~ Visions of Samsara: An Experience at the Kalachakra ~

Ascending and Descending ~ MC Escher (1960) ~ Jeff Taska, MS (at Washington DC, July 9-16, 2011) On a more personal note, I want to tell you how His Holiness' visit went for me... I could tell you about Whoopi Goldberg and Richard Gere being there, the sort of things which interest my mom and People magazine... I could tell you about HH The Dalai Lama and what a goofball he is at heart, the sort of things which endear him to the world... I could tell you about sitting for 8 days with monks and nuns and the rituals and such that went on, the things which sound rather formal and very important... Instead I'll tell you about something which occurred on the subway. I was riding the Metro, in a car packed with the usual sort of wide variety of people one is surrounded by in DC. I remember this European man on the train. He was wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a silk shirt. He was talking to a female he had recently met about the art exhibits he had just seen. His viewpoint was the Rodins, and Monets, and so ons he had just seen were "crap," and that there were much better examples of these artists' work he had seen elsewhere, how it was a waste of his time, and so on...

I remember these three black women on the train. Their clothing was much too small for their rather large frames and their jewelry was heavy on the quantity side, light on the quality side. They were talking ghetto; every other word they spoke came out as an expletive of some sort. One of these women was telling the others how she had been "disrespected" by a man in front of his friends, and how she didn't need this man, and didn't play that $h!+, and so on... And as I got off the train on to the walkway, I had this rather odd experience... As I was walking on the brick floor of the Metro surrounded by people walking and riding, I suddenly could hear the thoughts or conversations or somethings of all the people on the Metro. There was a thought/speech about some sort of iPads and iPhones and iCables and the way this man was wiring these devices... There was a though/speech about some sort of presentation this young man had to make and the anxiety he felt about his suit being just right... There was some sort of thought/speech about this woman's anxiety over her mother and how her relationship with her would turn out... My mind became aware of all of these thoughts at the same time from other people... I do not have the words to describe it... sort of like the way you can hear a swarm of bees humming and can pick out the sound of one individual bee's set of wings for just a moment before it recedes back into the general hum of the swarm. It was overwhelming to try to interpret and make sense of all of the information... And accompanying these thoughts was this feeling... this feeling I cannot adequately describe... it was like grief, and loss, and sadness, and anxiety, and anger, and disappointment, and loneliness, and pain, and ignorance... and just this overwhelming sense of how much these people having these thoughts were suffering at the moment... and yet how normal it seemed to them to be this way at this moment... as if they actually just didn't know how much they hurt. And I felt as if I had been each one of those people at some point... or was now... or will be... or something.... as Einstein alluded to, sometimes time is relative and it is difficult to know the difference between ten seconds and a tenth of a second... I don't know how long or short the feeling lasted really... and I saw them/us doing this over and over every day, going back and forth on the Metro train and the escalators and walkways, but never really going anywhere different and just making a loop... and I just felt this overwhelming wish to help take this burden away from these people... from my self... from us all... just to make it stop. Please. Make it stop. And I wept. And later, now I wonder if this was a direct realization of what Buddhists call samsara, the basis for the path of renunciation of worldly things... the determined aspiration to escape samsara. I do not know, but I think it is. And now, of course, the realization has passed and I look at the world with the same eyes I did before... yet in some small way, I see people differently. And I do not claim to be holy or omniscient or telepathic or Christ or a Buddha or anything else other than just some guy... but I do wonder if someone like Jesus or the Dalai Lama feels this way when he looks at the whole of humanity, and if this is what motivates them to work so hard to benefit and free us all. Perhaps this is the sort of realization which makes us take Bodhisattva Vows and Hippocratic Oaths and such... and perhaps I am kinder for the experience. I hope so.

Monk and Metro Worker

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