Random Dharma
-Maeve Millay (played by Thandie Newton) - A humanoid doll who makes her creators turn her "bare apperception" characteristic 'all the way up' after accidentally becoming conscious in the laboratory she is being worked on in. From 'Westworld'
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"All Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists."
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Pacing the aisles of a silent classroom, surveying the exposed napes of rows and rows of students bent over their fall exams, he realized he’d lost his old double vision, the one that was always looking for something more, somewhere else, the world behind the world. It was his oldest possession, and he’d let it slip away without even noticing it was gone. He was becoming someone else, someone new.
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In A Perpetual Present
"While most of us experience life as a story of gain and loss, McKinnon exists always and only in her own denouement. There is no inciting incident. No conflict. And no anxious sense of momentum toward the finale. She achieves effortlessly what some people spend years striving for: She lives entirely in the present."
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onehumanjourney.blogspot.ca/2017/01/tilo...words-of-advice.html
-- tomo
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thepowerofideas.ideapod.com/brain-like-b...ording-neuroscience/
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When Things Go Missing
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blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/...ience-of-meditation/
Meditation has surged in popularity in recent years, from a fringe interest to a mainstream trend championed by therapists, scientists, and celebrities. As part of this shift, misconceptions and dismissals have given way to the emerging recognition of meditation as a science. There are, however, those who would challenge this view. As both a scientist and a meditator, I feel a duty to respond.
In doing so, I must first acknowledge the huge number of activities commonly referred to as meditation. Many of those activities are not in any sense scientific. However, I will argue that some meditation practices, including the method I describe in The Mind Illuminated and other practices within the Buddhist tradition, do qualify as science. I will confine my discussion to those practices.
We can define science as the systematic study of the natural world through observation and experiment, yielding an organized body of knowledge on a particular subject. The human mind is undeniably a suitable subject for scientific study, and one purpose of meditation is careful observation of one’s own mind. This observation reveals consistent patterns that meditators share with one another and with teachers who direct their practice. Master meditators weigh these observations against their own experience and knowledge passed down from previous generations of meditation masters, thereby generating models of the mind. Over thousands of years, meditators have tested, refined, and reworked their models of the mind based on new insights as later generations developed new meditative techniques. Thus, over time, an organized body of knowledge has accumulated describing the nature and behavior of the mind at a very fine level of resolution. This is one sense in which certain forms of meditation qualify as science.
However, meditation is not simply passive observation, nor could it be, since the very act of observation is itself an activity of mind. Rather the meditator intentionally employs attention, awareness, and other mental faculties in a variety of ways to better understand the functional behavior of the mind. (The effect of observation on the thing observed is not different than what occurs in quantum physics.) Precisely how these mental faculties are used in the investigation of the mind is subject to modification that can increase or decrease the efficacy of this endeavor. Thus meditation is also technology.
every3rdthought wrote: 'At best, our failure to locate something that we ourselves last handled suggests that our memory is shot; at worst, it calls into question the very nature and continuity of selfhood. (If you’ve ever lost something that you deliberately stashed away for safekeeping, you know that the resulting frustration stems not just from a failure of memory but from a failure of inference. As one astute Internet commentator asked, “Why is it so hard to think like myself?”)'
When Things Go Missing
This ended up being a really good piece of writing.
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every3rdthought wrote: Zen Cho has become my new favourite author and I've been reading my way through her works - but this one, The Terracotta Bride , I particularly recommend for anyone with a Buddhist background - it's a story set in Chinese-theology Hell where the characters are waiting out their time trying to avoid being reincarnated, at which point they lose their 'individuality' of that round of self (so to speak). It's not overtly philosophical until towards the end, and not at all a difficult read, but very moving in the way it uses the Buddhist conception of self and rebirth as well as the sadness of impermanence and non-clinging to cap a story. highly recommended.
Thanks for the recommendation--just bought it for Kindle for $2.51. Hard to resist the price. For $2.51, I'd read my own writing.
The book was a reasonable detective story--an easy read, but with just enough Tibetan monastery life and legitimate dharma to make it interesting.
From Amazon:
"Don't ignore intuitive tickles lest they reappear as sledgehammers." That's the first rule of Ten. Tenzing Norbu ("Ten" for short)-ex-monk and soon-to-be ex-cop-is a protagonist unique to our times.
In The First Rule of Ten, the first installment in a three-book detective series, we meet this spiritual warrior who is singularly equipped, if not occasionally ill-equipped, as he takes on his first case as a private investigator in Los Angeles. Growing up in a Tibetan Monastery, Ten dreamed of becoming a modern-day Sherlock Holmes. So when he was sent to Los Angeles to teach meditation, he joined the LAPD instead. But as the Buddha says, change is inevitable; and ten years later, everything is about to change-big-time-for Ten. One resignation from the police force, two bullet-wounds, three suspicious deaths, and a beautiful woman later, he quickly learns that whenever he breaks his first rule, mayhem follows.
Set in the modern-day streets and canyons of Los Angeles, The First Rule of Ten is at turns humorous, insightful, and riveting-a gripping mystery as well as a reflective, character-driven story with intriguing life-lessons for us all.
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The Video Game That Claims Everything Is Connected
"The player enters the universe with an anxious certainty about the role of the self. Over time, with practice, that player can let go of those attachments, free the mind, and reach enlightenment. At which point the real work of living—or playing—can commence.
For players prepared to adopt Watts’s take on existence, that’s not a problem. But others, including me, it’s hard to shake off Everything’s unwelcome claim that everything in the universe is connected, accessible, and familiar. To be a thing in Everything feels so much like being a person, or an avatar of one, that it undermines the separation OReilly so adeptly achieved in Mountain.
When I eat bacon, or view zebras, or feel the breeze from a desktop fan, or ingest the hydrogen atoms bound to oxygen in a glass of water, I partake of those things only in part. Their fundamental nature remains utterly separate and different me, and from one another, too. I might be made of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen, but I can never really grasp what it is to be carbon. I might enter a fast-food restaurant, and I might even leave with bits of it inside me, but I can never fathom what it means to be a restaurant. The best I can do is to tousle the hair of that question, and establish the terms on which approximations might be possible."
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No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven's glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear
O God within my breast
Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me hast rest,
As I Undying Life, have power in Thee
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thy infinity,
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality.
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears
Though earth and moon were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And Thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee
There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.
-Emily Bronte
Been hosting back-to-back daylong retreats at my house on Saturdays & Sundays. I'm hammering the complete love & trust of perfect-parent meditation the whole damn time. And it feels like this is what I am doing to greed, hatred & delusion:
