Sunday, October 13, 2019

Planet Earth is a Buddha Factory... (reprise)

Xandi Hoesch aka Puma Woman meditating in a Buddha factory in Krabi, Thailand (photo: Antares)



Buddhahood simply means to be awake, enlightened, derobotized and rehumanized. In other words, to be fully conscious.

Planet Earth is actually a Buddha Factory. That's why so many varieties of souls choose to incarnate here - to plunge into physical embodiment and experience the bewildering world of forms, where pain and sorrow are as likely as pleasure and joy to befall you.

Think of Earth as a giant sieve for evolving souls. We arrive as coarse lumps of condensed matter... and depart refined as conscious humans. No doubt, it often takes many, many incarnations to complete the refinement process. But what are a few lifetimes in the cosmic context of eternity?

[This beautiful image was taken sometime in 1987 when my beloved Puma Woman and I were holidaying in Krabi, Thailand. In those days, it hadn't yet exploded into a tourist town and there was only a tiny handful of guesthouses. We rented a motorbike and explored the vicinity, doing a bit of rock climbing and checking out the awesome limestone outcrops. On the outskirts of town we spotted a Buddha factory... and that's how this memorable portrait came about. I didn't notice until afterwards that Xandi had tied her hair in a topknot just like all the Buddha statues! Scanned from a fading 8R print (luckily I had it laminated or nothing would have been left after 25 years) this portrait adorned my High Hut for many years and survived a massive mudslide in October 1999.]


[First posted 22 February 2013]