Archive for July, 2007
As indicated by the lack of updates, I have been really busy with work the last few weeks. Busy as in working 1-2 jobs every day for the last 12 days. It’s gotten me a bit tired and stressed and lowered my overall outlook on life to be honest. It can be tough to look above the grind when descending too deep within it.
Exacerbating things has been the fact that I’ve been slacking on the meditation as a result. I’ve gotten in the habit of allowing myself to think there simply isn’t enough time in the day. Since meditation can be done in pretty much any interval of time, this is of course a falsehood I’ve been allowing myself to carry on.
Tonight I have a brief window of time between jobs and despite the fact that I was beginning to feel overwhelmed, I decided on the ride home that my top priority for that window of time was to get in some quality meditation time. I managed 30 minutes, and it was the best sitting I’ve had in a while. My mind was pretty busy the whole time, turning over the multitudes of tasks and responsibilities and events that must be prioritized, but I didn’t allow any of them to occupy my attention and allowed them to come without judgment. I let myself see the swirling mass of thoughts as a reflection of the swirling mass of madness and activity that I am engulfed in living in the city of Los Angeles. I accepted the unending shifting and unpredictable nature of my thoughts and the world and focused on myself as an unchanging calm within the swirling eddies and waves. This is the way of things and this is what I am allowing myself to accept and be through meditation.
My calmness has returned and my stress level has decreased. I have nothing to prove and nothing that I must be at this moment but relaxed and accepting of the beautiful change all around me. I need to remember the consistent value that meditation brings and not let false ideas about my ability to use it invade my thoughts and actions. This post is a reminder of this need.
My friend A over at Rainbow Ruminations recently introduced me to the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi through this post. It has already inspired me in my daily life, and is very much in line with the Buddhist teachings of compassion that Vipassana has awakened in me. It is so easy to use the difficult situations and/or bad moods of the environment and people around you as an excuse to have a bad attitude yourself. It is perhaps more difficult, yet so simple to take the opposite tack and see every one of these external situations or moods as an opportunity to exemplify one’s saintly nature. This is the true meaning of our lives on this planet. Continuing the trend of words through pictures, I am posting my desktop background with the newly added text of The Prayer of Saint Francis.
link to desktop background version
(photo courtesy of Giant Ginkgo)
Not a real haiku, but fridge haiku just sounds so much better than fridge poetry. This message from who knows where caught my attention from the bottom of the fridge just now. I have no recollection of how it got there.
I just read an interview with theoretical physicist Paul Davies about his new book, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life.
His thoughts on the nature of the universe in just this interview are the closest explanations to my own intuitive view that I think I’ve ever had the pleasure of encountering. I’m pretty excited right now. I can’t wait to read this book. Two points he makes that really resonate with me:
1. The very nature of the universe, the laws of physics, are directly related to the the observer as creator and our current mind/brain phenomenon of consciousness is an inevitable aspect of the universe.
It is the structure of this relationship between the mind and the brain and its relationship to reality through observation that is the key that actually constructs not just the universe, but the very laws of physics. Personally, my biggest disconnect with the above scenario actually being possible is the fact that we can indirectly observe a time in history before the human brain. How can human consciousness have affected events going all the way back to the big bang? Now Davies addresses that question with plausible explanations from quantum mechanics:
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So the human personality construct is a pretty multi-plicitous beasts, no doubt about that. Especially in this newly fractured world of social media and friends networks and avatars, the net-connected human has many opportunities to present different faces to the world as different situations and contexts present themselves. Despite this, the fact remains that contending with the many traits and habits that people bring to a situation requires a certain level of predictability and stability, or else we are left without the all important middle ground where conversation may reliably take seed and blossom.
Consider email and the habits of interaction in that well-trod, though still very new communication space. Some people rely on the caps lock key to indicate excitement or exasperation. Others rely on the aptly-named emoticon, an attempt to parse the emotion of facial expressions with the tools of text. Some emailers have a repeating set of anecdotes they employ to illuminate a variety of situations and events. If you run with the truly geeky side of the net, you may even encounter the world of 1337sp34k (leetspeak), gamely replacing normal letters with number and symbol stand-ins.
We all learn to identify and predict these styles of email communication and respond at the very least coherently, and at our best, even reflect these styles back to the sender in our responses. So while the human’s opportunities to mix up one’s personality to the nth degree has increased, i believe our personalities in context, the personalities we present in specific situations and modes of communication, are actually becoming easier to codify and predict. Email is again a good example of why. First of all, unlike many other mediums of communication, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that one’s entire history of email communication could be stored and accessed in one archive. As the medium matures and services like gmail and hotmail have the opportunity to become a kind of “life-partner tool” establishing relationships with customers that last a lifetime, the opportunity to process the whole of one’s communication styles and habits within a certain frame becomes possible. User A starts off a conversation about Subject A with communication construct style G 95% of the time on weekdays. User B responds to Question B with Communication Construct Style G6 86% of the time after a workout.
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