Ra Penance!

Sunday 4:07 p.m.
What is penance for? You get penances when you're a catholic and go to confession. If you do something bad, you should make it right, and I understand that. You take something from someone, and you should give it back. Religious people seem to be dead into penance and since religion seems to spring from mysticism, you'd think that maybe you should try to understand where this penance thing fits.

At the end of the day, it has to conform or re-inforce non-self and emptiness because that's what mysticism is.

So the hindu joe is holding his arm in the air for so many years and that's tapas, or a penance. What it the point of that? Is that a middle way? Maybe between holding two hands up. There's always a middle way explanation.

Thomas A Beckett get his brains chibbed out and the King does a penance for instigating this. I think it's supposed to balance out in some way. But it doesn't really balance out, does it? You can crawl on your belly to Canterbury, but the Archbishop is still dead.

Is it just a demonstration to other people to show how sorry you are?

I was pleased when I read something that said the buddhists weren't into guilt. Guilt, the boy said, is morbid. We don't do the guilty feelings. We don't wallow in guilt. Your robe is muddy, so you clean off the mud and walk on.

Psychologically, there must be something in this penance thing. Also, I suppose if you're going to stay a catholic, every time you do something not so good, you know you're going to have to take a spanking for it, so you don't do it.

Say you did prostrations from Mongolia to Bodh Gaya and that took you three years. The boy who did this looked most serene. He said he was serene because he'd been measuring the earth with his body for three years, and the earth was big. Prostrating yourself like that is a kind of penance. Hmmmm?

I think I understand vows of poverty. Taking vows of poverty isn't the same as suffering poverty like Charlie Chaplin did as a kid. It's obviously about teaching yourself non-attachment. You don't claim ownership. It's a non-self thing maybe. I can understand humility in this regard as well. The Dalai Lama before he does teachings prostrates to the chair he'll be sitting on.

Sometimes I have thought of Lazarus, the coptic monk, who sits in the cave above the monastery of St Antony in Egypt. He said to the Extreme Pilgrim that there was no point in him being in the cave doing the solitude if he wasn't into penance.

It's just passed four thirty and getting dark. Must go to the hut and watch a fire!