This X'mas + New Year + Other Tales

This X'mas + New Year is very unusual despite my new relationship with Bee.  Everyone who knows I'm in love thought I'll be spending it sweetly with another by my side, which, I initially thought too.

But it wasn't.

24th December countdown was spent in our own dens reading (me) and meditating (Bee), while Bee popped by yesterday for a fried beehoon lunch (mom's) + mooching around before going back.  I was reading while Bee was sleeping in the countdown.

It was unusual and a tad boring for a honeymoon period couple, which I though so too.  But oh, reading the latest book I procured served quite alot of food for thought that I'd totally forgotten how odd we are.  Hahahahahahahaha......

The way That Guy teaches me isn't like many of those Masters out there.  He throws me into the deep + shallow of the pool, sometimes giving me a net to fish and sometimes my bare hands to catch.  In early 2011, he threw me out of the door with the words, "I've taught you everything already."

That really panicked me.  But I don't know everything!  How could I have learnt everything!

I was very scared and slightly depressed for a while, trying to pick myself alone to face the big wide world.  It was when Malachite Guy said, "开悟前，是师父度。开悟后，是自己度！(Before enlightenment, the Teacher will deliver you.  After enlightenment, you deliver yourself!)" that I drew a deep breath to move on.

With a nagging question in my mind, "How could I be enlightened without even knowing?",  I move on with alot of anxiety and worries but I have to move on.  Things are starting to roll, classes are about to start, you can't just cancel everything, don't you?

Especially when That Guy always say, "Your lacking of confidence is what's eating and killing you."  Which Malachite Guy and A echoed too.  Oh very well, I'll go on then.

Then by chance, I stumbled upon a big Master's works in Kino and started a journey of uncovering more of his works for reference.  He is 南怀瑾, 94 this year, healthy and hale.

Being a man of "olden times", he's especially forward-thinking and open-minded about sharing knowledge.  He shares all of his learnings on meditations, Taoism and Buddhism in all of his books, very carefully alerting us of the pitfalls that he'd been through in the past.

I went on a whirlwind search for his works in a bookstore at Bras Basah that got a 40+ years old cashier lady's attention -  She was very amused that a young person like me would have heard of him + buying his books that she gave the membership discount on the spot.

My learning world opened up a new horizon from him with so much more answers not given or found from That Guy.  He's highly articulate about expressing the elements of Buddhist scriptures and sutras, he described the various areas of meditation in such great details that other meditation writers are lightyears from him.

I think That Guy knows it's time for me to know of other Masters that he threw me out to help kickstart the journey.  I'm fiercely loyal to him that I've almost stop reading other literature to update myself before that.

Beyond that, I'm terribly lucky and blessed to be proficient in Mandarin for there isn't any English translation of 南怀瑾's works.  Even the English translations of the major Buddhist scriptures and sutras are sadly lost of their rightful meanings.

But we cannot discredit the English translators for losing the elements, the polar literal backgrounds between English and Mandarin give no verbatim at all.

As I read 南怀瑾's latest compilation (after finishing 《金刚经说什么》quite recently), I recalled how many Buddhist scriptures, sutras, their related books and I-Ching ones digested in 2011......about 20 of them?

That I realised it's time for me to unlearn them, or I'd not be able to use them in the way it should be. 

Like how 1 of my student went for the SGD$5000 reading-memory course he took with his wife shared, "You don't read a book word by word, you hold it "further" from you so you read it like a picture.  It then goes into your memory system and get "summoned" when the right situation arises.  But before that happens, you cannot hold onto what you've read "in memory".  Instead, you let it "forget", it's not lost like how a deleted data isn't lost in the hard disk, it will come back when it needs to.  This is also why children has better academic memory of books than adults, their perspective to reading is very different from us.  They can recall what they've read from memory but we can't."

This is what I'm doing now 'cos I'm feeling the sluggish in my brain from ingesting 20 Buddhist scriptures, sutras, their related books and I-Ching ones for the whole of 2011.

Of the Buddhist texts, I read only the 1st original translated ones from Sanskrit without the modern interpretation, taking more time to understand and digest.  I started doing that when I don't agree with some of the modern interpretations of 大日经.

Reading 南怀瑾's 《如何修证佛法》，《药师经的济世观》，《学佛者的基本信念》 now, I'm filled with awe of how much details I've missed when reading the scriptures and sutras.  He made alot of astute notes of critical points we need to ponder over when learning from the scriptures and sutras.

And I recalled this that I've read somewhere, "The more we know, the more we know we don't know.  The crippling bit is how we move on from knowing fully well that we don't know so much."

Then I recall again of what That Guy, Malachite Guy, A and 南怀瑾 said about dealing with it, "Just do it, if you don't, you would never really know what learning is all about."

Taking a deep breath, I know the real ride is about to start.