With all of us together on Zoom?

On Wed, Mar 9, 2022, 7:39 AM Richard Chang <rcterp@...> wrote:

why don't you just go all in on some sort of virtual reality / fleshlight setup or a real life doll?

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Buck <vertpurple@...>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Wed, Mar 9, 2022 5:56 am
Subject: Re: [dannysic] Fleshlight

I want to relieve Sandra of weekly sex pressure. Still masturbating once a day. With no guarantee of sex during the week anymore I need a new outlet. Sounds fun.?

On Wed, Mar 9, 2022 at 1:01 AM David E. Ford Jr. <ottoemezz@...> wrote:

what is it about now that makes it the time to buy a fleshlight, in all seriousness?

On Mon, Mar 7, 2022 at 7:04 AM Dan Buck <vertpurple@...> wrote:

Maybe this is the time to buy a Fleshlight. Anybody have one? Can you put it in the dishwasher?

why don't you just go all in on some sort of virtual reality / fleshlight setup or a real life doll?

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Buck <vertpurple@...>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Wed, Mar 9, 2022 5:56 am
Subject: Re: [dannysic] Fleshlight

I want to relieve Sandra of weekly sex pressure. Still masturbating once a day. With no guarantee of sex during the week anymore I need a new outlet. Sounds fun.?

On Wed, Mar 9, 2022 at 1:01 AM David E. Ford Jr. <ottoemezz@...> wrote:

what is it about now that makes it the time to buy a fleshlight, in all seriousness?

On Mon, Mar 7, 2022 at 7:04 AM Dan Buck <vertpurple@...> wrote:

Maybe this is the time to buy a Fleshlight. Anybody have one? Can you put it in the dishwasher?

what is it about now that makes it the time to buy a fleshlight, in all seriousness?

On Mon, Mar 7, 2022 at 7:04 AM Dan Buck <vertpurple@...> wrote:

Maybe this is the time to buy a Fleshlight. Anybody have one? Can you put it in the dishwasher?

Maybe this is the time to buy a Fleshlight. Anybody have one? Can you put it in the dishwasher?

Look carefully.

Also I have some good advice for when you are masturbating to porn. One weird trick. Tell yourself, "I can't believe this is happening." Believe it?

she's interested in repping fiction involving food. either because it sells, or because she likes food. and you know if she likes the pleasure of eating, and to eat, that she definitely?likes to fuck.

On Wed, Feb 2, 2022 at 2:00 PM Dan Buck <vertpurple@...> wrote:

I have lots of time in my job so I've started looking for literary agents. This process started randomly when I saw a publishing company on Twitter. A publisher guy read the whole first manuscript I wrote and passed but when he read the synopsis of book 2 he actually wanted to read it too.

That's my explanation of why I came across this agent today.

She's so pretty.

I have lots of time in my job so I've started looking for literary agents. This process started randomly when I saw a publishing company on Twitter. A publisher guy read the whole first manuscript I wrote and passed but when he read the synopsis of book 2 he actually wanted to read it too.

That's my explanation of why I came across this agent today.

She's so pretty.

i read through this very quickly earlier and then took a bit more time to read a bit more in depth now. definitely find this topic and your expressions within it interesting, if you want to go into anything else at a later date, i think we'd find that amenable.?

Bloom hope you/family starting to feel better......

On Fri, Jan 7, 2022 at 7:41 AM David E. Ford Jr. <ottoemezz@...> wrote:

tod bless you, godd rhoads, you've really set me up nicely here.?

first, to your first thing, the seek and enjoy the comfortable path sentiment, i think this is a version of something dan said and it's super important. in dan's case his basic thing was he takes satisfaction from his life, he is basically happy with his job and sandra and their family, and like, yeah, precisely, you don't get deep into this shit if you're basically satisfied and comfortable with your lot. that couldn't be farther from the experience i've had virtually the entirety of my post-adolescent life. i have never been comfortable or known anything like satisfaction nor has it ever seemed to be something even within my grasp. why so different? we're all middle class white boys who are more or less the same age and grew up in places and circumstances that were highly analogous, so why would two of us be basically satisfied and the other profoundly not? that is karma. i'll talk more about it but that's the major distinction, our relative karma. so there is an example in the wild, so to speak.?

covid is much worse in the united states rn, much worse. also covid is fucking everywhere, china notwithstanding, so i don't see a huge difference in being one place or another from the point of view of the pandemic.?

there is a lot to unpack in response to your next paragraph. by the way the owner of my favorite restaurant here got me a big old chunk of hashish so i'm getting stoned as i write, hiho. let's talk about those examples from my personal life history, it's important that you understand that i don't need to convince anyone of anything, im just trying to paint the most expansive picture of things for you here. to that end, it's not that mormons and tibetans are similar in every way, but something i've come to understand about my religious upbringing is that even if i never came to believe in that version of things, i was raised in a world that held open the possibility of the miraculous, or at least thst things might not be quite what they seem (and trust me, they really aren't). this has allowed me to see and understand things in ways that most of the people i know, including most of you, would be unable to see or accept. but i forgot to mention a detail. there's a phenomenon that is unique to tibetan buddhism, which is the phenomenon of termas or treasure texts. these are buddhist texts written by earlier masters centuries earlier (usually padmasambhava or his consort yeshe tsogyal) but which they hid because the tibetans at the time were not ready for them. so these texts were ostensibly written by these great masters and hidden to be discovered at the appropriate time by treasure finders or t?rtons. some of them apparently were discovered as physical copies hidden in sacred caves, but mostly they are mind discoveries, which means essentially they are revealed to the minds of the tert?ns who write them down and disseminate them. now, anticipating a certain reaction to this, think about a book that is one of your favorites, like some complex and sublime novel or something, and ask yourself where the book that the author wrote down came from. like, where did the words come from? i'll tell you something that i know with certainty: writers do not know the answer to that, basically ever. in any case, you'll recall that joseph smith founded mormonism in new york state after being led by an angel to a buried treasure text, the book of mormon. joseph smith was an american tert?n and i included that detail when i reached out to khyentse. but trust me, i get it, any of these things in isolation would be meaningless and even all together it's a fairly commonplace set of coincidences. though i will tell you about that covid test. as you can see i have developed a real certainty about these things including the more or less fatedness of me coming to india at this time, so when it looked like it wasn't going to happen at all, it was all on the verge of coming crashing down, but then that's not what happened. the thing i've come to understand is that none of the circumstances of my life is arbitrary, everything is the way it is because of everything that has happened before. that is how karma works.?

okay, we're about to get even deeper into it, so get ready for it. i'm glad you used the word humanism because it is a really important concept. put simply, humanism is precisely the problem. the way humans have separated ourselves from everything else that lives (not to mention everything that doesn't live), which we call "nature," is at the root of why everything in the world seems so fucking apocalyptic right now. dyed in the wool scientific materialists will loudly protest any intimation of the "supernatural" in one's cosmology or worldview. here's the thing about "supernatural," as a concept it is a logical absurdity. anything, any phenomenon that occurs at any time and any place in the world is by definition "natural." so the idea that there could even be something called supernatural is absurd. and yes, i take thst to its logical conclusion. here's just the most prominent contemporary example: the debate over whether the origin of the SARS-CoV2 virus was "natural" or something sinister ?. here's the thing, the way we place the things that humans do outside of nature is itself artificial. if you accept that we evolved along with everything else that lives on this planet over the last 4 billion years, which i assume each of us does, then there is no reason whatsoever to construct an artificial barrier between what we do and what is natural. ?but here's just one irony that this reveals, that scientific materialists insist upon the existence of the supernatural, which is how they qualify humans and all their shit.?

but it's your next paragraph that is a true gift. buddhism and its concepts including rebirth and karma don't need to be tweaked to better fit with scientific materialism. what has happened is we've allowed ourselves to have an understanding of what science is and what it means that is inaccurate. here's the thing, science has been soooooooooo effective at allowing humans to make better and better predictions (and all the technological innovations that flow from that) we've conceded that science = literal truth of how the world is. but that's not what it is, it is merely a an account of the world qualitatively no different from a mythical account t of the world, but it is one that has distinguished itself with the aforementioned improved prediction power. here are some important things about science to keep in mind: when the scientific method as we've come to understand it was coalescing during the transition from the renaissance to the enlightenment, one of the features built into it was the stipulation that the only information that is eligible to be considered of scientific value is information that can be confirmed objectively. so that leaves all of subjective experience off the table. and science has this habit where if there is some phenomenon in the world that cannot be accounted for by the prevailing scientific paradigm then they will argue that it simply doesn't exist. this is why you have very intellectually sophisticated people arguing that there is no such thing as free will. that is because nothing in our current scientific theory of the world would allow for anything like free will. ergo it doesn't exist. there are literally highly renowned philosophers of mind at prestigious university who say that consciousness as we commonly understand it doesn't exist. because there is nothing in the current theory that would allow for anything like consciousness. but science leaves out subjective experience, which is in fact more or less the only thing that we can say with any confidence actually exists. so this is a thing that rigid scientific materialists do, since the current theory doesn't allow for anything like rebirth or karma they ipso facto do not exist. but we already know that the current theory can't account ?for an awful lot of stuff we know is out there so why would we assume that just because we can't put it in a mathematical equation yet then it doesn't exist, especially when we're all looking at it right now. but if you want to see an example of what i'm saying in the wild, ask a scientist, specifically a physicist, what matter is. they can't tell you cuz they don't know, though they continue to insist that it is the only thing there is.?

so let's talk about what would be some common western conceptions of karma or rebirth might look like. with respect to the latter, the idea is based on the existence of the soul, which when one lifetime ends this same souls enters a new living thing. but perhaps the most significant insight made by the historical shakyamuni buddha was the non-existence of the soul. i can attest to this, no souls as popularly conceived. so what is there to be reborn, one asks. and one way to say it is that it is awareness that is reborn. well what is awareness then? if you think about awareness, the way you experience it is as experience, moment to moment. and one way to describe moment to moment experience is as a complex and ever changing flow of energy. and as the physicists will tell us energy is conserved, always. here's the way i think of it. i know that what i am right now was certainly not born in late 1975 and in fact wasn't even here yesterday. what i am is simply the moment to moment awareness, which is a kind of energy flow, and energy is conserved. while i don't know how any of it works, what i've come to believe is that while individual beings die there is no death, which is another way of saying i have always been here in one form or another and i will always be here as long as there is a here to be. but we have this habit of thinking of things as binary, like either the world corresponds to the christian or abrahamic worldview that dominated the west for so many centuries, or there is nothing and life is an accident (?) and there is no meaning. there's no room for any other conception of the world. so, since there is no god there is no heaven and hell so there is no afterlife no soul nothing that persists beyond death. which is infantile.?

and karma is even easier to address. karma is nothing more than cause and effect. period. i think when westerners think about karma they think of it like as this moral account that is perpetually being tallied by someone who judges whether your actions are virtuous or not, and then doles out punishment for all the bad things you do. also infantile. remember what i said before about the circumstances of my life, and in fact the state of things in the entire universe right now: none of it is arbitrary, all of it is the necessary consequences of everything that came before. that is all karma is. now the objection to karma rests in its moral valence. that somehow in addition to all the good old fashioned "laws of nature" ? cause and effect the buddhist notion of karma also has this moral aspect to it and since our current theory does not allow for anything like morality then it therefore doesn't exist. let me give you a hypothetical, or rather two: in the first you are walking down the street wearing loose fitting business trousers and no underwear when a teenager swings the corner of his iphone 13 right smack on one of your testicles, hard, and then proceeds to laugh about it. in the second you are walking down the street and you see this pretty young woman who is decked out in nice business attire and is carrying a briefcase, but is also holding the hand of her visibly disabled daughter, and just as they approach you the daughter trips on the sidewalk pulling the mother hard and the corner of her briefcase hits you square on the nut with the precise physical force and vector of the phone. is your reaction going to be the same in the two cases? so there is an example of how what we think of as morality alters a cause and effect chain. we can see it, we've experienced it, we know it's in the world. it is therefore natural and just because we don't have a theory around it and know how to measure it and express it mathematically, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. we just haven't figured it out yet. think of your individual genetic code. what is that but a record expressed via a particular means using a highly specific language, of everything that happened to every one of your forebears from the beginning. it is a expression of the karma of a biological individual. basically what i am saying is that because i am a skeptical westerner who has read deeply in science and more importantly tried to think through the implications of this tremendous knowledge we've accrued, i know that anything that happens in the world is by definition natural. because our current theories change from time to time, we use different terminology for what is in the world and we give a somewhat different account of what is going on. but it's important to remember that even despite great revolutions in our current theories, ?none of it ever changes what is, the only thing that changes is how we talk about what is. i also understand what science is (an investigative method) and what its limits are (they are legion), so i know that just because our current theory can't account for some phenomenon i experience it doesn't mean the phenomenon doesn't exist. just that scientists haven't caught up with it yet.?

one last thing i'll say is that this applies just as much to many western buddhists, e.g. yuval noah harari or stephen batchelor, as your typical orthodox scientific materialist. it surprises me sometimes how such very smart people can suffer such failures of imagination.

i think i went through more than i intended but there is a lot more to say. but it's long and i'm typing on my phone so i'll wait and see what anyone thinks about what's here before i decide to go on.

On Jan 7, 2022, at 02:07, Todd Rhoads <Todd@...> wrote:

?

Quite interesting, to say the least. Continued good luck on this journey.

I'm a pretty cautious person in many ways, or could say, am someone who hasn't "pushed things" too much, instead i guess my personality is more to "seek and enjoy the comfortable path"; thus I'm usually wary of offering encouragement for that which may be "ill-advised." But as we all do i'm sure, i occasionally?think about "well it would be have cool if i had at least tried this or that....." I do believe we far more regret the things we do not try, than the ones we do......

I certainly wouldn't travel to India?in a pandemic but hopefully Omicron indeed stays as a turning point to a more mild path and end to this one....

As someone who is more humanist than spiritual/metaphysical, I'm not sure I'd be too understanding of your other "fated signs" (in addition to your mother's birthday twinning with the Lama and the "Tibetans and Utahans are both mountainous" - Mormomism?was born like in Ohio though right and they were forced to flee?) - but on the other hand, that "getting your negative covid test 15 minutes before end of boarding" is a crazy story in and of itself.? Talk about drama. I turn stressed/crabby when running late during travel - I'd definitely be better off traveling alone during that type of episode than with a girlfriend/wife? ;)? ......

Would be interested at some point to hear more about how you think traditional Buddhism and karma/reincarnation could be tweaked to better fit Western scientific?materialism.......i certainly believe in karma but not a literal thing but a more "general" tendency. (i think it's true that almost all of us "Western scientific materialism" types who do not favor any religious or spiritual practice, do at the same time have many beliefs or thought-processes that do not at all strictly comply with "materialism"? - such as, why the reverence for human life or belief in human exceptionalism, behind humanism, if we are just briefly electrified meat-carbon?. But we need, and want, to believe in some contradictions or "leaps of faith", in our day-to-day world-views, as part of making any little semblance of sense of this place, and our lives, as we can or at bare minimum, need to, to continue.....)

My favorite food as far as taste/health combo is Southern India vegeterian?food - all the great spiced lentil, chickpeas, potatoes, breads; not great options in San Diego for it, when Dan and I lived with Amit Shah junior year, before his poor mother died, he would visit home every weekend and she would load him up with tupperware after tuppwerare?of it, and he didn't want most of it because too much/and had had it for too many years, and would tell me i was welcome to whatever, and i'd come home from being reporter/editor at daily school paper at end of night and that would be favorite all-time midnight snack.

Certainly have always noted a high number of creative/intelligent western people who got into Buddhist practice or at least deep meditation practice - Allen Ginsburg, Yuval Noah Harari, Howard Stern, David Bowie, David Lynch, George Harrison, George Foreman, George Bush (the mexican one).......anyways i got a mantra 3rd-hand from Joe (he wouldn't share his real paid-for one) and enjoyed mediation for a little while, but have wanted to try to get back into it again......

On Thu, Jan 6, 2022 at 9:17 AM David E. Ford Jr. <ottoemezz@...> wrote:

?in Dan's defense, i would also be deeply skeptical if someone told me they were doing what i am doing. i will tell you about what that is, but it requires a lot of background, so, fair warning. also, be advised that i am likely to speak about things in ways that might surprise you. to be fair, it surprises me too, but i cannot deny the experiences of the last two years. and again, my dear friend andy, my now former girlfriend becca, and my therapist, hanna, all of whom are deeply skeptical people, all admit that despite the unlikeliness of it all, they all agree that what i am doing is sound and not evidence of some crisis that i'm running from.

okay, with that, as i think you all know by now, i have been practicing tibetan buddhism since roughly late-spring/early-summer 2019. and as you all also have some idea, the years of the pandemic have been especially harsh for me and my family. admittedly, at this time last year i was indeed in a deep crisis that led to me checking in to a psychiatric facility because i was as suicidal as i've ever been in my life. shortly thereafter my mother died from the covid that i brought into the family. because of all this i took about 7 months of medical leave from my job and in fact at that point i had sort of abandoned my buddhist practice because in my despair i reasoned that it wasn't doing anything for me. but as this period progressed, i ultimately found that i missed the many beneficial aspects of my meditation practice and so in about late february or march of last year i returned to daily meditation. at that time, i figured out that the reason i had abandoned my practice for a while was because i had mistaken ideas about just what exactly it could do for me. to put it succinctly, i had been operating under the impression that if i continued my practice and continued helping my family in all the ways i was, that eventually things would improve ?. of course this isn't what happened and frankly anyone who doesn't realize that things are not going to improve any time soon hasn't been paying attention for the last five or six years. so as i returned to my practice i found it deepening significantly.

now, i don't know how much y'all know about tibetan buddhism, but to give you a brief history, buddhism was brought to tibet by indians beginning in roughly the 8th century. the buddhism that was being practiced in india by that time was a form known as vajrayana, or tantric buddhism. without getting toooo deeply into it, tantric buddhism is alll about a personal relationship between a student and a tantric teacher or guru. i'm sure i don't have to inform any of you of the many controversies and problems associated with tantric buddhism as it has been propagated in the west, including charges of abuse both sexual and otherwise. there have been a number of horrifying scandals surrounding tantric buddhism in the west beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present day. because of these (not to mention the fact that in order to practice tantric buddhism one must have access to a qualified tantric teacher with whom one feels a strong connection) i had decided fairly early on in my practice that i wasn't even going to attempt to go down that road. just too many potential problems and nowhere near enough qualified teachers, especially ones that a relatively poor person like me might have access to.?

having said that, last summer as my practice was getting more serious and i was looking to make connections with other buddhists, i started reading some books written by a guy called Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, who is a very prestigious reincarnate lama, as well as an actually really interesting filmmaker under the name Khyentse Norbu (seriously, no bullshit, his movies are worth checking out). Khyentse is someone who is very clearly concerned with transplanting buddhism to the west because tibet is a non-starter and if the tradition is going to survive it must move (as it did from india to tibet centuries ago). so his books are written for people like me, westerners with interest in the buddhadharma who are also very skeptical of the problems associated with tantric buddhism. honestly, he could have written several of his books specifically for me. what i found i them was first of all an extremely sincere and extremely smart guy who has no illusions about the problems associated with tantra, specifically in a western context. as i read his books i was amazed to find that literally every single concern i have is directly addressed by him in a fearlessly honest manner.?

having read his books i immediately moved on to everything i could find on the internet written by him (there's a lot and it's virtually all brilliant). so one night i'm reading some articles he wrote and it suddenly occurred to me with great clarity and urgency that this was the guy i didn't even know i was looking for and i wanted to ask him to be my teacher. but of course how the fuck was i supposed to make that happen. ?as i say, he is one of the most well known living tibetan masters, especially in the west, in addition to being a well regarded filmmaker, who has thousands of students all over the world and who travels virtually constantly all over the world giving teachings. so i decided to write him an email ?. while i couldn't find an email address for him directly, the guy has founded several well known organizations dedicated to different aspects of spreading the dharma, including one called the Khyentse Foundation, which is mainly concerned with funding buddhist education for promising students. so i wrote a fucking long as hell and excruciatingly sincere email, first asking him to be my teacher and explaining why i felt so strongly about it and sent it to a general contact email at the Khyentse Foundation. i really didn't think it would work but several days after sending it i received an email from a ?very nice woman at the foundation. after making it clear that she had read my entire email and was moved by it, she explained that i had in fact contacted the Khyentse Foundation. she went on to say that they have a system for communicating requests to Khyentse but that they have a strict rule that any message or request must be limited to one or two sentences at most (my email was something like five or six thousand words) and asked if i could possibly make my request to fit those requirements. she did also say that she could send my original email to his secretary in case they wanted more information. so i wrote a brief request and sent it along and proceeded to wait for about a week. when i heard back from her i thought at first that i was getting the brush off, but, reading between the lines i saw that wasn't the case at all. while she did not indicate that he had accepted my request, she made it clear what i needed to do next in order to move the process along. i won't get into too much detail here but before one can even begin tantric training, there are a host of preliminary practices (these are referred to as ng?ndro in tibetan) that must be completed, and this can take many years depending on the pace at which one works. so she basically told me that before asking him directly to be my teacher i should begin the ng?ndro practices under the auspices of an organization he founded, which has teachers hand picked by Khyentse to help and advise students through this. so i joined his ng?ndro organization and chose a mexican man from guadalajara named Carlo as my ng?ndro advisor.

okay, now it's time to get a little woo woo metaphysical. there are things about the last two years, and my experience with buddhist practice, as well as details from my life more broadly that started to make me feel like none of this was an accident. and as my practice continued and i got to know carlo better, i have more or less concluded that these are not coincidences. i'll paint a picture for you. the first thing is simply the fact that as soon as i really started getting into these practices (as well as the basic view of buddhism in general) it really felt like slipping on a glove. it wasn't hard or weird and in fact i took to it immediately. then there are these facts about my life:

i was born to a family who are members of a highly devout and decidedly insular religious community tucked into the mountains. also, my mother was born on the literal same day (same year) as the current Dalai Lama. these things all would strike most people as coincidences and, not so long ago, i would have said the same thing. there are other things that i could mention, but i'm afraid you might find them dubious, so i'll refrain, but the long and short of it is, i am absolutely certain that none of this is new to me and that in fact everything that has happened in my life has been leading me directly to this point and i am doing work that was begun long before i was born. and that work specifically is forging a new, indigenous western buddhist tradition.

going back to the spread of buddhism to tibet, as i mentioned, it was brought there over the course of more than a century by indian buddhist masters. as i'm sure you know, buddhism was founded in india, and as you probably also know, it is virtually extinct here now. this extinction was the result of a number of forces, including the beginning of islamic incursions into india, which destroyed the huge infrastructure of monasteries in india. at the same time, what we now call hinduism was making a comeback and that meant that buddhists lost much of the royal patronage they had enjoyed since the time of ashoka. all this happened just as the tradition was being transmitted to tibet. but it's important to understand that this transition was far from smooth and there were a couple of centuries during which there was a lot of pressure from traditional tibetan sources to reject it outright. the story of how this was overcome focuses on an indian tantric master known as guru padmasambhava (which means "lotus-born master"). put simply, because the traditional tibetan tutelary gods were opposed to the introduction of buddhism to tibet and spoiled attempts to build the first monastery there, padmasambhava was summoned to subdue the local tutelary gods, and he did this by incorporating them into what became tibetan buddhism. in other words, buddhism had to be made tibetan before tibetans would become buddhists.

as i said, the work of bringing tantric buddhism to the west began in the 1970s, and frankly it hasn't really gone all that well (remember all those scandals?). not only that, because of the specifics of western culture, many people, including people otherwise open to buddhism, are unable to reconcile some of the important aspects of the buddhist view (i'm talking mainly here about karma and rebirth). what i've come to realize is that the typical western objections to these concepts more or less boil down to misconceptions of how they work as well as misconceptions about our present scientific worldview. this email is already long as fuck, so i won't get into it now, but if you are interested i can get more deeply into these things another time. but basically, what i concluded is that in order for this stuff to stick in the west it has to be reconceived in a way that takes western culture into account. in other words, in order for westerners to accept buddhism buddhism will have to be made western and the tutelary gods of the west (in a phrase, scientific materialism) must be subdued or appeased.

the truly amazing thing is that as soon as i came to realize this, it was like i opened a floodgate somewhere and ideas just began flowing with tremendous force and prodigiousness. and again, i'll refer you to becca, andy and hanna, all of whom have heard them and all of whom agree that they are not just sound but in some aspects actually fucking brilliant. so, i saw the course of the rest of my life before me.

anyway, sometime this summer i decided that the next time i went to india i wanted to, first, do pilgrimage to the major sites associated with the buddha's life, and second ?travel up to the tibetan colonies in himachal pradesh and try to track down Khyentse directly. it being summer 2021, with india still banning tourists in the country because of covid, i figured that might be a year or two away at least.?

now i have to give you a little more background. a few months before i went to india in 2019, i met this woman named priya who was a software engineer at my office who is from andhra pradesh in southern india very near where we visited. when she learned that i was going to south india and loved south indian movies we became fast friends. when the pandemic began, i had a lot of concern for priya because i knew she was living on her own in a very foreign country with no transportation of her own at a really fucking scary time. so with becca's support i decided i needed to do what i could to look out for her. this meant picking her up every couple of weeks and driving her to the indian grocer in gaithersburg as well as helping her to make appointments and taking her to see apartments when she had to move. priya, of course, was deeply appreciative of all the help. and also she informed me that she was engaged to be married though the wedding was delayed because there was opposition from both families because of caste difference. but she said that as soon as they were able to get the families on board they would plan the wedding and that i would be invited. i'm sure i don't have to tell you that being invited to a traditional indian wedding (in india) is a rare opportunity for a white boy like me, so i resolved then and told her as much that when it happened i would do everything in my power to attend.?

so, things are going along this past fall. my buddhist practice was deepening and at the same time my alienation from my job was becoming untenable. it got so bad that i had to level with my supervisor about it because i was finding ?it difficult to do the bare minimum at my job. as it happened, this forced my hand, and my supervisors boss immediately came to me and asked me to tell her when my last day of work would be. so i said i would work through the end of 2021 and that would be it. i didn't know what i was going to do instead but i was weirdly sanguine about the whole thing. then, about a week later, i got a text from priya: my wedding will be on december 29, can you come? my immediate thought was fuck no i can't, i'm broke as hell i just quit my job and besides i think india is still not issuing tourist visas. but, i said i wasn't sure but i would try my very best, really thinking there was no way it was going to happen. but then i checked and discovered that india had resumed issuing tourist visas that very week and so i started shopping for airfare. because the timing was so short it cost about twice as much as the last trip, but i had enough room on a credit card and so i bought a ticket. and again, i had determined that the next time i found myself in india i was going to seek out my guy. besides that, i was more or less determined that i was not going to come back to the u.s. for some time if that were at all possible.

so this brings us more or less up to date, except to say that i bought the ticket the week of thanksgiving, which meant i had to inform my girlfriend, all my friends, and my family, that i was going to india and i wasn't sure when i would be coming back. this caused a crisis and the last six weeks or so have been very very difficult and there is still quite a bit of resentment on the part of some for what they see as a selfish move on my part. here is the thing, this sudden break with everything in my life has been so hard and so fucking scary that if i didn't have absolute certainty about what i'm doing, i am absolutely convinced i would have backed out.

before closing i want to share a couple more details that double down on the downright fated feeling this whole thing has for me. one, with respect to Carlo, he is a really really interesting guy. ?he's a few years younger than us (i think he is 40), he's gay, like us, and he met Khyentse in 2001 while a student at u. of british columbia (nice detail, eh steinberger?). shortly thereafter he became a monk, which he was for ten years before returning his robes and he is now the principal of an english language international school in guadalajara (nice detail, eh buck?). anyway, i really have come to appreciate him a lot but he also has this maddening way of being coy with me about certain things. like he is supportive of the things i'm trying to do but he doesn't let on much in the way of what he thinks personally or what Khyentse himself might know or think. but, a few weeks before i left we were messaging with each other about my plans and i was talking about my concerns about the brevity of my visa. when we came to india in 2019, we were issued tourist visas that were good for five years with multiple entries, with a limit of six months for any consecutive stay. so people who wanted to stay in india longer would just take a weekend in thailand every six months. but since the pandemic, all those visas were canceled and they are now only issuing 30-day, single entry visas that are not extendable. so i was talking about this and expressing my concerns about running out of time and he sent me a voice message that began with him saying very forcefully "you canNOT postpone this trip!" when i listened to it it spooked me a little but also felt as though he let something slip. i shared the message with becca and it spooked her even more. then, possibly the craziest part happened just as i was preparing to go. my flight to hyderabad left december 26, and like virtually every country who allows foreigners to enter, india requires a negative rt-pcr covid test taken within 72 hours of departure. now y'all remember that week. it's just when this omicron horseshit really started popping. so i made an appointment on the 23rd at a local pharmacy that a friend had gone to for the same reason ?a few days earlier, but when the day came i showed up and they informed me they had run out of tests. so i scrambled to find a place that was taking walkins and found one in college park. so i'm driving to this place when suddenly i realized that for more than ?a mile i had been driving past a line of cars managed by police, all of whom were waiting to get a test at the same place. so that was a non-starter. so at that point i began freaking out a little and i went home and searched for some place that could give me an appointment. the only thing i could find was an urgent care in chevy chase with an opening the morning of the 24th. the thing is, though, this wasn't appropriate to my situation, but rather it was a thing for someone who thought they may have covid. the office clearly indicated it could take 4-5 days for the results to come through, way longer than i had. but the way i ?figured it i was out of options and i had to do something. ?even when i was at the place, the receptionist and the doctor both told me i would not get my results back in time, but i got the test all the same. my flight left at 10:30 the morning of the 26th so i had to get there early as fuck. my sister sarah drove me and all the while she's like what are you going to do if they won't let you on the plane and i was just like i'll cross that bridge when i get to it. so i get to the airport and at the check in counter the boy asked me for my rt-pcr test, and i showed him the paperwork that said i had gotten it but that id yet to receive my results. the guy was clear: india won't let you in without it so we can't check you in unless you have it. then he said that they have testing downstairs and perhaps you can go down there and find out if they can get you a result by 9:30, so i went down to the testing site and there was chaos down there, scores of people all trying to get tests and being told that they weren't doing any that day. i was crushed. i phoned my sister and by that point i was literally bawling and told her they weren't going to let me on the plane. she tried to calm me down and said she was turning around and would come get me. i thought that was it. i messaged carlo and priya and broke the news and proceeded to wait for sarah to come get me. ?all this time i am periodically checking to see if the results had come in and when i did so at around 9:15 (so with fifteen minutes to spare) the results posted and the test was negative and i raced back to the counter and the woman there asked if my results came through and i confirmed they had and she rushed me through check in and i managed to get on the plane.?

here too, an argument can be made for just good luck or coincidence but with everything else that had happened this was further confirmation of the rightness of what i am doing.

so here's where we stand the evening of january 6, 2022: ?i attended my friends wedding in andhra, which was one of the most amazing and special experiences of my life, and priya's whole damn family treated me like i was fucking royalty. a few days afterward i took a train from vijayawada to delhi and from there i took a flight to dharamshala, the location of the tibetan government-in-exile. after staying there a few days i got a ride to Bir, about 60 kilometers away, and i'm staying at the deer park institute, which is an educational and research institution founded by khyentse and is next door to where he lives. i as yet don't even know if he is in india, but i indicated to carlo earlier today that i intend to seek ordination and asked if he thought that was a good idea. he said that even the desire to do this is very auspicious but since it's such an unfamiliar way of living for someone from the west, he indicated that we should ask Khyentse directly. i asked him if he thought i should reach out directly to his secretary and he has become coy again, which makes me think that he is in contact with him directly already. so i don't yet know what is going to happen, but it seems very likely that i will soon take ordination as a buddhist monk. i think this is the necessary step because in order for me to do the work i see myself doing, i have a lot to learn in the meantime.?

i will keep you abreast of developments.

-df

On Dec 22, 2021, at 19:29, Matte <matte@...> wrote:

?

Sic semper tyrannis

On Dec 22, 2021, at 6:25 PM, Joe Steinberger <joe@...> wrote:

?

Alms for the sic?

On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 3:54 PM Todd Rhoads <todd@...> wrote:

"he might prefer Allives Matte." "Olives mattuh?"

On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 3:50 PM Joe Steinberger <joe@...> wrote:

I have a new nickname for Matte I just invented, BLM… Black Lives Matte. ?

On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 12:42 PM Todd Rhoads <todd@...> wrote:

a Houston shout-out -?

On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 7:51 AM Matte <matte@...> wrote:

I have nothing to add to the conversation but didn’t want my silence to speak for me. Dan, I hope you’re feeling better and Dave, I hope you find what you’re looking for. And I’ll add my positive, yet non-specific wishes for the rest of you fine folks.

Merry December 22nd.

-Matte

On Dec 22, 2021, at 9:46 AM, Joe Steinberger <joe@...> wrote:

I’m not sure I would give any stock to dan’a assessment. Perhaps it means you’re on the exact right path. ?

I think it’s safe to say everyone wants the details of what you’re motivations are and what your really doing.?

“Your is possessive. You’re is a conjunctive verb. Good god.”

“Well, now you get no details, shit bag.”

“It’s shitbag. One word.”

That was all you, by the way.? Um.? Yes.? I would appreciate/enjoy anything more you can provide.?

Godspeed?

On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 5:53 AM Richard Chang via??<rcterp=[email protected]> wrote:

I have no idea what you are planning on doing Dave but I feel like if Covid has taught us anything this past year is to not have regrets. And if that means you travel to Tibet, that's what you should do. I probably wouldn't recommend tongue kissing (I assume you mean french kiss) a stranger unless you have some sort of permission and a negative PCR test from 15 minutes earlier.

I'll definitely read with interest any updates you send to the IC.

-----Original Message-----
From: David E. Ford Jr. <ottoemezz@...>
To:?[email protected]
Sent: Tue, Dec 21, 2021 12:13 pm
Subject: Re: [dannysic] hear ye, hear ye

did you forget that i contracted covid on election day and gave it to my mother who literally died?

dan's right, though, i am definitely the most likely to die from the disease. ?or maybe not. i have history of infection and three shots of the super vaccine.

an update for the IC, i'm returning to india on Sunday and i don't have a definite plan to return. my activities there will be varied: i am first flying to hyderabad and i will attend a former coworker's?wedding in andhra pradesh, ?then i'm going to travel up to the buddhist pilgrimage sites in Bihar and uttar pradesh. from there i will head up to the tibetan colonies in himachal pradesh trying to link up with a guy called Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche (also known as the filmmaker Khyentse Norbu??), with whom i have some important business.

dan thinks i've gone completely off the rails, i think, but it's important for me to point out that my close friends here who see me regularly don't feel the same way. i could explain what it is i'm going there to do but i kinda doubt you'd believe it entirely. but i will continue to keep the ic updated on whatever wild shit is happening with me. and if anyone is curious to hear a bit more i'd be glad to get into it but with the proviso that it will most likely include me talking about shit in unfamiliar ways. is that vague enough?

joe: godspeed is one word

dan: way to throw sandra under the bus

bloom: did you know that rhode island isn't actually an island

christian: your assessment of your covid prognosis is wrong

andrew: famous last words

todd: you didn't say anything interesting enough for a response

reechard: you should go out and tongue kiss a stranger on christmas

ho ho ho,

df

On Mon, Dec 20, 2021 at 1:11 PM Dan Buck <vertpurple@...> wrote:

I believe I am the first in dannysic to be positive for Covid-19.

And I'm in Quebec.

Hear ye, hear ye.

I bet you didn't know that there is a rare symptom of Covid:?.

Stg it feels like my stomach and balls were kicked multiple times.

Imagine not being able to stand up straight because your stomach muscles hurt.

Hear ye, hear ye.

tod bless you, godd rhoads, you've really set me up nicely here.?

first, to your first thing, the seek and enjoy the comfortable path sentiment, i think this is a version of something dan said and it's super important. in dan's case his basic thing was he takes satisfaction from his life, he is basically happy with his job and sandra and their family, and like, yeah, precisely, you don't get deep into this shit if you're basically satisfied and comfortable with your lot. that couldn't be farther from the experience i've had virtually the entirety of my post-adolescent life. i have never been comfortable or known anything like satisfaction nor has it ever seemed to be something even within my grasp. why so different? we're all middle class white boys who are more or less the same age and grew up in places and circumstances that were highly analogous, so why would two of us be basically satisfied and the other profoundly not? that is karma. i'll talk more about it but that's the major distinction, our relative karma. so there is an example in the wild, so to speak.?

covid is much worse in the united states rn, much worse. also covid is fucking everywhere, china notwithstanding, so i don't see a huge difference in being one place or another from the point of view of the pandemic.?

there is a lot to unpack in response to your next paragraph. by the way the owner of my favorite restaurant here got me a big old chunk of hashish so i'm getting stoned as i write, hiho. let's talk about those examples from my personal life history, it's important that you understand that i don't need to convince anyone of anything, im just trying to paint the most expansive picture of things for you here. to that end, it's not that mormons and tibetans are similar in every way, but something i've come to understand about my religious upbringing is that even if i never came to believe in that version of things, i was raised in a world that held open the possibility of the miraculous, or at least thst things might not be quite what they seem (and trust me, they really aren't). this has allowed me to see and understand things in ways that most of the people i know, including most of you, would be unable to see or accept. but i forgot to mention a detail. there's a phenomenon that is unique to tibetan buddhism, which is the phenomenon of termas or treasure texts. these are buddhist texts written by earlier masters centuries earlier (usually padmasambhava or his consort yeshe tsogyal) but which they hid because the tibetans at the time were not ready for them. so these texts were ostensibly written by these great masters and hidden to be discovered at the appropriate time by treasure finders or t?rtons. some of them apparently were discovered as physical copies hidden in sacred caves, but mostly they are mind discoveries, which means essentially they are revealed to the minds of the tert?ns who write them down and disseminate them. now, anticipating a certain reaction to this, think about a book that is one of your favorites, like some complex and sublime novel or something, and ask yourself where the book that the author wrote down came from. like, where did the words come from? i'll tell you something that i know with certainty: writers do not know the answer to that, basically ever. in any case, you'll recall that joseph smith founded mormonism in new york state after being led by an angel to a buried treasure text, the book of mormon. joseph smith was an american tert?n and i included that detail when i reached out to khyentse. but trust me, i get it, any of these things in isolation would be meaningless and even all together it's a fairly commonplace set of coincidences. though i will tell you about that covid test. as you can see i have developed a real certainty about these things including the more or less fatedness of me coming to india at this time, so when it looked like it wasn't going to happen at all, it was all on the verge of coming crashing down, but then that's not what happened. the thing i've come to understand is that none of the circumstances of my life is arbitrary, everything is the way it is because of everything that has happened before. that is how karma works.?

okay, we're about to get even deeper into it, so get ready for it. i'm glad you used the word humanism because it is a really important concept. put simply, humanism is precisely the problem. the way humans have separated ourselves from everything else that lives (not to mention everything that doesn't live), which we call "nature," is at the root of why everything in the world seems so fucking apocalyptic right now. dyed in the wool scientific materialists will loudly protest any intimation of the "supernatural" in one's cosmology or worldview. here's the thing about "supernatural," as a concept it is a logical absurdity. anything, any phenomenon that occurs at any time and any place in the world is by definition "natural." so the idea that there could even be something called supernatural is absurd. and yes, i take thst to its logical conclusion. here's just the most prominent contemporary example: the debate over whether the origin of the SARS-CoV2 virus was "natural" or something sinister ?. here's the thing, the way we place the things that humans do outside of nature is itself artificial. if you accept that we evolved along with everything else that lives on this planet over the last 4 billion years, which i assume each of us does, then there is no reason whatsoever to construct an artificial barrier between what we do and what is natural. ?but here's just one irony that this reveals, that scientific materialists insist upon the existence of the supernatural, which is how they qualify humans and all their shit.?

but it's your next paragraph that is a true gift. buddhism and its concepts including rebirth and karma don't need to be tweaked to better fit with scientific materialism. what has happened is we've allowed ourselves to have an understanding of what science is and what it means that is inaccurate. here's the thing, science has been soooooooooo effective at allowing humans to make better and better predictions (and all the technological innovations that flow from that) we've conceded that science = literal truth of how the world is. but that's not what it is, it is merely a an account of the world qualitatively no different from a mythical account t of the world, but it is one that has distinguished itself with the aforementioned improved prediction power. here are some important things about science to keep in mind: when the scientific method as we've come to understand it was coalescing during the transition from the renaissance to the enlightenment, one of the features built into it was the stipulation that the only information that is eligible to be considered of scientific value is information that can be confirmed objectively. so that leaves all of subjective experience off the table. and science has this habit where if there is some phenomenon in the world that cannot be accounted for by the prevailing scientific paradigm then they will argue that it simply doesn't exist. this is why you have very intellectually sophisticated people arguing that there is no such thing as free will. that is because nothing in our current scientific theory of the world would allow for anything like free will. ergo it doesn't exist. there are literally highly renowned philosophers of mind at prestigious university who say that consciousness as we commonly understand it doesn't exist. because there is nothing in the current theory that would allow for anything like consciousness. but science leaves out subjective experience, which is in fact more or less the only thing that we can say with any confidence actually exists. so this is a thing that rigid scientific materialists do, since the current theory doesn't allow for anything like rebirth or karma they ipso facto do not exist. but we already know that the current theory can't account ?for an awful lot of stuff we know is out there so why would we assume that just because we can't put it in a mathematical equation yet then it doesn't exist, especially when we're all looking at it right now. but if you want to see an example of what i'm saying in the wild, ask a scientist, specifically a physicist, what matter is. they can't tell you cuz they don't know, though they continue to insist that it is the only thing there is.?

so let's talk about what would be some common western conceptions of karma or rebirth might look like. with respect to the latter, the idea is based on the existence of the soul, which when one lifetime ends this same souls enters a new living thing. but perhaps the most significant insight made by the historical shakyamuni buddha was the non-existence of the soul. i can attest to this, no souls as popularly conceived. so what is there to be reborn, one asks. and one way to say it is that it is awareness that is reborn. well what is awareness then? if you think about awareness, the way you experience it is as experience, moment to moment. and one way to describe moment to moment experience is as a complex and ever changing flow of energy. and as the physicists will tell us energy is conserved, always. here's the way i think of it. i know that what i am right now was certainly not born in late 1975 and in fact wasn't even here yesterday. what i am is simply the moment to moment awareness, which is a kind of energy flow, and energy is conserved. while i don't know how any of it works, what i've come to believe is that while individual beings die there is no death, which is another way of saying i have always been here in one form or another and i will always be here as long as there is a here to be. but we have this habit of thinking of things as binary, like either the world corresponds to the christian or abrahamic worldview that dominated the west for so many centuries, or there is nothing and life is an accident (?) and there is no meaning. there's no room for any other conception of the world. so, since there is no god there is no heaven and hell so there is no afterlife no soul nothing that persists beyond death. which is infantile.?

and karma is even easier to address. karma is nothing more than cause and effect. period. i think when westerners think about karma they think of it like as this moral account that is perpetually being tallied by someone who judges whether your actions are virtuous or not, and then doles out punishment for all the bad things you do. also infantile. remember what i said before about the circumstances of my life, and in fact the state of things in the entire universe right now: none of it is arbitrary, all of it is the necessary consequences of everything that came before. that is all karma is. now the objection to karma rests in its moral valence. that somehow in addition to all the good old fashioned "laws of nature" ? cause and effect the buddhist notion of karma also has this moral aspect to it and since our current theory does not allow for anything like morality then it therefore doesn't exist. let me give you a hypothetical, or rather two: in the first you are walking down the street wearing loose fitting business trousers and no underwear when a teenager swings the corner of his iphone 13 right smack on one of your testicles, hard, and then proceeds to laugh about it. in the second you are walking down the street and you see this pretty young woman who is decked out in nice business attire and is carrying a briefcase, but is also holding the hand of her visibly disabled daughter, and just as they approach you the daughter trips on the sidewalk pulling the mother hard and the corner of her briefcase hits you square on the nut with the precise physical force and vector of the phone. is your reaction going to be the same in the two cases? so there is an example of how what we think of as morality alters a cause and effect chain. we can see it, we've experienced it, we know it's in the world. it is therefore natural and just because we don't have a theory around it and know how to measure it and express it mathematically, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. we just haven't figured it out yet. think of your individual genetic code. what is that but a record expressed via a particular means using a highly specific language, of everything that happened to every one of your forebears from the beginning. it is a expression of the karma of a biological individual. basically what i am saying is that because i am a skeptical westerner who has read deeply in science and more importantly tried to think through the implications of this tremendous knowledge we've accrued, i know that anything that happens in the world is by definition natural. because our current theories change from time to time, we use different terminology for what is in the world and we give a somewhat different account of what is going on. but it's important to remember that even despite great revolutions in our current theories, ?none of it ever changes what is, the only thing that changes is how we talk about what is. i also understand what science is (an investigative method) and what its limits are (they are legion), so i know that just because our current theory can't account for some phenomenon i experience it doesn't mean the phenomenon doesn't exist. just that scientists haven't caught up with it yet.?

one last thing i'll say is that this applies just as much to many western buddhists, e.g. yuval noah harari or stephen batchelor, as your typical orthodox scientific materialist. it surprises me sometimes how such very smart people can suffer such failures of imagination.

i think i went through more than i intended but there is a lot more to say. but it's long and i'm typing on my phone so i'll wait and see what anyone thinks about what's here before i decide to go on.

On Jan 7, 2022, at 02:07, Todd Rhoads <Todd@...> wrote:

?

Quite interesting, to say the least. Continued good luck on this journey.

I'm a pretty cautious person in many ways, or could say, am someone who hasn't "pushed things" too much, instead i guess my personality is more to "seek and enjoy the comfortable path"; thus I'm usually wary of offering encouragement for that which may be "ill-advised." But as we all do i'm sure, i occasionally?think about "well it would be have cool if i had at least tried this or that....." I do believe we far more regret the things we do not try, than the ones we do......

I certainly wouldn't travel to India?in a pandemic but hopefully Omicron indeed stays as a turning point to a more mild path and end to this one....

As someone who is more humanist than spiritual/metaphysical, I'm not sure I'd be too understanding of your other "fated signs" (in addition to your mother's birthday twinning with the Lama and the "Tibetans and Utahans are both mountainous" - Mormomism?was born like in Ohio though right and they were forced to flee?) - but on the other hand, that "getting your negative covid test 15 minutes before end of boarding" is a crazy story in and of itself.? Talk about drama. I turn stressed/crabby when running late during travel - I'd definitely be better off traveling alone during that type of episode than with a girlfriend/wife? ;)? ......

Would be interested at some point to hear more about how you think traditional Buddhism and karma/reincarnation could be tweaked to better fit Western scientific?materialism.......i certainly believe in karma but not a literal thing but a more "general" tendency. (i think it's true that almost all of us "Western scientific materialism" types who do not favor any religious or spiritual practice, do at the same time have many beliefs or thought-processes that do not at all strictly comply with "materialism"? - such as, why the reverence for human life or belief in human exceptionalism, behind humanism, if we are just briefly electrified meat-carbon?. But we need, and want, to believe in some contradictions or "leaps of faith", in our day-to-day world-views, as part of making any little semblance of sense of this place, and our lives, as we can or at bare minimum, need to, to continue.....)

My favorite food as far as taste/health combo is Southern India vegeterian?food - all the great spiced lentil, chickpeas, potatoes, breads; not great options in San Diego for it, when Dan and I lived with Amit Shah junior year, before his poor mother died, he would visit home every weekend and she would load him up with tupperware after tuppwerare?of it, and he didn't want most of it because too much/and had had it for too many years, and would tell me i was welcome to whatever, and i'd come home from being reporter/editor at daily school paper at end of night and that would be favorite all-time midnight snack.

Certainly have always noted a high number of creative/intelligent western people who got into Buddhist practice or at least deep meditation practice - Allen Ginsburg, Yuval Noah Harari, Howard Stern, David Bowie, David Lynch, George Harrison, George Foreman, George Bush (the mexican one).......anyways i got a mantra 3rd-hand from Joe (he wouldn't share his real paid-for one) and enjoyed mediation for a little while, but have wanted to try to get back into it again......

On Thu, Jan 6, 2022 at 9:17 AM David E. Ford Jr. <ottoemezz@...> wrote:

?in Dan's defense, i would also be deeply skeptical if someone told me they were doing what i am doing. i will tell you about what that is, but it requires a lot of background, so, fair warning. also, be advised that i am likely to speak about things in ways that might surprise you. to be fair, it surprises me too, but i cannot deny the experiences of the last two years. and again, my dear friend andy, my now former girlfriend becca, and my therapist, hanna, all of whom are deeply skeptical people, all admit that despite the unlikeliness of it all, they all agree that what i am doing is sound and not evidence of some crisis that i'm running from.

okay, with that, as i think you all know by now, i have been practicing tibetan buddhism since roughly late-spring/early-summer 2019. and as you all also have some idea, the years of the pandemic have been especially harsh for me and my family. admittedly, at this time last year i was indeed in a deep crisis that led to me checking in to a psychiatric facility because i was as suicidal as i've ever been in my life. shortly thereafter my mother died from the covid that i brought into the family. because of all this i took about 7 months of medical leave from my job and in fact at that point i had sort of abandoned my buddhist practice because in my despair i reasoned that it wasn't doing anything for me. but as this period progressed, i ultimately found that i missed the many beneficial aspects of my meditation practice and so in about late february or march of last year i returned to daily meditation. at that time, i figured out that the reason i had abandoned my practice for a while was because i had mistaken ideas about just what exactly it could do for me. to put it succinctly, i had been operating under the impression that if i continued my practice and continued helping my family in all the ways i was, that eventually things would improve ?. of course this isn't what happened and frankly anyone who doesn't realize that things are not going to improve any time soon hasn't been paying attention for the last five or six years. so as i returned to my practice i found it deepening significantly.

now, i don't know how much y'all know about tibetan buddhism, but to give you a brief history, buddhism was brought to tibet by indians beginning in roughly the 8th century. the buddhism that was being practiced in india by that time was a form known as vajrayana, or tantric buddhism. without getting toooo deeply into it, tantric buddhism is alll about a personal relationship between a student and a tantric teacher or guru. i'm sure i don't have to inform any of you of the many controversies and problems associated with tantric buddhism as it has been propagated in the west, including charges of abuse both sexual and otherwise. there have been a number of horrifying scandals surrounding tantric buddhism in the west beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present day. because of these (not to mention the fact that in order to practice tantric buddhism one must have access to a qualified tantric teacher with whom one feels a strong connection) i had decided fairly early on in my practice that i wasn't even going to attempt to go down that road. just too many potential problems and nowhere near enough qualified teachers, especially ones that a relatively poor person like me might have access to.?

having said that, last summer as my practice was getting more serious and i was looking to make connections with other buddhists, i started reading some books written by a guy called Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, who is a very prestigious reincarnate lama, as well as an actually really interesting filmmaker under the name Khyentse Norbu (seriously, no bullshit, his movies are worth checking out). Khyentse is someone who is very clearly concerned with transplanting buddhism to the west because tibet is a non-starter and if the tradition is going to survive it must move (as it did from india to tibet centuries ago). so his books are written for people like me, westerners with interest in the buddhadharma who are also very skeptical of the problems associated with tantric buddhism. honestly, he could have written several of his books specifically for me. what i found i them was first of all an extremely sincere and extremely smart guy who has no illusions about the problems associated with tantra, specifically in a western context. as i read his books i was amazed to find that literally every single concern i have is directly addressed by him in a fearlessly honest manner.?

having read his books i immediately moved on to everything i could find on the internet written by him (there's a lot and it's virtually all brilliant). so one night i'm reading some articles he wrote and it suddenly occurred to me with great clarity and urgency that this was the guy i didn't even know i was looking for and i wanted to ask him to be my teacher. but of course how the fuck was i supposed to make that happen. ?as i say, he is one of the most well known living tibetan masters, especially in the west, in addition to being a well regarded filmmaker, who has thousands of students all over the world and who travels virtually constantly all over the world giving teachings. so i decided to write him an email ?. while i couldn't find an email address for him directly, the guy has founded several well known organizations dedicated to different aspects of spreading the dharma, including one called the Khyentse Foundation, which is mainly concerned with funding buddhist education for promising students. so i wrote a fucking long as hell and excruciatingly sincere email, first asking him to be my teacher and explaining why i felt so strongly about it and sent it to a general contact email at the Khyentse Foundation. i really didn't think it would work but several days after sending it i received an email from a ?very nice woman at the foundation. after making it clear that she had read my entire email and was moved by it, she explained that i had in fact contacted the Khyentse Foundation. she went on to say that they have a system for communicating requests to Khyentse but that they have a strict rule that any message or request must be limited to one or two sentences at most (my email was something like five or six thousand words) and asked if i could possibly make my request to fit those requirements. she did also say that she could send my original email to his secretary in case they wanted more information. so i wrote a brief request and sent it along and proceeded to wait for about a week. when i heard back from her i thought at first that i was getting the brush off, but, reading between the lines i saw that wasn't the case at all. while she did not indicate that he had accepted my request, she made it clear what i needed to do next in order to move the process along. i won't get into too much detail here but before one can even begin tantric training, there are a host of preliminary practices (these are referred to as ng?ndro in tibetan) that must be completed, and this can take many years depending on the pace at which one works. so she basically told me that before asking him directly to be my teacher i should begin the ng?ndro practices under the auspices of an organization he founded, which has teachers hand picked by Khyentse to help and advise students through this. so i joined his ng?ndro organization and chose a mexican man from guadalajara named Carlo as my ng?ndro advisor.

okay, now it's time to get a little woo woo metaphysical. there are things about the last two years, and my experience with buddhist practice, as well as details from my life more broadly that started to make me feel like none of this was an accident. and as my practice continued and i got to know carlo better, i have more or less concluded that these are not coincidences. i'll paint a picture for you. the first thing is simply the fact that as soon as i really started getting into these practices (as well as the basic view of buddhism in general) it really felt like slipping on a glove. it wasn't hard or weird and in fact i took to it immediately. then there are these facts about my life:

i was born to a family who are members of a highly devout and decidedly insular religious community tucked into the mountains. also, my mother was born on the literal same day (same year) as the current Dalai Lama. these things all would strike most people as coincidences and, not so long ago, i would have said the same thing. there are other things that i could mention, but i'm afraid you might find them dubious, so i'll refrain, but the long and short of it is, i am absolutely certain that none of this is new to me and that in fact everything that has happened in my life has been leading me directly to this point and i am doing work that was begun long before i was born. and that work specifically is forging a new, indigenous western buddhist tradition.

going back to the spread of buddhism to tibet, as i mentioned, it was brought there over the course of more than a century by indian buddhist masters. as i'm sure you know, buddhism was founded in india, and as you probably also know, it is virtually extinct here now. this extinction was the result of a number of forces, including the beginning of islamic incursions into india, which destroyed the huge infrastructure of monasteries in india. at the same time, what we now call hinduism was making a comeback and that meant that buddhists lost much of the royal patronage they had enjoyed since the time of ashoka. all this happened just as the tradition was being transmitted to tibet. but it's important to understand that this transition was far from smooth and there were a couple of centuries during which there was a lot of pressure from traditional tibetan sources to reject it outright. the story of how this was overcome focuses on an indian tantric master known as guru padmasambhava (which means "lotus-born master"). put simply, because the traditional tibetan tutelary gods were opposed to the introduction of buddhism to tibet and spoiled attempts to build the first monastery there, padmasambhava was summoned to subdue the local tutelary gods, and he did this by incorporating them into what became tibetan buddhism. in other words, buddhism had to be made tibetan before tibetans would become buddhists.

as i said, the work of bringing tantric buddhism to the west began in the 1970s, and frankly it hasn't really gone all that well (remember all those scandals?). not only that, because of the specifics of western culture, many people, including people otherwise open to buddhism, are unable to reconcile some of the important aspects of the buddhist view (i'm talking mainly here about karma and rebirth). what i've come to realize is that the typical western objections to these concepts more or less boil down to misconceptions of how they work as well as misconceptions about our present scientific worldview. this email is already long as fuck, so i won't get into it now, but if you are interested i can get more deeply into these things another time. but basically, what i concluded is that in order for this stuff to stick in the west it has to be reconceived in a way that takes western culture into account. in other words, in order for westerners to accept buddhism buddhism will have to be made western and the tutelary gods of the west (in a phrase, scientific materialism) must be subdued or appeased.

the truly amazing thing is that as soon as i came to realize this, it was like i opened a floodgate somewhere and ideas just began flowing with tremendous force and prodigiousness. and again, i'll refer you to becca, andy and hanna, all of whom have heard them and all of whom agree that they are not just sound but in some aspects actually fucking brilliant. so, i saw the course of the rest of my life before me.

anyway, sometime this summer i decided that the next time i went to india i wanted to, first, do pilgrimage to the major sites associated with the buddha's life, and second ?travel up to the tibetan colonies in himachal pradesh and try to track down Khyentse directly. it being summer 2021, with india still banning tourists in the country because of covid, i figured that might be a year or two away at least.?

now i have to give you a little more background. a few months before i went to india in 2019, i met this woman named priya who was a software engineer at my office who is from andhra pradesh in southern india very near where we visited. when she learned that i was going to south india and loved south indian movies we became fast friends. when the pandemic began, i had a lot of concern for priya because i knew she was living on her own in a very foreign country with no transportation of her own at a really fucking scary time. so with becca's support i decided i needed to do what i could to look out for her. this meant picking her up every couple of weeks and driving her to the indian grocer in gaithersburg as well as helping her to make appointments and taking her to see apartments when she had to move. priya, of course, was deeply appreciative of all the help. and also she informed me that she was engaged to be married though the wedding was delayed because there was opposition from both families because of caste difference. but she said that as soon as they were able to get the families on board they would plan the wedding and that i would be invited. i'm sure i don't have to tell you that being invited to a traditional indian wedding (in india) is a rare opportunity for a white boy like me, so i resolved then and told her as much that when it happened i would do everything in my power to attend.?

so, things are going along this past fall. my buddhist practice was deepening and at the same time my alienation from my job was becoming untenable. it got so bad that i had to level with my supervisor about it because i was finding ?it difficult to do the bare minimum at my job. as it happened, this forced my hand, and my supervisors boss immediately came to me and asked me to tell her when my last day of work would be. so i said i would work through the end of 2021 and that would be it. i didn't know what i was going to do instead but i was weirdly sanguine about the whole thing. then, about a week later, i got a text from priya: my wedding will be on december 29, can you come? my immediate thought was fuck no i can't, i'm broke as hell i just quit my job and besides i think india is still not issuing tourist visas. but, i said i wasn't sure but i would try my very best, really thinking there was no way it was going to happen. but then i checked and discovered that india had resumed issuing tourist visas that very week and so i started shopping for airfare. because the timing was so short it cost about twice as much as the last trip, but i had enough room on a credit card and so i bought a ticket. and again, i had determined that the next time i found myself in india i was going to seek out my guy. besides that, i was more or less determined that i was not going to come back to the u.s. for some time if that were at all possible.

so this brings us more or less up to date, except to say that i bought the ticket the week of thanksgiving, which meant i had to inform my girlfriend, all my friends, and my family, that i was going to india and i wasn't sure when i would be coming back. this caused a crisis and the last six weeks or so have been very very difficult and there is still quite a bit of resentment on the part of some for what they see as a selfish move on my part. here is the thing, this sudden break with everything in my life has been so hard and so fucking scary that if i didn't have absolute certainty about what i'm doing, i am absolutely convinced i would have backed out.

before closing i want to share a couple more details that double down on the downright fated feeling this whole thing has for me. one, with respect to Carlo, he is a really really interesting guy. ?he's a few years younger than us (i think he is 40), he's gay, like us, and he met Khyentse in 2001 while a student at u. of british columbia (nice detail, eh steinberger?). shortly thereafter he became a monk, which he was for ten years before returning his robes and he is now the principal of an english language international school in guadalajara (nice detail, eh buck?). anyway, i really have come to appreciate him a lot but he also has this maddening way of being coy with me about certain things. like he is supportive of the things i'm trying to do but he doesn't let on much in the way of what he thinks personally or what Khyentse himself might know or think. but, a few weeks before i left we were messaging with each other about my plans and i was talking about my concerns about the brevity of my visa. when we came to india in 2019, we were issued tourist visas that were good for five years with multiple entries, with a limit of six months for any consecutive stay. so people who wanted to stay in india longer would just take a weekend in thailand every six months. but since the pandemic, all those visas were canceled and they are now only issuing 30-day, single entry visas that are not extendable. so i was talking about this and expressing my concerns about running out of time and he sent me a voice message that began with him saying very forcefully "you canNOT postpone this trip!" when i listened to it it spooked me a little but also felt as though he let something slip. i shared the message with becca and it spooked her even more. then, possibly the craziest part happened just as i was preparing to go. my flight to hyderabad left december 26, and like virtually every country who allows foreigners to enter, india requires a negative rt-pcr covid test taken within 72 hours of departure. now y'all remember that week. it's just when this omicron horseshit really started popping. so i made an appointment on the 23rd at a local pharmacy that a friend had gone to for the same reason ?a few days earlier, but when the day came i showed up and they informed me they had run out of tests. so i scrambled to find a place that was taking walkins and found one in college park. so i'm driving to this place when suddenly i realized that for more than ?a mile i had been driving past a line of cars managed by police, all of whom were waiting to get a test at the same place. so that was a non-starter. so at that point i began freaking out a little and i went home and searched for some place that could give me an appointment. the only thing i could find was an urgent care in chevy chase with an opening the morning of the 24th. the thing is, though, this wasn't appropriate to my situation, but rather it was a thing for someone who thought they may have covid. the office clearly indicated it could take 4-5 days for the results to come through, way longer than i had. but the way i ?figured it i was out of options and i had to do something. ?even when i was at the place, the receptionist and the doctor both told me i would not get my results back in time, but i got the test all the same. my flight left at 10:30 the morning of the 26th so i had to get there early as fuck. my sister sarah drove me and all the while she's like what are you going to do if they won't let you on the plane and i was just like i'll cross that bridge when i get to it. so i get to the airport and at the check in counter the boy asked me for my rt-pcr test, and i showed him the paperwork that said i had gotten it but that id yet to receive my results. the guy was clear: india won't let you in without it so we can't check you in unless you have it. then he said that they have testing downstairs and perhaps you can go down there and find out if they can get you a result by 9:30, so i went down to the testing site and there was chaos down there, scores of people all trying to get tests and being told that they weren't doing any that day. i was crushed. i phoned my sister and by that point i was literally bawling and told her they weren't going to let me on the plane. she tried to calm me down and said she was turning around and would come get me. i thought that was it. i messaged carlo and priya and broke the news and proceeded to wait for sarah to come get me. ?all this time i am periodically checking to see if the results had come in and when i did so at around 9:15 (so with fifteen minutes to spare) the results posted and the test was negative and i raced back to the counter and the woman there asked if my results came through and i confirmed they had and she rushed me through check in and i managed to get on the plane.?

here too, an argument can be made for just good luck or coincidence but with everything else that had happened this was further confirmation of the rightness of what i am doing.

so here's where we stand the evening of january 6, 2022: ?i attended my friends wedding in andhra, which was one of the most amazing and special experiences of my life, and priya's whole damn family treated me like i was fucking royalty. a few days afterward i took a train from vijayawada to delhi and from there i took a flight to dharamshala, the location of the tibetan government-in-exile. after staying there a few days i got a ride to Bir, about 60 kilometers away, and i'm staying at the deer park institute, which is an educational and research institution founded by khyentse and is next door to where he lives. i as yet don't even know if he is in india, but i indicated to carlo earlier today that i intend to seek ordination and asked if he thought that was a good idea. he said that even the desire to do this is very auspicious but since it's such an unfamiliar way of living for someone from the west, he indicated that we should ask Khyentse directly. i asked him if he thought i should reach out directly to his secretary and he has become coy again, which makes me think that he is in contact with him directly already. so i don't yet know what is going to happen, but it seems very likely that i will soon take ordination as a buddhist monk. i think this is the necessary step because in order for me to do the work i see myself doing, i have a lot to learn in the meantime.?

i will keep you abreast of developments.

-df

On Dec 22, 2021, at 19:29, Matte <matte@...> wrote:

?

Sic semper tyrannis

On Dec 22, 2021, at 6:25 PM, Joe Steinberger <joe@...> wrote:

?

Alms for the sic?

On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 3:54 PM Todd Rhoads <todd@...> wrote:

"he might prefer Allives Matte." "Olives mattuh?"

On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 3:50 PM Joe Steinberger <joe@...> wrote:

I have a new nickname for Matte I just invented, BLM… Black Lives Matte. ?

On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 12:42 PM Todd Rhoads <todd@...> wrote:

a Houston shout-out -?

On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 7:51 AM Matte <matte@...> wrote:

I have nothing to add to the conversation but didn’t want my silence to speak for me. Dan, I hope you’re feeling better and Dave, I hope you find what you’re looking for. And I’ll add my positive, yet non-specific wishes for the rest of you fine folks.

Merry December 22nd.

-Matte

On Dec 22, 2021, at 9:46 AM, Joe Steinberger <joe@...> wrote:

I’m not sure I would give any stock to dan’a assessment. Perhaps it means you’re on the exact right path. ?

I think it’s safe to say everyone wants the details of what you’re motivations are and what your really doing.?

“Your is possessive. You’re is a conjunctive verb. Good god.”

“Well, now you get no details, shit bag.”

“It’s shitbag. One word.”

That was all you, by the way.? Um.? Yes.? I would appreciate/enjoy anything more you can provide.?

Godspeed?

On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 5:53 AM Richard Chang via??<rcterp=[email protected]> wrote:

I have no idea what you are planning on doing Dave but I feel like if Covid has taught us anything this past year is to not have regrets. And if that means you travel to Tibet, that's what you should do. I probably wouldn't recommend tongue kissing (I assume you mean french kiss) a stranger unless you have some sort of permission and a negative PCR test from 15 minutes earlier.

I'll definitely read with interest any updates you send to the IC.

-----Original Message-----
From: David E. Ford Jr. <ottoemezz@...>
To:?[email protected]
Sent: Tue, Dec 21, 2021 12:13 pm
Subject: Re: [dannysic] hear ye, hear ye

did you forget that i contracted covid on election day and gave it to my mother who literally died?

dan's right, though, i am definitely the most likely to die from the disease. ?or maybe not. i have history of infection and three shots of the super vaccine.

an update for the IC, i'm returning to india on Sunday and i don't have a definite plan to return. my activities there will be varied: i am first flying to hyderabad and i will attend a former coworker's?wedding in andhra pradesh, ?then i'm going to travel up to the buddhist pilgrimage sites in Bihar and uttar pradesh. from there i will head up to the tibetan colonies in himachal pradesh trying to link up with a guy called Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche (also known as the filmmaker Khyentse Norbu??), with whom i have some important business.

dan thinks i've gone completely off the rails, i think, but it's important for me to point out that my close friends here who see me regularly don't feel the same way. i could explain what it is i'm going there to do but i kinda doubt you'd believe it entirely. but i will continue to keep the ic updated on whatever wild shit is happening with me. and if anyone is curious to hear a bit more i'd be glad to get into it but with the proviso that it will most likely include me talking about shit in unfamiliar ways. is that vague enough?

joe: godspeed is one word

dan: way to throw sandra under the bus

bloom: did you know that rhode island isn't actually an island

christian: your assessment of your covid prognosis is wrong

andrew: famous last words

todd: you didn't say anything interesting enough for a response

reechard: you should go out and tongue kiss a stranger on christmas

ho ho ho,

df

On Mon, Dec 20, 2021 at 1:11 PM Dan Buck <vertpurple@...> wrote:

I believe I am the first in dannysic to be positive for Covid-19.

And I'm in Quebec.

Hear ye, hear ye.

I bet you didn't know that there is a rare symptom of Covid:?.

Stg it feels like my stomach and balls were kicked multiple times.

Imagine not being able to stand up straight because your stomach muscles hurt.

Hear ye, hear ye.

re: Joe not remembering/relating to David Morton proffing at U of BC - Joe's memory is pretty good for some things and pretty bad for a lot of things; he's also known for being good at making human connection to those he's in a room with, but not being good at staying in touch with people......

On Sun, Jan 9, 2022 at 9:18 PM David E. Ford Jr. <ottoemezz@...> wrote:

joe's childhood friend david morton is a professor at ubc,though i guess maybe they aren't friends anymore.

eric, next time you feel like losing 26k can i send you my venmo information?

On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 10:15 AM Joe Steinberger <joe@...> wrote:

That is a good question that I honestly don’t have an answer to.?

I did have an answer, that I am half British, half Colombian and I went to university, but I deleted that as it was dumb and misleading.?

On Sun, Jan 9, 2022 at 7:03 PM David Doga <oyeguey@...> wrote:

Joe

What's your connection with ubc?

---

From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Joe Steinberger <joe@...>
Sent: January 9, 2022 9:08 PM
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [dannysic] Anyone in crypto?

?

It's funny that we've got the spectrum of "I'm going to become a buddhist?monk" to "what's the best crypto to invest in" in the same email thread.

Also...?

On Sun, Jan 9, 2022 at 4:47 PM Eric Bloom via <ericbloom8=[email protected]> wrote:

oh yeah and any coin related to the metaverse.? MANA (Decentraland) probably being the most popular at the moment

On Jan 9, 2022, at 1:19 PM, Eric Bloom via <ericbloom8=[email protected]> wrote:

Rekt Capital newsletter

Great detailed info on macro and micro trends in crypto.? twice a week you get one focused on Bitcoin and one focused on altcoins.? Really useful.

To start with - I'd highly recommend the following altcoins to look at:

Matic

Chainlink

Crypto.com (CRO)

Tezos

Cosmos (ATOM)

ADA

ASM

I've been on coinbase/coinbase pro for the last 3 years and have at various times (more than once) turned $4,000 into $30,000.? (I've also turned $30,000 into $4,000, but that's beside the point).

eric

On Jan 8, 2022, at 11:11 AM, Richard Chang via <rcterp=[email protected]> wrote:

I'm going to start investing in crypto and finding reliable info, research and analysis is challenging to say the least. Anyone have insights or good resources? I have no issues paying for newsletters, substacks, etc.?

joe's childhood friend david morton is a professor at ubc,though i guess maybe they aren't friends anymore.

eric, next time you feel like losing 26k can i send you my venmo information?

On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 10:15 AM Joe Steinberger <joe@...> wrote:

That is a good question that I honestly don’t have an answer to.?

I did have an answer, that I am half British, half Colombian and I went to university, but I deleted that as it was dumb and misleading.?

On Sun, Jan 9, 2022 at 7:03 PM David Doga <oyeguey@...> wrote:

Joe

What's your connection with ubc?

---

From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Joe Steinberger <joe@...>
Sent: January 9, 2022 9:08 PM
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [dannysic] Anyone in crypto?

?

It's funny that we've got the spectrum of "I'm going to become a buddhist?monk" to "what's the best crypto to invest in" in the same email thread.

Also...?

On Sun, Jan 9, 2022 at 4:47 PM Eric Bloom via <ericbloom8=[email protected]> wrote:

oh yeah and any coin related to the metaverse.? MANA (Decentraland) probably being the most popular at the moment

On Jan 9, 2022, at 1:19 PM, Eric Bloom via <ericbloom8=[email protected]> wrote:

Rekt Capital newsletter

Great detailed info on macro and micro trends in crypto.? twice a week you get one focused on Bitcoin and one focused on altcoins.? Really useful.

To start with - I'd highly recommend the following altcoins to look at:

Matic

Chainlink

Crypto.com (CRO)

Tezos

Cosmos (ATOM)

ADA

ASM

I've been on coinbase/coinbase pro for the last 3 years and have at various times (more than once) turned $4,000 into $30,000.? (I've also turned $30,000 into $4,000, but that's beside the point).

eric

On Jan 8, 2022, at 11:11 AM, Richard Chang via <rcterp=[email protected]> wrote:

I'm going to start investing in crypto and finding reliable info, research and analysis is challenging to say the least. Anyone have insights or good resources? I have no issues paying for newsletters, substacks, etc.?