The past week has been a wild one! Got a new cat Wednesday. Flew down to LA on Friday for the weekend. Drank my ass off for 3 days straight. My body hates me! Good times with great friends!
Luna my new Bengal cat.
DTLA on a warm January night.
Cruising around LA in the drop top Cadillac with my good friends Meagan and Jorma.
Madball in Anaheim.
Rode back up to SF early Sunday morning with Mitts from Madball to watch football before their show. Ran into these assholes gettin' legal up in the venue.
Warren, Hoya Roc and Cris gettin' down on most food!
Today was such a long ass day. Stoked to end it with these people!
Population, almost 10 million people. This is the most organized chaos I have ever seen. The most wonderfully helpful people I have ever met. Bangkok is a force to be reckoned with.
On every street corner there is a mall. Not a strip mall, but a 4-story consumer haven. This is MBK.
3rd floor food stands. Eat like a queen for $1 and the food is amazing. Add a Singha beer for an additional $1.
I have no idea what this is. Goodies? Not my goodies.
City livin'.
I bought a beer from a smiling dog in a tutu. That was weird.
Water taxi. Bangkok has a ton of canals. This was the fastest way to get around. Just don't get wet, the water is pretty grimey.
Tuk Tuk travels.
D & D at the Orange Bar. This was a cool sidewalk bar. Don't try to find it during the day cause they only set up after dark. The owner was bumping 2Pac when we rolled up. The sidewalk view makes for really good people watching. Lots of lady boys and old white men A.K.A. to catch a predator.
I've mapped my plans for REBEL8 in 2011. It's a delicious combination that should have you hungry for more. But seriously, in all honesty, I really hope you enjoy REBEL8 this year.
Our 40% off sale is still happening in the online store. Use discount code R8007.
I have the word “Samadhi” tattooed on my left arm. It’s the Pali Sanskrit word for Right Concentration, the final aspect of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. It is also the last of three aspects that concern themselves with mental discipline, concentration and meditation.
I learned how to develop Right Concentration in three main ways:
1. Focusing my attention on my breath.
2. Focusing my attention on a singular object.
3. Working with mantras.
Focusing my attention on my breath has been the mainstay of my meditative practice since the beginning. My first instruction on sitting meditation included lengthy comment on the importance of the process of breathing to the aspiring meditation student. If you are alive, you are breathing. It’s something you can always come back to. So as your mind becomes distracted by thoughts during meditation practice, simply return to your breath and remain there as long as you can. Then when you notice that you are lost in thought again, simply return your concentration to your breath. This is the process of meditation: continually pulling your attention back from your thinking mind then returning your attention to your living body, breathing in and breathing out. In this way, I feel like I learned to how internalize my practice of Right Concentration.
In 2003, while staying at a Tibetan Buddhist retreat center in Southern France, I began to meditate with my eyes open. Oddly, up until that point I had been trained to keep my eyes closed during sitting meditation practice. So as I sat in meditation, instead of focusing my attention on my breath I focused on what I was seeing. At first I tried to focus on something very tiny on the ground. I would try to concentrate on it for the entire 45 minute sitting meditation period. Then I began meditating in nature, focusing my attention on a nearby tree for one sitting period, then focusing on the horizon the following period, then trying to see all things as One thing the following period. Over time, I feel like I learned how to visualize my practice of Right Concentration in this way.
In one context, I think of dharma as the ideas that we aspiring Buddhas need to understand to be free of the suffering caused by identifying with our egos. The historical Buddha described his Dharma as a raft on a river. We start our Path on the shore of greed, hatred and delusion. Then, using the raft of the Dharma we are carried to the shore of love, compassion and understanding. (And as an important side note, he mentioned that it is not necessary to carry the raft with you once you really make it across.) An ancient mantra that reminds me of this story is “Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhisvaha.” I know that looks crazy, but it simply means “Gone Gone All the way gone All the way gone to the other side Fuckin’ awesome”, or something to that effect. In any case, as I sit in meditation I just concentrate and repeat the mantra evenly and consistently until reach a state of egoless absorption. In this way, I feel like I developed a way to vocalize my practice of Right Concentration.
Through these various methods of practicing Right Concentration, I feel like I was able to integrate the previous seven aspects of the Eightfold Path, coming full circle. I can see that each aspect of the Path works with the others to help us be free of the suffering created by our thinking minds. But again, it’s up to each of us as individuals to articulate these teachings in our own lives for any of it to work at all. Lasting peace of mind is possible, always. Just remember the teachings of the Buddha, come back to the present moment and you’ll see that everything is actually going quite well.
I've been around the world in 4 days. And I'm still going.
Racking up some serious frequent flyer miles. Hello Premier Exec. I made an impromptu trip to Sweden to give my Mormor a hug and a kiss. Damn I love that woman.
Uppsala, Sweden at 10:00AM is cold. You only get a few hours of daylight in the winter. It was dark 4 hours after this photo was snapped.
Check out the Domkyrka. It's a gorgeous cathedral built in 1435 with amazing gothic architecture. The photo below was taken at 3:00PM! Dark all day.
Peace out Sweden! I love you. Jag älskar dig.
Jumped back on a plane to San Fran to party with the girls. Hours later I was at SFO East Bound and Down.
One night in Bangkok and the world's your oyster. It's 3:00AM and I'm in Bangkok partying in a parking lot under the freeway. Chillin' with the host with the most Dylan, Dirty D. and a bottle of Sang Som Thai rum. Like whoah.
Get it before you regret it! Shop our online store and when checking out, add discount code R8007 to the discount code box. See how much money you just saved! That's 40% off! Now go back and buy more. You can do this all day. Enjoy.
Right Mindfulness is the seventh aspect of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. It is the second of three aspects that concern themselves with mental discipline, concentration and meditation. By practicing Right Mindfulness we are training ourselves to perfect cognition, or to “see things as they are.”
Normally when we see something our thinking minds make distinctions and interpretations of the object we are looking at. We may notice the size, shape or color of the object. It might be something we want to keep, or something we’d like to destroy. But by thinking about the object, we are conceptualizing it. We’re not actually getting to know the object. When we are practicing Right Mindfulness correctly we are able to observe the process of conceptualization without getting caught up in it. In other words, we can hear all the thinking going on in our minds, but we can take it or leave it. In this way we can settle our minds down and in a way let the object itself tell us what is has to say. This may sound trippy, but when you are able to relax your mind in this way it all makes sense.
Here Bhikkhu Bodhi explains the practice of Right Mindfulness:
“The mind is deliberately kept at the level of bare attention, a detached observation of what is happening within us and around us in the present moment. In the practice of right mindfulness the mind is trained to remain in the present, open, quiet and alert, contemplating the present event. All judgments and interpretations have to be suspended, or if they occur, registered and dropped.”
At this point on my own Path, I feel like the practice of mindfulness has been the most beneficial aspect of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path mostly because it has helped me see that I am not my Ego. My ego is a construct of my thinking mind, and therefore creative in nature. It’s as real as my dreams. It’s not something worth investing a lot of time in. So I let it go and try to remain humbly in the present moment, where All is well.
Also, through practicing Right Mindfulness for myself, I began to see that the way my mind works in a dream when I’m asleep is the same as how it works when I’m awake. It’s just thinking. And just as easily as I can wake up from a dream and realize it was just a dream and forget about it, I can practice Right Mindfulness when I’m awake and deal with my thinking mind as if it were a dream, and let thoughts come and go, cultivating the good thoughts and letting go of the bad thoughts. Personally, this simple realization has been incredibly helpful day to day.
Also, as a side note to my fellow artists, when I practice Right Mindfulness while I’m working in the studio, I can work from a place beyond the conceptualizing of my thinking mind. It is in this space that I feel the most focused and in tune with the raw creative flow. And when I’m in that flow I’m able to remain productive and inspired indefinitely. I really believe that combining my art practice with my mindfulness practice was a huge breakthrough both personally and professionally.
Now, as a lifestyle, I try to maintain mindfulness during all the day’s activities. The consistent application of Right Mindfulness to all my daily activities has always yielded great personal kharmic benefit and a powerful feeling of peace and contentment. If I had to choose only one aspect of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path to people interested in liberating themselves from a sense of dissatisfaction in their lives, I would encourage everyone to develop Right Mindfulness. It’s that important.
Right Effort is the sixth aspect of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. It is the first of three aspects that concern themselves with mental discipline, concentration and meditation. It’s important to recognize that the same mental energies that go into self-discipline, honesty, and kindness can just as easily create desire, envy and aggression. The practice of Right Effort should be our guide when traveling the highways of our minds. Without the practice of Right Effort, our mental energies can be misguided and create more harm than good. The practice of Right Effort is really about focusing our mental energies on continually developing wholesome states of being.
The Pali Canon describes ways to practice Right Effort in our thoughts and actions:
1. Prevent unwholesome states that have not yet risen.
2. Let go of the unwholesome states that have already arisen.
3. Cultivate wholesome states that have not yet arisen.
4. Maintain the wholesome states that have arisen.
