Sun, 07 Feb 2010
Snowpocalypse
This was the weekend of the big snowstorm of 2010. I've survived the experience and here's the story. I took off from work Friday so that I could get my usual weekend shopping done before the storm hit. This is Baltimore, so of course the grocery store was mobbed. (Does this happen in other cities?) It must have been mobbed the night before, because many things were sold out. Some I understand, such as chips. (Seems to be the snack food of choice in snow storms. That, and beer, but grocery stores aren't allowed to sell beer in Baltimore. Plus, it is Superbowl weekend.) Other foods, maybe I understand, like margarine. (Maybe everyone is making Chex party mix.) Other shortages had me scratching my head, like lentils. I was able to get most of what was on my list. (No lentils or frozen vegetables.) I had to wait in the checkout line for half an hour, though.
When I find myself waiting like this, I pull out my cellphone and start the ereader program. Right now I am reading Flaubert's book, "The Temptation of Saint Anthony." I've wanted to read this book ever since it was mentioned in an episode of Dragnet, In the episode a mopey high school kid engages in a thrill kill after reading the book. In the episode a librarian reads the page in the book that inspired him. But it's not an easy book to get, and so I haven't read it until now. The book is strange, written in a very flowery style with a heightened sense of what was grotesque and bizarre in the late Classical world Anthony lived in. One phrase the sticks in my mind is a shield Anthony is offered, whose dragon skins were "tanned in the bile of a parricide." I'm sure Flaubert had a lot of fun writing this book and I'm having fun reading it.
The snowstorm started Friday night, but really didn't get serious until after I went to bed. I woke up to a full blizzard, with thunder and lightning. The snow lasted until mid-afternoon. Then it stopped quite suddenly, the sky cleared and the late afternoon sun shone on two feet of new snow. My car was buries under it, plus had additional snow that had been blown against it or had been plowed against it. I spent five hours or more Saturday and Sunday clearing out my car. It was really hard work and left me aching. So I took a homeopathic remedy (arnica), which helped a lot. All you skeptics out there who believe homeopathy is just a placebo effect, please note. Before I took the arnica, I had bruises on the palm of my hands from shoveling. Two hours after taking the arnica the bruises were no longer there. So say what you will about homeopathy. I am still a believer, because experience has made me so.
Thu, 07 Jan 2010
Slightly Interrupted
I've been having some problems with my computer hardware, bluetooth problems. If you don't know what bluetooth is, it's a wireless technology meant to make our lives easier, but occasionally making it harder. In my case, it zapped my mouse and keyboard. I've been having a few problems since coming back from retreat. On Sunday and Monday I lost heat and hot water in my apartment. A pipe broke in the boiler room. It's been cold here, like most of the USA, and the temperature dropped to 55 before it was fixed. Tonight it's supposed to snow, but not much.
Last week I was away at the mani drubchen. "Mani drupchen" is Tibetan for "recite the mani mantra 24 hours a day for a week." Which is what we did, apart from sleeping and eating. The center doesn't have the facilities to handle the number of people at the retreat, but meditators are a calm and placid lot, so we all got along fine in spite of the difficulties. I didn't shower for a week, there were only two bathrooms and one shower. So the first thing I did when I got home was shower. Fortunately, this was before the hot water went off. Each person at the retreat was assigned a job on the rota. I was the last person to get passed the rota, so I wound up with the job least wanted, which was cooking lunch and dinner. Why least wanted? Because cooking takes a good chunk of time (2 to 3 hours) and your failures are obvious. Unlike vacuuming, where no one notices the spot you miss, everyone notices if the vegetables are undercooked. I got through the week, despite my lack of cooking skills, and despite all the diffiulties. You'll probably think I'm mad, but I enjoyed the week and wish it went on for two. One week is not long enough. Your mind wanders and not much time is spent actually meditating, so a lot of time is needed. My biggest grief was when newcomers came for the second weeekend, they changed the whole energy of the retreat.
Kirby has also been blogging the retreat. Read his blog if you want a more detailed look at what went on. He wonders what karma got his clothes covered with backed up sewage. (This was the grand finale of the retreat. I was trying to nap in the basement when the lights went on and serious people started talking in concerned tones.) Dude, you parked your bags next to the sewer pipe! That was gravity, not karma! If you had left your bags in the bookstore, the shit wouldn't have put on sandals and walked across the basement! Well, I have to get up early tomorrow to shovel out my car, so good night.
Mon, 07 Sep 2009
The Carless Hand
No that's not a typo. I've been without a car for a week, since I took it into the body shop. Being without a car means riding the bus to work again. It also means that I've gotten a lot of my unpaid web work, mostly for Lama Gursam, done. Time on the bus is also time to think and that is dangerous, because it has caused me to rethink some of my Perl code. So the time I was not spending on web work was spent recoding Perl packages. Not the most exciting way to spend a weekend, but what else am I going to do without a car? Last Monday I started doing Vajrakilaya package. My simple shrine is now more elaborate, as I have to do a torma offering as part of the practice.
Mahasangha News reports that Lama Tsultrim (actually ex-lama) died recently of cancer. I met him when I did a dathun at Karme Choling. If you don't know, a dathun is four weeks of all day shamatha meditation. Da is short for dawa (month/moon) and thun is practice. Lama Tsultrim was on staff and explained the practice to us eager young meditators. After he explained the details of oryoki practice, I let out a loud sigh, for which he gave me a dirty look. But he was a good soul. Hearing about his death reminds me how much has changed and how much time has passed since then.
Fri, 17 Jul 2009
Laundry List
Here's a list of the stuff I'd like tow write if I could find the time. It's a promise to myself in front of others, to make it nore likely that I'll do it. On the computer programming side, I'd like to finish a replacement for the blog software I'm using now (Blosxom). The replacemnt is called Stiki and is ninety percent done, but the last ten percent is always the hardest. Look for it first on my work site. Then I'd like to write a homeopathic repertorization program in Javascript, so the computational load is entirely on the client side. It will use drag and drop for the rubrics, so it will look really snazzy. Repertorization is nothing more than a shopping cart script, so it's not hard to write. Look for it first on my Boger's Card Repertory. Finally, I'd like to write a Tibetan calendar program based on Henning's book on the Kalachakra Tantra. I started and dropped this project and want to pick it up again.
On the literary side, I'm committed to doing a verse by verse commentary on Atisha's Lamp for the Path on its blog. I'd also like to write = an introductory talk on meditation for the Medicine Buddha Sangha, emphasisizing the practical benefits and deemphasizing the spiritual side, simply because that's what people like to hear. That will go on this blog. Then I would like to write an essay defending the concept of the vital force, which will wind up on my homeopathy blog. Finally, (and this is the killer) I'd like to write an essay on the relationships between Buddhism and modern physics. I'm really not competent to write this, but I've seen so much nonsense written on the subject I feel I have to.
None of this is going to happen until I get my web sites squared away.
Mon, 18 May 2009
Trivial Pursuits
I don't know if people are interested in the trivia of my life, bute here it is. As I mentioned Sunday we had a traditional Tibetan doctor give a talk on the Tibetan view of disease. Tibetan medicine views disease as an imbalance of the three humors, wind, bile, and phlegm. I have notes, but I think they may not be useful or even harmful if taken out of context.
As I mentioned, I bought a new small laptop to replace my Alpasmart. It arrived a week ago, but I had to send it back because the hard disk was bad, probably dropped during shipment. Today the replacement arrived. It ships with Windows, but I fixed that by installing Ubuntu Linux. It seems to work fine from the little bit I've been able to use it. It still needs to be configured for how I plan to use it. I hope I have that done before this weekend's teaching.
Yes, this weekend starts the Drikung meditation center's annual retreat. Khenchen Konchog Gyaltsen will be teaching on two texts he composed. The first is "Precepts and Prohibitions: Their Mode of Abiding" Though P & P sounds like a text on Vinaya. it's actually a short summary of the path in verse. The second text is a short guru yoga to Jigten Sumgon, the founder of the Drikung lineage. Every time Khenchen teaches here, it's a big deal, because he founded the Frederick center and many there know and love him.
I also bbought a new shrine table from Ikea and spent the morning putting it together. Ikea, of course, doesn't have shrine tables in its store, it's a repurposed television table, which was the best substitute I could find. It took some time for me to get it put together, as I'm tools challenged. And it's slightly crooked, but it will do.
Mon, 11 May 2009
Buying Stuff
Early last Thursday morningI woke up when I heard a crash. Yje shelves in my bookcase had collapsed. It seems that their fiberboard core softened in the damp weather we've been having. Saturday I bought a new bookcase from Ikea and this morning I assembled it. It's taller and narrower than my old bookcase. I had better hope there are no earthquakes in Baltimore, or I'll die in my sleep when it topples over on me.
I also bought a new laptop computer. It's one of those new netbooks and it's intended mostly for taking notes. It replaces my Alphasmart, whicg gave up the ghost during Drupon's last visit. I should have asked him to do phowa for it. It shipped with Windows NT, which I intend to replace with Ubuntu. Though it's a netbook, it's powerful enough to server as my main computer, if only its screen were bigger. I may do a little development on it, so I plan to install Apache and Mysql. And with emacs, I'll be able to take notes the way God, I mean Richard Stallman, intended.
Thu, 16 Apr 2009
How to Argue with Nearly Anyone
I spend a lot of time on the Internet, and much of it is spent arguing with people I disagree with. Here are a few tips if you find yourself in an argument.
Stick to what you know. Don't try to argue quantum mechanics, philosophy, or economics if you've never studied them in depth. It's much better to be honest and unassuming.
Keep it short. No one has the patience to read your thousand word argument. Make your point and quit.
Keep it simple. You may think that presenting three arguments for your position is better than presenting only one. If you do this, the person you arguing with will concentrate on the weakest argunment and ignore the other two. So you are weakening your argument instead of strengthening it.
State the obvious. Don't assume that because a point is obvious to you, it is obvious to everyone.
Check what your opponent has said and if it isn't true, call them on it. Search engines make it easy to double check.
Don't lose your cool. Never reply in anger. Give yourself time to cool down and reply later.
Never forget that your opponent is a person much like yourself. Treat them with kindness and respect.
Wed, 25 Mar 2009
Rocky Jones
This morning I happened to think of a space opera I used to watch when I was a kid, "Rocky Jones, Space Ranger." Rocky Jones, as the name suggests was the two fisted hero ready to take on the bad guys. Usually this was the Orphicians, led by the slinky but evil Queen Cleolanta and her flunky Atlasan. ("What is it, my suzerain?" I always loved than line!) Tagging along with Rocky were his sidekick Winky, navigator Vena. Professor Newton, and obnoxious/cute kid Bobby. You Tube has a few excerpts from the series. The best are Part I and Part II of "Beyond the Moon." Vena looks quite smart in her miniskirt and cape but Rocky Jones rather churlishly doesn't want a "girl aboard" his ship. Rocky says, "I'd rather have an extra pair of fists. Anyone understands that language." Lots of fun and nostalgia for me and I wish there was more online.
Thu, 25 Dec 2008
Test Drive
As I've mentioned, I'll be doing a week long retreat starting Saturday. We've been asked to wear robes for the retreat. I dislike playing dress up, but gave in and bought a maroon wrap around skirt (they called it a chuba in the catalog) and a maroon shawl. I put them on today and did a short meditation, sort of a test drive. I looked like a Christmas present wrapped in red polyester. Otherwise my day was spent translating one of my web scripts, Boger's Card Repertory, into my new and yet unpublished Web framework. Eventually I will convert all my software, including this blog over to the new framework. What I have now is sort of an archeologist's dig, constructed of different layers.
Enough chit chat. I often go back to my notes from Khenpo Karthar's mahamudra teaching in Crestone. The plan is to eventually produce a book from these teachings, but until then I will rely on my notes. Here's what he had to say on shamatha practice in mahamudra.
There are three parameters or characteristics of resting the mind properly. The first is absence of distraction. You do not allow your mind to wander to outer or inner objects. You keep your mind in freshness, the direct experience of the present. While undistracted you must not tie the mind up or bind it. You do this by not exerting too much tension in body, speech, or mind. So the second point is effortlessness. You let your mind come to rest freely. The third point is that while engaging the faculty of mindfulness, one does not treat the practice as a remedy to distraction. You simply remain aware of your thoughts. The recollection does not oppose the thoughts. So the third point is that you rest the mind in a state that is aware of itself. There is no duality of thoughts and mindfulness. These points are summarized as resting undistractedly, resting freely, and resting in self aware mindfulness. Another description of the practice is no distraction, no meditation, and no alteration. These correspond to the three gates of liberation. The first gate is not to prolong the past. One of the things we tend to do is prolong the past by thinking about it. When you do not, the mind enters the gate of absence of characteristics. The second gate of liberation is not thinking about the present, which is attempting to alter or control it. When you abstain from this and don't try to limit it or change it, you enter the gate of emptiness. The third thing we do is beckoning the future. This includes speculation about progress in the practice. This is the hope or fear that the practice is or is not working. The freedom from these is the gate of absence of aspiration (wishlessness.) So all these are descriptions of the same thing. It is allowing the mind to rest without the pollution of the past, present, or future.
Wed, 24 Dec 2008
Year's End
Though it's the night before Christmas, it feels like year's end to me. Today was my last day at work this year. The place was empty, which meant I could work undisturbed. But five minuts before I was going to leave, someone comes in and tells me our web site had crashed. And I'm the only one there who could deal with it. Fortunately, I was familiar with the problem because it was code that I had written. So it's patched for now, but that was a nasty thing to have happen as I'm going out the door for a week.
I'll be going away on a meditation retreat next week, so there will be no posts after Friday. They are doing a Thousand Armed Chenrezig retreat in honor of Drubwang Rinpoche's death a year ago.
Sun, 30 Nov 2008
Fear of an Early Death
It all started a week before Thanksgiving when Joyce, the woman who cuts my hair notice that a small lump on the back of my head had gotten bigger. So I went to see a doctor about it, whi said, "This will have to come out," and sent me on to a surgeon. All the while the lump on my head was getting bigger and harder and I was getting more and more worried. My mind was ping ponging beween, "it's just a cyst" and "it's cancer." When I told the surgeon about the lump, he immediately went to feel the lymph nodes on my neck and scheduled me for surgery the next mrning, the Saturday after Thanksgiving. So I spent a sleepless night—what was it going to be, cyst or cancer? Well, it was only a cyst, an infected sebaceous cyst. The surgeon numbed the area in back of my head with a local anesthetic, cu the lump open and sucked out the contents with a little vacuum cleaner. There was an amazing amount of pus. He also cut out a small wart above my eyebrow and held it up like a trophy to show me. So I was sent home with a prescription for painkillers and antibiotics, relieved to know I would live another day.
Fri, 05 Sep 2008
Another Long Absence
I'm back blogging after being gone for two and a half weeks. I was knocked off line by the phone company (they accidentally disconnected me) for about half that time, and I was just lazy about getting back. At the same time I was having land line problems, I also changed cell phone carriers. So I was out of touch with everyone, a practical hermit. Well, not really.
While I was offline, I was working on the software for a new blogging system. The software I'm using now in Blosxom, but it's been abandoned by its author for some time, My software now passes its unit tests and is ready to be tested online, though not to be used for anything serious. The software has now two parts, a templating system and CRUD manager, though it probably will end up being split into five parts: CGI front end, CRUD manager, persistence manager, site manager, and templating code. For those of you who don't know the lingo, CRUD stands for create, read, update, delete, the basic operations for changing a persistent data store. And CGI stands for common gateway interface, whichis the simplest protocol for tying programs to the web. It all adds up to approximately 2000 lines of Perl code and probably another 1000 or so before I'm finished. That's a lot bigger than the original version of Blosxom (about 100 lines) but there are good reasons for what I've written that I won't go into now.
Here's my obligatory Buddhist content. Another study of Buddhist meditation has been done, the usual drink this radiactive cocktail and we'll watch how your brain metabolizes it experiment. This watched twelve Zen meditators' brains while solving a trivial problem, paired with twelve non-meditators. The conclusion:
Scans revealed that Zen training led to different activity in a set of brain regions known as the "default network," which is linked with spontaneous bursts of thought and wandering minds. After volunteers experienced in Zen were distracted by the computer, their brains returned faster to how they were before the interruption than novice brains did. This effect was especially striking in the angular gyrus, a brain region important for processing language.
"The regular practice of meditation may enhance the capacity to limit the influence of distracting thoughts," Pagnoni said.
So a lot of technology was used to reach a not so surprising conclusion.
Thu, 19 Jun 2008
Self Improvement
I'm taking another class in Tibetan at the Ja Ling Center. It's being taught by Jigme Lodro, one of the Tibetan residents I haven't met before. The first class was well attended. However, after the first exposure to the Tibetan alphabet, attendance dropped for the second class. So I don't know if the class is going to go forward. The Ja Ling Center is in a bad part of town, the "projects" near Hopkins Hospital. I haven't had problems, but Christian almost had his bike stolen last week. The Tibetan language is one of those things I always promise myself I'm going to learn, but I always lose my resolve and give it up. So we'll see if I stick with it this time.
I'm also on a physical self improvement kick. I was putting on too much weight, so I went on a diet. I've lost about ten pounds in as many weeks and I would like to lose about five more. Today I stumbled on the Hundred Pushups training program and I thought I'd give that a try staring next week. Back when I was taking martial arts one of my instructors wanted me to do a hundred push ups a day. I worked up to fifty or sixty, but that was as far as I got. He also wanted me to learn how to do a kip up, but that was another skill I didn't master. Today I tested myself and was able to do thirteen push ups. If I start the six week program I should finish it and my diet about the same time, in August. I figure if I mention all this here, it will shame me into not backing down.
Tue, 05 Feb 2008
Long Time Gone
I've been offline for a while because I came down with the flu. While I was offline a bunch of stuff happened. Khenpo Chokyi Goeccha complained of stomach pains while he was visiting last Fall. The pains turned out to be colon cancer. He was operated on last Thursday and is now recovering. Lorraine Fertch, one of our local homeopaths, has been missing for several weeks. She started using homeopathy to help her eczema, found it helped, and showed up at a couple of study group meetings. She took some training in homeopathy with Andre Saine and started using it in her practice at Ruscombe. She was more of a mixer than a strict classical homeopath. I can't say I knew her well, but I always found her an easy and fun person to talk to.
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