirit.”
Love became something you could prove with receipts.
And now…
• Entire economies rely on December
• Hanukkah has been inflated to compete
• Childhood itself got branded
All because a soft drink company wanted winter sales.
This goes beyond marketing.
It’s cultural hypnosis.
And here’s the spiritual punchline.
If a corporation can rebrand a saint, rewrite a holiday, and colonize our emotions…
What else in our lives quietly came from a boardroom?
So this year, you get to choose.
Presence over presents.
Connection over consumption.
Meaning over marketing.
Enjoy the lights.
Enjoy the food.
Enjoy the warmth.
Just don’t let a soda company define your spirit.”
This is what matters most. Regardless of where it came from the important thing is how you act now. If a consumer Christmas came from Jesus riding on a unicorn it still wouldn't be a spiritually healthy way to live. If a feeling of warmth and generosity came from a soda company it would be a good way to live.
But I gather I often dip below the meaning of the message. Perhaps its like the message that finally proved to be effective at getting people to stop smoking was highlighting how they were being taken advantage of by the cigarette companies rather than umpteen other ideas.
This is why I celebrate the solstice and try to ignore Christmas.
I’ve tried that too, but have backslid into celebrating low-key Christmasses. It’s hard to ignore a phenomenon like Christmas when everything from public holidays to the music they play in the supermarket revolves around it.
I did say I try! You can't get away from it, but you can invest as little of yourself as possible in it. Of course when family and friends are more traditional you go with it rather than spoiling their fun, trying to find a place where you honor your own needs as well as theirs.
Well, I don’t really mind it. When the music says “it’s the most wonderful time of the year” why argue. The only thing I avoid is the stress. I do the minimum to prepare… I buy some nice treats, I put up the fake Christmas tree, I buy a few simple gifts like chocolates or flowering plants.
Nowadays, Christmas and many other so-called religious holidays have become a money-making capitalist enterprise, nothing more, nothing less. For me it is just another day, nothing special, and if the weather is good I go to the beach to worship the sun and the sea.
Where I work, we help people sort out their debts by working with clients and their creditors. It is a free service, and we also operate the local food bank.
In the lead-up to Christmas each year, we set aside a room at the office where people can donate children’s Christmas presents for families who are struggling financially. The local Rotary club also donates supermarket cards so families can buy essential items.
About a week before Christmas, families with children begin coming in to choose presents and receive a supermarket card. At the same time, people continue to come in daily for food assistance.
For many of our clients, putting food on the table each week is already a struggle. This time of year simply adds another layer of stress for families who are barely making ends meet.
It’s good work you do, @Shoshin1, very worthy. We have food banks here as well, for those people who have difficulty getting by, and I have great admiration for the volunteers who take care of the packages there.
In the Netherlands we group the last day of the old year and the first day of the new year together and call it “Oud en Nieuw”, when we celebrate the changing of the year. On New Years Day there is a bit of a tradition to go out for a drink in a cafe in the afternoon, de “Nieuwjaars borrel”. It’s all good fun…
New Year's Day and guess where I am...
Here it’s 42 minutes to midnight and the continuous fireworks bangs and explosions are keeping me awake. Dastardly young curmudgeons! If I hadn’t had my three-hour beauty sleep between six and nine I don’t know how I’d cope…
Happy New Years Day everyone…
A story about coming together and sharing beautiful things…
“Nanak travelled all over India and outside India – the only great Indian mystic who ever went outside India. And he had only one disciple with him in all these travels. He went to Sri Lanka, he went to Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia, far and wide – and he was walking. All that he used to do was just to sit under a tree and his disciple, Mardana, used to play on a certain musical instrument. He would play music and Nanak would sing a song. And there was such beauty in his song, and in the music of Mardana, that even people who did not understand their language would come there and sit close to them.
After the music was finished, Nanak would sit silently. And the people who had become enchanted with the music, without understanding – because it was not their language…a few would leave, but a few would sit because now his silence had also become a tremendous magnetic force.
He was an uneducated man and he used only a villager’s language – Punjabi. But he managed to create an impact on almost half of Asia. Without any language, he managed to make disciples. I am reminded of a small but tremendously valuable incident…
Near Lahore there was a campus of Sufi mystics, very famous in those days – five hundred years ago. People used to come from far and wide to Lahore for that mystic gathering. Nanak also reached there, and he was just taking a bath outside the campus when the chief Sufi heard that he was there. Neither he understood Nanak’s language, nor Nanak understood his language; but some way had to be found. He sent one of his disciples with a beautiful cup full of milk, so full that even one more drop of milk could not be contained in it. And he sent that cup of milk to Nanak.
Mardana could not understand: ”What is the matter? What are we supposed to do? Is it a gift, is it a welcome?” Nanak laughed and he looked around, found a wildflower, and floated it in the milk. The wildflower was so light that it did not disturb the milk, and nothing came out of the cup. And he gave the signal to the man to take it back.
The man said, ”This is strange. I could not understand why this milk has been sent, and now it has become even more mysterious: that strange fellow has put a wildflower in it.” He asked the chief Sufi, his master, ”Don’t keep me in ignorance. Please tell me what the secret of all this is. What is going on?”
The chief mystic said, ”I had sent that cup full of milk to tell Nanak, “Go on to somewhere else; this place is so full of mystics, there is no need of any more mysticism. It is too full, just like this cup. We cannot welcome you; it will be unnecessarily crowding the place. You go somewhere else.” But that man has managed to float a flower in it. He is saying, “I will be just like this flower in your gathering. I will not occupy any space, I will not be a disturbance in your gathering. I will be just a beautiful flower, floating over your gathering.”
The Sufi mystic came, touched the feet of Nanak and welcomed him – without language; nothing was said. Nanak remained their guest, every day singing his songs, and the Sufis were dancing, enjoying. And the day he left they were crying. Even the chief mystic was crying. They all came to give him a send-off. Not a single word of language was exchanged – they had no possibility of any communication. But a great communion happened.
Enlightenment has no language, Milarepa, but enlightenment is capable of finding ways of conveying its rejoicings, its blissfulness, its truth, its love, its compassion…all that is great in human experience – the highest peaks of consciousness.”
(From ‘The New Dawn’ by Osho)
Enlightenment - The Awakening
As easy as enjoying a cup of tea,
As difficult as climbing Everest alone with both hands tied behind your back and your feet hobbled and no equipment.
It is said an eight year old Dragon King's daughter did it in an instant
And a man who struggled through many kalpas failed.
A man approached a leader of a certain Buddhist organization. The man, a well educated person, said that he had studied the organization, the teachings for twenty years. He stated that the teaching were indeed beautiful and he could see the positive effects of the teaching in the practitioners, but still did not understand how they manifest. The leader (better described as a mentor) listened. Then he said, "You have studied the theory. You have observed others. Yet you do not understand the how of it. You have done everything except to take action. Just apply all that theory and do it.
The man did....and with that, he stated, with a smile, "Now I understand."
Buddhism first presented the concept of the great ship (to cross the Sea of Suffering and reach the fine harbor of tranquility). Then presented the blueprints for the Great Ship.
Then built the Great Ship to in fact carry everyone. (One could say that a vast fleet of Great Ships have been built.)
The captain beckons all to board the Great Ship, together to hoist the sails of practice, man the helm of study, and follow the compass of faith over the Sea of Suffering to the Harbor of Tranquility.
We practice to make the cause.
We study to understand the practice.
As we practice and study, our faith become a reality and grows stronger
Through this triad of Practice, Study, and Faith, we awaken the Buddha within, we become enlightened,...As We Are.
Simple - Easy - Difficult.
Peace to All