Monkey See, Monkey Do

we’re hosting a meditation class at our small center this weekend, called warrior in the world. it’s about taking meditation practice and applying that in our greater life experiences.

i’m really surprised at how well the meditation center is going. the space looks fantastic, we’ve had more classes and programs than i could have hoped for, and we now have almost 20 members who are volunteering and also supporting the rent and expenses. that’s so much better than i expected when we first rented the space. it’s still a question in my mind how the space becomes self sustaining, what size it needs to reach for that both in members and teachers and in square footage, and what kinds of programming works. but it really looks good so far.

check out this cool piece from the royal academy of art, a haunted mansion ghost and drum machine mashup.

(via we make money not art, my favorite technology and art mashup blog.

zak was super kind to send me a couple books by Jed McKenna, and i just finished the first one titled Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing. a provocative and unabashed author, i found the book interesting to contrast and compare with my recent tibetan buddhist studies. he discusses enlightenment, emptiness, and spiritual materialism in a no-holds barred, unapologetic style. he critiques most modern spiritual perspectives, and he presents a view which is clear and a practice instruction which is uncomplicated. as a whole i found his points surprisingly consistent with the view presented in my tibetan buddhist lineage, though with a couple key and poignant differences. mainly, he refutes the validity of compassion practice as a path to sustained non-dual awareness (second degree or fold egolessness). he also claims that compassion is not in union with emptiness, which is part of the tibetan vajrayana view, once one is completely enlightened. but otherwise his description of emptiness and the view of practice to obtain a sustained non-dual awareness is really in parity with the view of enlightenment from the tibetan buddhist perspective and his practice instruction is identical to some madhyamaka investigations. also of note, Mr. McKenna claims he never had a specific spiritual lineage or teacher but is self taught and self realized. he also claims he is fully enlightened.

for more of my comparison click Read the rest of this entry »

emptiness is perhaps a uniquely buddhist way of talking about reality, and one that invokes thoughts of nihilism or solipsism. in sanskrit the word used is shunyata. one might also translate shunyata as fullness, suchness, or just ‘that’. it might be more helpful for westerners to use a word like suchness to avoid equating the concept with nihilism. my poor understanding of suchness is based on the kaygu and nyingma schools of tibetan buddhism that i have studied. there may be some zen mixed in as well. i’ll describe briefly and from my poor understanding what suchness means.

click to read Read the rest of this entry »

well i was going to work on my home office setup, but i got completely sucked into the iTunes music video section. just a few videos thankfully, but the experience really reminds me of watching mtv when it first aired. back in the day, when they actually played music.

i’ve really been noticing lately how much my productivity can be effected by having a “workspace” setup properly. i guess this is common sense for most but it’s really been clearer for me lately. by workspace i mean having all the things you need to complete a task ready to go, organized, and familiarity with them.

i think what i have been noticing more lately is how not having things accessible, familiar, or organized becomes an obstacle to the flow of work or my projects. i used to get side tracked or pause when these conditions were not met, without realizing what was slowing me down. i still get waylaid in this way actually, but it’s getting easier to identify and hopefully rectify.

some small examples: not having the right tool for a project in the garage can waylay finishing something. sears is built on solving this problem for the everyman. come to sears, they say, and they’ll get your workspace setup so you’re never delayed in your efforts.

in software development, this could be having the right debugging tool or IDE plugin. it doesn’t seem though that all the effort to try out different peoples’ plugins are going to be worth the effort. but if you find a good one, and figure out how to use the effectively, it’s incredibly helpful. i guess buying a tool at sears and not learning to use it properly is nearly as much an obstacle as not having it at all.

so much for my obvious observations for the day. back to getting my home workspaces setup now…

i’ve been setting up a home office over the last week, and yesterday was mostly about collecting final things i needed for that (like another electrical power strip) and today i’m cleaning up the mess i made. i got really lost in fry’s yesterday, especially in the book section flipping through ones i thought i might buy. i already have plenty that i could read instead but there’s something really addictive about finding a good book. i came home with four.

had a really nice dinner last night with folks from the san francisco shambhala center as well as acharya david schneider. discovered that acharya and i had worked at apple at the same time, he was in the technical publications group on the newton project during a period when i was there. then saw a ton of friends out dancing afterwards. the music was so loud however that today my voice is hourse, from yelling in order to catch up with people over the music. that’s got to be bad for my hearing, and i forgot to bring ear plugs.

i wish i had worn ear plugs more often. when i go to sleep now after years of clubbing and loud parties, there’s a constant buzz like static in my ears. i’m used to it, but i suspect for the rest of my life absolute silence will only be a memory.

these peeps have a clever way to practice for the SAT: sign along to a good vocabulary.

ranchero today pointed to an interesting business 2.0 article. it made the case for developing startup products for the mac first. his points actually match my recent experience. if you try to create buzz by working with popular bloggers and technology gadfly’s but have a windows only product, guess what, you get no where fast. the folks creating buzz now a days are disproportionally using macs and linux.

i’m thoroughly amazed by apple’s new word processor called pages and how easy it was for me to use this weekend.

how could one make a word processor significantly easier to use? let me demonstrate. our meditation group is hosting a class that started this monday. many of the participants i figured would be fans of our teacher pema, since the material for the class was hers. i wanted to hand out a flyer to the participants to let them know about upcoming programs at our center and pema’s teaching schedule this summer, as well as give them some information about our small group. i had content to make a flyer, and i have some aesthetic sense, but i am not a visual designer. pages to the rescue.

a new document in pages starts with a very strong set of templates to chose from. templates are not a new concept, but pages does a really fantastic job with them. i tried out a couple sample layouts until i have a visual design i thought might look good and a color scheme as well. then i just started dragging and dropping pictures and text into the document. i had a folder of pictures that i had the rights to use for a flyer, and all the text for pema’s summer programs, and since there were three events i selected a second page from the template’s set of six page formats that had a nice three column layout. the whole process took me only an hour, for an awesome two page color layout. in microsoft word this probably would have taken me four times that long to get the formatting right, but the real benefit from pages’ templates is that i doubt i ever would have come up with such a nice layout and image placement on my own. so it was like having my own visual designer helping me out. here are the thumbnails of the newsletter to give you an idea of how they looked:

(i won’t upload the whole flyer because the files are so big)