Saturday morning, no one on Yahoo...

To begin again.

Another story. Another group of people. Another time, another place.

Al the same really. The same way all days are the same, but within them almost infinite possibilities. Should we surrender a day, then? Simply because it is another day, another rolling of the world and another double rolling of the clocks?

Is it like the roll of the dice?

The big question is, if I am a 45 year old man, why do I sound like a 17-year-old trying to be profound?


There is more in heaven and earth, Lorenzio, than is dreamt of of your 'philosophy'...


Why don't I just write about the thinmgs I want to write about? Or even just write stories that I think wil sell, that people eould enjoy reading?

Is it some fear of my parents? Some fear, some hypnosis, that my father inculcated in me, to bescared of what I desired?

I desire to create. To write. To be sitting in a cafe in Boston or Orange, CA, or Paris, at my laptop, not here in my room in my apartment with my window curtain drawn shut from the cold.

But here I am.

I also want to create a dialectic of Buddhism-nontheism, with which I can debate and discuss religion and the world with Christians and atheists, and even Moslems, from the *Buddhist* perspective, to grapple the language away from the Christian angle that pervades our language, and even our intellectual discouse.

The questions are almost always framed from the Chrisitian assumptive: "Why *don't* you believe in God?" The language of the question, which is non-presumptive, which is just the way we *talk*, assumes a God. Or "the" God.

Shakubuku is about the heart. I - we - have been told that again and again. About touching the heart. Cutting through the clutter and the baggage. Ethan has told me - twice, in two different occasions - that *all* a Christian has is a book (and here he hold up his hand as if holding the Bible up in front of my face, shaking it in mock fear and rage). In the Christian PalTalk chatroom it is *all about* -- only about -- The Bible. Take that book away, and Christians are left with nothing. Not as profoundly as a Moslem would be, who beleive The Quran, those words, is the very breath if God.

But then again, we as Buddhists have our practice centered around "words", "breaths", as well, with our daimoku. And our daily personal recitation of Gongyo.

But our case is totally, 180-degrees different -- with "The Word" it is WE who create. Daily. And in the case when we are chanting daimoku, moment to moment.

President Ikeda has said (and I apologize, I do not know the source), that some anthropoogists believe that primitive men and women were praying *before* they had thought up something to pray to. Prayer came first. Prayer in it's pure form is hope. Buddhist prayer - the prayer that is daimoku, the prayer that is really called "kudoku" in Japanese -- to supress darkness and weakness and bring out stength and goodness -- is the *essence* of prayer in its true form. "I want to be better today, than I was yesterday. I want to be better tomorrow than I will be today" Or rather "I *will* be..."; "I *will to be*..."; "I *will myself to be* better..."

THAT is true prayer. The essence of what Emerson meant by our (human) drive being to challenge ourselves to greatness. Lincoln's admonition that we call forth our "better angels".

Maureen's blatant and blunt frustration with me at our session yesterday, that; 1) I know I don't want to work in an office 8 hours a day, but I do; 2) I don't want to live in Buffalo, but I do; 3) for some reason I feel tied down, even though I am not in a marriage or even a relationship.


This is the question of my life. That I have some seemingly insurmountable barrier, wall, keeping me from my true self.