Monkey See, Monkey Do

phew… i’m the kind of person who uses email messages like a “to do” list. this morning i went through and related to about three hundred messages, and now my inbox is down to a much more healthy size again.

i get razzed sometimes from my zenny friends asking me if i’ve accumulated merit recently. that tibetan way of talking about karmic action makes them laugh. so for them i offer this more abstract definition of the tibetan buddhist concept, thanks to his eminence tai situ rinpoche in the book The Life of Tilopa on page 22:

the work of accumulation/purification brings about a gradual disappearance of mental definition-habits which formerly created artificial subject-object polarities; all the arbitrary splitting of mental experience into ‘me’ and ‘it’, ’self’ and ‘other’, ‘me’ and ‘my mind’ and so on. When these frozen standpoints go, all the ensuing rigidity they normally create goes too. Realisation of the inseparability of subject and object reveals their one essence or the ‘great union’. It is fresh and fluid.

a buddhist teaching you may encounter is called the six realms (or sometimes the three realms). this is when taken literally a description of different planes of heavenly and earthly existence not unlike many religious traditions. but when taken more as a description of psychological states i find it generally helpful on a day to day basis.

click here if you’d like my quick summary. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times had an interesting review two years ago about the movie Groundhog Day and its religious undertones.

Since its debut a decade ago, the film has become a curious favorite of religious leaders of many faiths, who all see in “Groundhog Day” a reflection of their own spiritual messages… Harold Ramis, the director of the film and one of its writers, said last week that since it came out he has heard from Jesuit priests, rabbis and Buddhists, and that the letters keep coming.

wonder how long it will take for the major networks to support email with sender policy framework so my email program can automatically filter out bogus return addresses. i’m getting hundreds of spam email a day now, most of it is filtered out automatically for me, but it’s amazing just how much junk must be clogging the pipes of the internet. and email would be pretty easy to add checks like that to minimize it.

from The Daily Telegraph:

He told the broadsheet that Westerners had become self-absorbed, burdened with too much choice.

“It is fascinating. In the West, you have bigger homes, yet smaller families; you have endless conveniences — yet you never seem to have any time. You can travel anywhere in the world, yet you don’t bother to cross the road to meet your neighbours,” he said.

“I don’t think people have become more selfish, but their lives have become easier and that has spoilt them. They have less resilience, they expect more, they constantly compare themselves to others and they have too much choice — which brings no real freedom.”

my favorite quote in this news item about the muppets being featured in the smithsonian was “This was a natural for us on so many levels”.

so to celebrate, i bring you manamana…

the last few weeks, after spending so much time in meditation retreats, i’ve been really curious what the lasting effect will be on me. how all that effort has paid off.

i haven’t been able to articulate it easily. at a picnic this afternoon many people asked what it is like to be back. to some i talked about the contrast of pace and speed and distraction. with others i talked about my experience of people and social interactions feeling different.

one thing i’ve noticed is that people *look* different too. more three dimensional almost. i guess i used to see people in a more two dimensional way, not noticing all the details. now i find people, if i know them or not, more interesting looking and with much more detail and emotional texture. it feels like each person is a surprise. maybe i’m just noticing more textures in facial expressions, or maybe i’m labeling and pigeonholing people less.

was talking to danah this afternoon at a picnic, and she felt that world of warcraft is the new golf. all the venture capitalists she knows are now playing that game together!

so i was trying to compile a wizzy little tool vnc2swf for mac os 10.4.6 and i had a link problem:

/usr/bin/ld: Undefined symbols:
_XpmReadFileToPixmap

After digging around, adding ” -lXpm” to the EXTRA_LIBS variable in the makefile fixed the problem. wanted to document this here just for future geeks who may encounter this and use google to find an answer.