What a helpful, hopeful book Lama Surya Das offers to anyone who finds life overwhelming! His encouraging, steadying and compassionate voice shows us how the "conveniences" of modern living--especially the electronic--far from being time-savers, alienate us from our connection to the real world and from ourselves: "...we are cutting time up into thinner and thinner slices until it slips through our fingers." Working with easy meditations and exercises, the reader comes to see the reality of two "times": that of the clock and the absolute time-less-ness of Now, what he calls Buddha Standard Time. A mundane example of this is the experience of being "in the Zone"--clock time no longer has any relation to the amount perfectly accomplished by one in that Zone.
While lama training is well beyond most of us, what we can do is begin with Lama Surya Das' meditations and become familiar with the vast Space within ourselves. This Space is always there, is always perfect and is always accessible. It begins with simple, mindful breathing; with gazing up into the night sky; with listening to the ongoing songs of your own body, blood, breathing. There are no cushions to buy, no incense to light (unless you wish to); all you need is with you now. With this comforting beginning, Lama Surya Das leads the reader deeper and deeper into Sacred Time, and finally to understand that "every home is a temple, and this earth is like an altar upon which we walk in the splendor of our renewed vision of expansive time and space." --Judith Hawkins-Tillirson, proprietress, Wyrdhoard Books, and blogger at Still Working for Books