Building a Dialogue with the Self

I have a post card that is a gift from someone that has a picture of the Contemplative Bodhisattiva from the Three Kingdoms Periods 7th century and is Korea's National Treasure No. 83. He looks like he is deep in meditation and not thinking of anything. He has one leg crossed over another as he sits on a chair of some sort. His elbow rests gracefully on his crossed kneee. His face shows a sense of peace.

Before he got to be a Bodhisattiva, before he became skillful enough to achieve such a deep level of meditation, this man must have discarded all aspects of his ego and that is not an easy thing to do. Many people worship such symbols of Buddhism as dieties centuries later but Buddha Gautama stated so many years ago that he was just a man. The man in this statue had to create a level of communication with his real and true self. He had to accept who he was, warts and all. He had to love the self as he really was, accept the things he did along the way and detach from them. He had to see all of himself as he was and is. The fact that he was able to do it after committing all of the mistakes and errors we all make, made him a Bodhisattiva.

The most fascinting and interesting person we will meet in our lives is ourselves. We know this as children but are shamed out of this knowledge. When we can accept this fact again, love the self again, we can then go on and discover those around us. So many people criticise this view as selfish, vain and even disturbing and some even call those who profess this belief as the "me generation"; yet this way of looking at the self and the world was created out of the Hindu religion by a man in 600 B.C.

I am not trying to convince anyone to become a Buddhist, but in the benefits in building a bridge, a dialogue with the self that can be very important to writers. I know when I was working in a job that often had scholarships that would pay for new careers, the biggest problem was that many people did not know what they wanted to do for a living and had no way of discovering this.

The only way I know to build a dialogue with the self is with writing meditation and with the use of the journal. Of course, some communication is done when we write essays, poetry, short stories, novels and non-fiction. I think it is so important for all writers to maintain a journal and to write in it every single day. Even when I had huge writer's blocks, I would write in my journal about what was happening to me and the fact that I had this huge writer's block.

Sometimes, I commit the sin of wordiness. This particular post is probably full of it. Maybe, I might end up deleting it. I am definitely thinking about it. I am trying to figure out what I am going to do since writing about the fact why I am in Korea seems about exhausted. I can't read books and get ideas since getting books in English is very hard to do. I should do what I am telling others to do. Build a dialogue with myself. Maybe, that is another reason that I am in Korea. Heaven knows, I have plenty of ego to discard.