Coming Full Circle.

Today there is so much ways and means of getting oneself tuned into what is going on with your mind and most of it can be found on the You Tube or the Internet. Meditation techniques and mind analysis and control methods can be excised through various schools and institutions to give one some form of practice. Ranging from Zen Buddhist to Hindu Yoga, Chinese Taoist and Muslim Sufi traditions, native American Shamanistic and Tibetan Tantric tradition, it is all there at your finger tips. All you have to do is feel interested to know and make a choice of what you feel most comfortable with, find a Guru or a teacher and spend a few months or years in an Ashram or Zen Monastery or a Sufi retreat and you can well be on your way towards self discovery, getting to know know who you are at a more deeper level and more significant impact. After you have done your spiritual window shopping and found what you are looking for take a time out to reflect carefully if this is what you want to do, because once you have made the commitment you might not be able to get off the train as easy and what you may find up the road may not be to your liking,at least in the beginning.
Most of those i met who had answered this calling in their lives were driven somehow by unnatural forces that had in one way or another plagued them to make them seek this mode of self study or self discovery or whatever you want to call it. Most were individuals with an issue to resolve, a rut in life to get out of or a stagnated existent that was killing them; most were desperately looking for answers, a way out of their dilemma .My first Zen Instructor was a former drug pusher, had spent three years in the Federal Penitentiary and a Hippie until he said enough was enough and took a trip to India and Sri Lanka. Today he is an Abbot of Zen Buddhist community in the United States. While at green Gulch zen Center i met all kinds of individuals from all over the country in the US and some from Europe and Asia and all came with a reason and practiced to find a solution to this reason and today I know many found their answers and are serving the world with their expertise in one way or another. Within my group of 'practice students', those who were successful were those who had real issues and were determined to find the way out or the solution and most who came simply because it was a fad or the thing to do being at a zen monastery never lasted and drifted in and out like window shoppers. The genuine 'Truth Seekers' rode the train to the end of the line, like my first Zen and Yoga teacher.
'The calling" like the Muslims yearning to go to Mekah to perform the Haj does not happen to all and when it does it happens gradually over a period of time where one is put through a period of preparation and purification unknowingly to the one it is happening to. Often one drift into it with no intention or fore knowledge of being led into such an undertaking, but you were called. Sometime, somewhere in your past you had expressed the desire and the call was made and the rest was the journey getting to where you were intended to be, albeit in a Madrasah or a Zen Buddhist monastery, or a Hindu Ashram or a Shaolin temple. Your subconscious mind had been triggered to chart the course of your life towards becoming a wandering Sadhu, a mendicant monk or a Sufi dervish. You have been saved from the normal life that most everyone has the privilege of living from cradle to grave. Yours will be the see saw, roller coaster ride of a life and your life will be filled with turmoil and vexations enough to sometimes makes you want to end it prematurely. Soo when it was most unbearable and you find yourself at the end of the ropes, Bang! You are the at the doorstep of the Monastery in Ladakh or Tassajara or at the gates of an ashram in Poona or Oregon and you are initiated and your final healing process begins. If and when you are successful you leave the place to become a Roshi or a Rishi, but never a Sushi!
I have just laid out my trip pretty much as i found my way from this island of Penang on to The east Coast of Terengganu and later to the United states and Japan and now back and as my blogging has been trying to regurgitate it out, this was how i came to be who I am. It all began one fine day while sitting along the beach facing the calm South China Sea I had wished with all my heart to leave the shore and travel to the other side and find out what lies beyond. Almost forty years now and i am back from where I had began and what I have discovered is pretty much laid out in this Blogging.

“The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.” 
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

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