TIBET TO TULSA THE WOODEN CHEST BELOW LEFT IS NOT TIBETAN. YES, PEOPLE ASK.  THE CHAIR IS STILL RESERVED FOR YOUR ENLIGHTENMENT.  Also, Edits will be done on Site as material is...well, edited. Thank you, Management This page, for example, is not complete....and is"to be continued" TIBET TO TULSA Some of us remember a 1937 movie, "Lost Horizons." It can be summarized quickly as a plane crash in the Himilayas where the survivors discover a community of people who never age, seem a bit Asian, and have minimalist but somehow exotic furniture. When the movie goer discovers years later the heavy snow was bleached cornflakes...it doesn't seem to make a difference. Tibetan people escaping Tibet mostly on foot, during the Chinese occupation to save them from something akin to "sins" that may only be clear to the Puritans of early America (?all the research is still not in on the Puritan influence that accepts the blame for all our uptightness), now suffer from our concept that they arose straight out of enlightenment for the sole purpose of letting us Western people know how it's done. We can even get impatient when they don't tell us what the secret is.   Whever do they think of us? Joking aside, buddhism is greatly distorted by the Lens through which we look at Buddhism and through which we listen to teachings and read books. However, there has been a serious attempt to understand Buddhism as it travelled from India outward to many countries and finally to America. Some basic facts, often gleefully misunderstood almost deliberately to give us a cultural glow of an identity other than our boring selves...can help us make Buddhism actually helpful, rather than just more passing educational entertainment. This page will gradually explore various aspects of "our assumptions" about Buddhism. Language is powerful. In the paragraph above, we have already implied we are not content with ourselves, searching for a better identity, (how about our authentic and existing Identity) and rendering buddhism unable to help us by not handling it as well as we could... if only we had more everyday tools to understand our culture.  Read and Listen as carefully as you can. This is not only good advice for reading Buddhist material, asking "from what Buddhist school is this book written?" but good advice for anything determining how our brain is being fired up by our mind. We can work with out genetics, our predispositions to slow reaction time, or in the case of people failing to get into the navy seals...the inability for our bodies to return to a stress-free state after a difficult situation.  See the Navy Seals Study. How can we work with our mind? This is the topic of Buddhism, it's the reason all the teachings exist, and this determines "how" these teachings are expressed. Tibetan Buddhist masters choose their words with extreme care, as we all should, as words lead the mind to experience. We are attracted to Buddhism because we sense a promise of an experience we might like to engage wth.  Happiness that lasts. That sounds good. But it is important to quickly understand that if this happiness were something we actually knew about...we'd be doing it already. So perhaps it's not exactly the same as the act of "being happy and not worrying" our culture tries to get us to buy as chips, pop, the cool car, or the best over the counter drug.