homesick

i decided to help beef up my posts, and maybe encourage more frequent posting, ill start including passages of gotama sakyamuni tathagata's teachings that i find particularly interesting. i write down the page numbers on a bookmark as i go along. heres the book i have right now:

i guess it goes to the left. well anyway, the first one i marked is from pages 29-36, so i guess ill just take out some sentences. heres the first passage that made me go 'oh!'

"Then, my good man, didn't it ever occur to you, an intelligent and mature person, 'I too am subject to death and cannot escape it. let me now do noble deeds by body, speech and mind'?"

"No, Lord (of a hell), I could not do it. I was negligent."

As i said, im homesick. the city isnt quite for me, although im sure ill get used to being surrounded by non-life. i reallized awhile ago im going to be real sad when summer comes, cause ill know how beautiful it is everywhere else and how much i could be enjoying myself at home. for now, ill just have to put up with all the concrete and pavement. no wonder these people are so tough and negative, theyre quite literally cut off from life. i even read a little article about how being surrounded by plants is good for the mind :B i guess im lucky that my aunt lives in the place she does, theres atleast a little grass and some trees.

mental capacity = spiritual refinement?

think about it, thats the only thing we can find thats different between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. it doesnt even start to make sense how something purely physical, like our brains, would determine anything about whatever it is that makes us into lifeforms. whatever it is, all living things have something in them that makes them 'alive', whatever this is is found in no greater or lesser ratio throughout life, youre either alive or dead. it just so happens that some things can fly, some can get their oxygen through water, some can live without oxygen, some can live in space, and some hace the ability to ponder/ignore.

and another reason why i know theres really no such thing as good/bad outside of our communities - the only difference between thinking about doing something bad and doing it is self control. who hasnt considered hurting someone, or lying, or doing anything unfair at all? but then we often say 'no i shouldnt' or repress these feelings. either of these does not change the fact that we want to. like it or not, its what it is to be human. it takes an incredible amount of meditation just to accept and then understand our dark side (see carl jung or sigmund freud on what that is), just ask any buddhist monk. and then theres working with your new found self to truly eliminate these negative impulses.

different cultures excelled at different things, hell we dont even understand what exactly the pyramids are for even with all of our advanced-ness. the indian (from india) people spent several thousand years doing nothing but studying spirituality. id say their religious information is a good place to start when doing spiritual studies.

but yeah that thinking/doing part was what i thought about today whilst doing dishes, and part before that ive been meaning to blog for a few weeks, and the last bit was just an afterthought incase anybody's actually interested in finding out about themselves.

i want to make a list of all i find super duper, and i have to remember to put robots and whoopie pies near the top, next to bugs and michael :) oh ive become such a softie in my old age