Hanging out with the Lama

I spent probably 12 years hanging out with the Lama. So I studied Tibeten and I learned the religious script so that I knew what I was saying. Kalu Rinpoche was his teacher and he had him stay in Paia. Every time he'd see me he pat my pocket and say, "You've got money. Cause he knew I had a block against money.

[Rinpoche] was here. Those are a pictures of him when he visited, spent the night here. He said, "You just stay here," he says, "There's billions of beings here. You just take care of all of these beings. And then one day you will find the wish fulfilling stone." That's the moni stone, what [inaudible] has in his hands. And then all riches will come to you. But what the moni stone symbolizes is, is great equanimity. Everything that comes to you is incredible richness, no matter what it is, but it also, you know, you're not there yet. So it's a path. And so that path also symbolizes as the guru that all true teaching comes from moving towards great equanimity. This is my Lama. When he died, he had a, a blockage tumor about a week before he died. And we were at the Dharma center in Paia and he, he looks at me, he says, he says, "When I die," he says, "I'm going far, far away." He says, "When Michael dies, they've got to come to his land and have a big party for him. And then somebody is going to say, "shh, Michael, doesn't like noise." Teasing me that I was attached to my land. So that was one of his final lessons.

In Buddhism, there's two things, emptiness and compassion. Compassion is a choice. You choose to be loving. You choose that. But emptiness is something different. Emptiness is basically seeing the world the way that it really is. It's not being subject to delusion, or at least knowing when you're subject to delusion. The Lama said that a fool that knows he is a fool is only half a fool.