I will be back to regular blogging very soon. My blog’s theme is temporarily changed to this one since, for reasons unknown, WordPress.com is only displaying their default template pictures in the header of my theme, and my custom pic is not showing up in the header at all.

Oddly, my pic is all present and accounted for in the Presentation editor, but when I re-save and upload it, ta-da… all I get is the default WordPress pic. This only started in the last few days, and a few other WordPress.com bloggers are reporting the same issue. When the WordPress team returns from vacation on January 2nd, I hope they will be addressing this.

Update: 04 Jan 07 - Thank you for the fix, WordPress.

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Sorry about the delay in responding to comments. This past week I was traveling extensively for work, and then pretty busy at each new city. I should have posted something about being too busy to blog, but each day I kept thinking it wouldn’t be a problem (sigh). Anyway, I am back off the road, and will resume posting and answering comments within the next couple days or so. My next post will be from a lesson with my teacher this past Monday evening, a continuation of this recent series of posts.

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There is a type of medication that I try to take regularly and on time: learning how to stay centered.

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Warrior spirit. It’s more than guns and Rambo. That is why the higher masters of the martial arts turn inward and teach the spiritual journey. Sometimes, when we peek through the slits we call eyes, we can spot them here and there… if we don’t blink or look away because the light is so bright.

I like the guys over at Zen Unbound e-magazine, and their metablog Blogmandu. I don’t know them well, yet. But it looks like they have warrior spirit:

“Readers: When your great, great grandchildren are dead, the grandchildren of your great, great grandchildren will be delighted by the sights, the sounds, the odors [from hypertext markup language with cascading smell sheets] of Zen Unbound at www.zenunbound.com . Count on it. We will still be here when Amazon has dried up and disappeared; when Yahoo is just something cowboys say when they’re happy…”

Warrior spirit shows in a lot of ways. It can be the willingness to let the world see you just they way you are, with all your wrinkles, flaws and weaknesses. That’s something I admire about Jon over at The Wild Things of God. Sometimes you just have to blurt out a true confession now and then, to help inspire and motivate the rest of us. Read his post The Suck.

Warrior spirit stays calm in the face of adversity; it’s the eye at the center of the storm. Warrior spirit rises above the calamity and distractions called everyday life, while still participating in every moment of the pulse we call life. Warrior spirit persists with a resilience that is relentless when it says, “I will not stop until I achieve my mission. Whatever it takes. At all costs.”

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…”while my guitar gently weeps.” Check out this amazing ukelele rendition of a George Harrison Beatles classic, performed by Jake Shimabukuro. Ukelele, you say? Yep, a ukelele. Over the top.

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At the end of this short passage from the Book of John, Chapter 8, is an insightful commentary by my teacher. It really helps set the context of Jesus’ statement, “Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone.”

² Now very early in the morning, he came again into the temple, and all the people came to him. He sat down, and taught them.

³ The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman taken in adultery. Having set her in the midst,

⁴ they told him, “Teacher, we found this woman in adultery, in the very act.

⁵ Now in our law, Moses commanded us to stone such. What then do you say about her?”

⁶ They said this testing him, that they might have something to accuse him of. But Jesus stooped down, and wrote on the ground with his finger.

⁷ But when they continued asking him, he looked up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw the first stone at her.”

⁸ Again he stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground.

⁹ They, when they heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning from the oldest, even to the last. Jesus was left alone with the woman where she was, in the middle.

¹⁰ Jesus, standing up, saw her and said, “Woman, where are your accusers? Did no one condemn you?”

¹¹ She said, “No one, Lord.” Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way. From now on, sin no more.”

I was attending a course on the Book of John at Great River Institute.

At this point in the story, Sensei looked up at the class and said, “What do you suppose Jesus was tracing on the ground with his finger?”

No one replied. I remembered having thought about this before, but I’d never come to a conclusion.

“Jesus was highly psychic,” he continued.

“He could see into each person’s heart. He was, in turn, writing out a specific thing that each of her accusers had they themselves done.

“He’d look up at someone, and then turn back to the ground and start to trace out their inner secrets in the dust. Before he could finish, they’d walk away, so he wouldn’t finish and expose them in front of everyone else. He moved from one person to the next, until no one was standing there anymore.”

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If I have something to convey that is beyond words, how can I use words to convey it? Check out this post:

The inexpressible is like water flowing. Words are the pipe that surrounds the water, the pipe that is bringing water from the reservoir out in the countryside to the city. The words are containing something that is inside and in between the words. The words are not the inexpressible, but they can contain and convey it, just as the pipe is not the water but it contains and conveys the water.

One day, after years of being Sensei’s student, I had a realization. It had been forming for a while, percolating on occasion into the fringes of my consciousness. At first I didn’t pay much attention, but after a while I realized it was re-occurring fairly often, so I started paying attention. Oddly though, I found myself paying attention to something that I couldn’t define. It didn’t have a form that I could relate to. Actually, it didn’t appear to have any form at all.

But here is what I was experiencing: an experience.

In other words, for all the words that my teacher was stating out loud, there was a strange phenomenon going on inside of me. As my observational focus improved, I became both the observer and the observed. I was inside of an intensely subjective experience, but I was watching from a highly objective perspective.

One of my first conclusions was that I could see there were inner effects occurring that didn’t seem to be related to the words at all. In fact, at times I could hardly hear the words.

This went on for many months. At some point I observed that the more open and conductive I was, the more this effect took place. The more resistive, closed or negative I was, the less it occurred, or it didn’t seem to occur at all.

At that point, I made a determined effort to stay open, and to be as conductive as possible. Then one day, after a long while had passed in this state of uncertain awareness, it hit me. I was experiencing the thing that the words were endeavoring to convey!

This was a major realization. In time I came to have a modest understanding about this. One thing that I came to understand was that the deeper I opened, the deeper the seeds of the inexpressible were being planted.

The reality of this hit me when (often after many years) those seeds would suddenly manifest into understandings and realizations. In other words, stuff that I might or might not have understood intellectually years ago, would suddenly emerge in the light of actualization or realization.

In time, I realized that there had been another essential ingredient to the success of growth in my deeper inner garden: being a conscientious gardener. In all the subsequent months or years since those seeds had been planted, I had been faithfully endeavoring to be a worthy student. I worked hard on my assignments; I tried to keep a steady disposition.

I tried to do this in a way that wasn’t disruptive or obvious, as I have a job to keep, a family to support and all the other things that constitute a normal life.

I applied the principles that my teacher was giving me to practice. I applied them relentlessly, over and over. I looked to steady myself in the way of the warrior, applying all that I had and was learning into every possible aspect of my everyday life and environment. I certainly wasn’t always good at this. But I did my best; I was out to do it.

I don’t consider myself a teacher of this, other than as a student passing along his experiences. I sput and sputter at it. As the years have progressed, however, my time between sputters has decreased. I am getting better at it, and that’s very encouraging.

One thing I will testify to: It is there, in between the words.

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