Motley Kamuka

  One of the hindrances I have while meditating is a todo list. A subset is what to read. I'm reading Bakewell's fun romp through existentialism, and that will be due back to the library eventually. I like the time limit on library books, when you buy, you can just pile them up. I suddenly got the idea of doing a cross breed of Confederacy of Dunces and the Odyssey , and then I thought I should read Ulysses . So many Dharma books to read. Tibetan, Theravada, Mahayana. I come up with an ideal reading list based on what I know at the moment, for others. Then I think, just grind on the Pali canon. So much amazing stuff there. The Buddha once told some monks to meditate on the loathsomeness of the body and they committed suicide. Opse. In his mortification phase, before he found the middle way with meditation, he ate his own shit, animal shit. Yesh. Mostly it's repetitive formulas meant for memorizing. I am grateful to the tradition for carrying the teachings forward. I have a...

I'm listening to Geddy Lee's autobiography My Effin' Life , and in the 3rd chapter he tells his parents story during the Holocaust, coming from Warsaw Poland to Toronto Canada. What a gut wrenching story. I've read Primo Levi, and other Holocaust memoirs and novels. This chapter can be among them. His mother even had Josef Mengele take blood from her every day, she almost died from the effort. I love Rush, saw them live in Madison on the Signals tour, 1982 or maybe 83.  I'm reading Cultish , which is about cults and how they use language.  That got me watching Wild Wild Country , a 6 part documentary on Bhagwan Rajneesh. What an amazing documentary, and what a kind book to try and treat this topic sensitively.  The next section was on Jonestown and I watched this short video to remind me. Here’s a quote I liked: “Thought-terminating clichés are by no means exclusive to "cults." Ironically, calling someone "brainwashed" can even serve as a seman...

I saw a great picture of Margaret Atwood , and I thought I should do a read through of he work. I loved her Shakespeare's Tempest book, Hag-Seed , and I liked Handmaid's Tale , which won the Arthur Clarke Award in 1985. I like the Netflix version of Alias Grace . She has poetry, and non-fiction as well. She's perhaps one of the prominent Canadian authors. Then I thought about how I'm struggling to read these days. Perhaps I'm getting older and the energy expense is harder. Also when I read I'm easily turned off by writing. Some might be bad writing and some might just be impatience, and the idea that there's not much under the sun I haven't seen. I wonder at my bizarre push to read 52 books a year for the past 30 years. There was a kind of stoical just push push push. It was a weird ambition that has never really paid off for a career or for anything. I've always had a vague fantasy to be a writer, and to be a writer I think you should read a lot, bu...