Working On the Great Wheel

Yesterday I went to the temple late in the afternoon and met with Sakya Rasa. He had just finished a newsletter for the temple and I was taking him up on an offer to help me with a little project I was working on. The working title is The Great Wheel Metaphor (coming soon to a blog near you). In a nutshell*, it is going to end up as a .jpg I want to use as a visual aid to explain my realization of what transcendence is. Hint: I believe transcending has to do with expanding levels of awareness, rather than transforming or replacing existing ones.

I had my written notes of what I want the image to be with me in order to systematically explain it to Sakya. These notes are like oral instructions of how to draw a map. I see the completed image as being like a map to understand a new territory. I can see the map in my head, but lack the technical skills to make it manifest, so was limited to giving a written description.

Watching Sakya work was amazing. He was clicking on icons and things were popping up, selections made, boxes appeared and disappeared, things were dragged, sized and resized, all so fast I was almost getting dizzy watching it. I am sure if you had knowledge of the programs he used, it would all make sense, but to me it looked like magic. In what seemed like no time he had whipped out the 8 concentric circles I wanted and pasted the text into the appropriate places. The rest of our time we spent cruising thru clip art volumes and Googling to find the pictures I want to have in the completed image.

At the end of our first session, he printed out for me what we have so far, and I will have to get back with him to complete it the next time he has some spare time. Even with what I have, it makes it much easier to show it to devotees and discuss what I am trying to do and get feedback.

* ”In a nutshell” take this as either a cliché, or a tribute to Stephen Hawking :-)