心經

It helps if you search in Chinese characters if you want to find a Chinese-language rendition of the Heart Sutra...

(The first part of the video below is in fact the Heart Sutra...the first 2 1/2 minutes or so...)

Listening and responding to SOS...

Pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?

Peak agarwood

Speaking and agarwood, which is a staple of Buddhist incense, I should mention that the stuff is, uh, endangered, according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). So that's kind of a quandary for those of us (and yeah, I count myself among them) that don't want to destroy the earth too much.

However, unlike certain things, it appears that the folks doing this convention have agreed to, er, study the problem.

It is known- you can google it yourself - that Vietnam is attempting to create sustainable "farm-raised" agarwood. (You don't just raise the trees, you see; the stuff has to rot for a while, and not just any rot, of course, but a special rot which gives agarwood its unique properties).

Anyway, if you do buy the stuff (and I do), treat it with care and do not waste it, and appreciate it. It seems a ridiculous expenditure in these times perhaps (although I can't countenance purchasing the really high end stuff) but on the other hand, there is nothing that conveys what agarwood conveys for zazen and chanting. Yeah, yeah, there is great misery and want in the world, but a zendo is not a space of denial and asceticism, nor is it a place of ridiculous indulgence.

And if there's a way to help foster sustainable methods for producing this stuff, let me know. I can't believe there won't be alternatives found for exterminating the agarwood species; I just hope the folks who are dead set against genetic engineering can deal with it.

Discovery & Dispute

• The Olfactory Rescue Service are people that are as serious about incense as oenophiles are about wine.
  
  I have no idea how they get the money to transform all those Shoeyeido agarwoods into ash and smoke, but having done that to samplers once myself I can understand the appeal.
  
  If you do burn incense for meditative practices, though their advice is generally spot-on.
  
  As for myself, for zazen I usually use the Baeido 白檀 (byakudan), their sandalwood - heavy version of their daily incense. However, in part thanks to these folks, I've recently found the guilty pleasures of Minorien.
  
  If you buy the Minorien byakudan, light a stick, and smell, you'll have the South/East Asian analogue of Anton Ego in Ratatouille: you'll be instantly transported to the first time you experienced that scent in a Buddhist or Hindu temple, except that this is purer, more expressive than you will remember.
  
  I think there's a place for this kind of thing in this world.
  
  



• I seemed to have disturbed at least one Wilberite. (See comments there.) Which was picked up elsewhere.
  
  OTOH, I'm not alone...I cannot believe though that someone threw "lineage holder" around.
  
  As though I'm unaware of lineages?
  
  

George Carlin is dead...

He was a bodhisattva: the bodhisattva of making young children's television watchable.


As I noted on a diary on Kos:

He narrated many of these children's shows for Americans, and made them watchable, if only because you were imagining him let loose at any minute with a string of profanities, vulgarities, and references to genitalia.

He was also the the bodhisattva of making airport security funny.

Is THIS the very body of the Buddha?

Then why are so many out there trying to sell enlightenment?

YOU WILL DIE!

Although we all might heed Shosan Suzuki's advice above, I bet nobody who happens by here, with the exception of a couple of folks - and I guess who they might be - have actually made a will.

I recently have had the experience of the fact that life is quite finite - nobody in my immediate family's going to die yet by any means, but as we get older, probabilities increase.

And we are so totally unprepared.

Ah, well, if anyone can do this...

Where kohdo meets high finance...

Link

According to Brent Clegg, Director of Touchwood the "local" Agarwood industry is "whopping" and his output of tress farmed in Thailand will be targeting the Arabian market. "It's both an interesting and green story including a turn from a deforestation pattern in parts of Thailand towards a forestation pattern and a boon to local villagers benefiting from employment," he said.

What's the catch? "Well I would call it a Private Equity deal and therein lie the usual disclaimers: seek independent legal advice and understand the risk. However, because it is an unregulated agricultural investment it might not attract regulators' attention in some parts where trees are not considered to be 'securities'."

Still, like any investment purchase caveat emptor applies (let the buyer beware). From an investment angle, Clegg says that Touchwood targets "10 per cent of portfolios and 20 per cent annual returns"...



The tree stock consists of: Agarwood, the world's most expensive resinous wood. Touchwood has pat-ented a process supported by Dr Robert Blanchette and Dr Joel Jurgens, both of the University of Minnesota. Their process amounts to the injection of a serum into the Aquilaria Tree after three years of its life and over the following three years it produces Agarwood. The main markets for it are the Arabian peninsula for perfumes and China for herbal medicines.

As an inhabitant of the Pacific Northwest, I've harbored a fantasy that the process by which agarwood becomes kyara could be introduced into trees local to the temperate rain forests here (I have no idea how far-fetched this is, other than that there are temperate-forest cousins of agarwood, if I'm not mistaken).

Why have I harbored this fantasy?

• Agarwood - or aloeswood - promotes good meditation practice.



• The best varieties - "kyara" (伽羅) - are the most amazing thing you ever smelled in your life.



• And therefore they're worth significantly more than gold even at today's prices. If you don't believe me check out Shoyeido's online store here. Those bundles at the bottom of the page ain't your hippie's Nag Champa...

Well, I guess it was only a matter of time before somebody else did the "cultured pearls thingy" to agarwood...

And yes, this is an absurd way for resources to be used, except for the fact that some recognition of a sacred space is not in and of itself a bad thing.

Barack Obama's record...

Just in case someone asks, droogie6655321 at Kos did the homework so you don't have to do it...

I will shamelessly quote nearly the whole thing...

My heart just sinks every time some well-meaning (but ignorant) Obama supporter calls into a radio show and gets heckled by Sean Hannity or whoever about Barack Obama's legislative accomplishments.

This happened just yesterday. Hannity offered an Obama supporter a steak dinner if he could name three pieces of legislation that had Obama's name on them. The caller clumsily changed the subject.

Sensing he had the caller on the ropes, Hannity lowered the bar to a single piece of legislation. And alas, the caller could not name the legislation.

Hannity smugly switched off the caller's volume and said directly to the audience, "Ladies and Gentlemen, checkmate." And Droogie exited his car, entered his house and ate tacos sadly.

Listen, I know how talk radio works. Even if he had been able to list three pieces of legislation, Hannity still would have badgered the caller about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright.

Hannity is not the issue. The issue is that ordinary people are being told that Obama has a thin resume and has accomplished very little in his Senate career. I have a Republican co-worker who I spar back and forth with on this issue.

Even when I told him of one bill, he said, "Well, that's probably the only bill." It's never enough for some people, but that doesn't mean you should go into the world uninformed.

So here are just a few highlights from Barack Obama's career as a Senator: specific pieces of legislation, what they meant and how they were passed.

The Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act

Introduced by Sen. John McCain in May 2005, and cosponsored by Sen. Edward Kennedy. Barack Obama added three amendments to this bill.

While the bill was never voted on in the Senate, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Acts of 2006 and 2007, respectively, drew heavily upon the wording of this bill.

The Lugar-Obama Cooperative Threat Reduction.

Introduced by Sen. Barack Obama, Sen. Dick Lugar and Sen. Tom Coburn.

First introduced in November 2005 and enacted in 2007, this bill expanded upon the successful Nunn-Lugar threat reduction, which helped secure weapons of mass destruction and related infrastructure in former Soviet Union states.

Lugar-Obama expanded this nonproliferation program to conventional weapons -- including shoulder-fired rockets and land mines. When the bill received $48 million in funding, Obama said, "This funding will further strengthen our ability to detect and intercept illegal shipments of weapons and materials of mass destruction, enhancing efforts to prevent nuclear terrorism."

Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006

This act of Congress, introduced by Senators Obama and Coburn, required the full disclosure of all entities or organizations receiving federal funds in FY2007.

Despite a "secret hold" on this bill by Senators Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd, the act passed into law and was signed by President Bush. The act had 43 cosponsors, including John McCain.

The act created this Web site, which provides citizens with valuable information about government-funded programs.

Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act

This law helped specify US policy toward the Congo, and states that the US should work with other donor nations to increase international contributions to the African nation.

The bill marked the first federal legislation to be enacted with Obama as its primary sponsor. Following this legislation's passage, Obama toured Africa, traveling to South Africa, Kenya, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Chad. He spoke forcefully against ethnic rivalries and political corruption in Kenya.

Honest Leadership and Open Government Act

In the first month of the 110th Congress, Obama worked with Sen. Russ Feingold to pass this law, which amends and strengthens the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995.

Specificially, the changes made by Obama and Feingold requires public disclosure of lobbying activity and funding, places more restrictions on gifts for members of Congress and their staff, and provides for mandatory disclosure of earmarks in expenditure bills.

The House passed the bill, 411-8, on July 31. The Senate approved it, 83-14, on Aug. 2. At the time, Obama called it "the most sweeping ethics reform since Watergate."

Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act

Following the Republican-sponsored voter intimidation tactics seen in mostly black counties in Maryland during the 2006 midterm elections, Obama worked with Sen. Chuck Schumer to introduce this bill.

The bill has been referred to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Obama said of the bill, "This legislation would ensure that for the first time, these incidents are fully investigated and that those found guilty are punished."

The Obama-McCain Climate Change Reduction Bill

The Obama-McCain bill, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., would cut emissions by two-thirds by 2050.

Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007

Introduced by Obama, this binding act would stop the planned troop increase of 21,500 in Iraq, and would also begin a phased redeployment of troops from Iraq with the goal of removing all combat forces by March 31, 2008.

Explaining the bill, Obama said it reflects his view that the problems in Iraq do not have a military solution. "Our troops have performed brilliantly in Iraq, but no amount of American soldiers can solve the political differences at the heart of somebody else's civil war," Obama said.

Amendments to the 2008 Defense Authorization Bill

Obama worked with Sen. Kit Bond to limit, through this bill, the Pentagon’s use of personality disorder discharges in the FY 2008 Defense Authorization bill.

This provision would add additional safeguards to discharge procedures and require a thorough review by the Government Accountability Office. This followed news reports that the Pentagon inappropriately used these procedures to discharge service members with service-connected psychological injuries.

"With thousands of American service members suffering day in and day out from the less visible wounds of war, reports that the Pentagon has improperly diagnosed and discharged service members with personality disorders are deeply disturbing," said Senator Obama.  "This provision will add additional safeguards to the Department of Defense’s use of this discharge and mandate a comprehensive review of these policies."

The Comprehensive Nuclear Threat Reduction provision

Working with Sen. Hagel and Rep. Adam Schiff, Obama authored this provision, which would require the president to develop a comprehensive plan for ensuring that all nuclear weapons and weapons-usable material at vulnerable sites around the world are secure by 2012 from the threats that terrorists have shown they can pose.

A provision from the Obama-Hagel bill was passed by Congress in December 2007 as an amendment to the State-Foreign Operations appropriations bill.

"It is imperative that we build and sustain a truly global effort under an aggressive timeline to secure, consolidate, and reduce stockpiles of nuclear weapons and weapons-usable material to keep them out of the wrong hands. The comprehensive nuclear threat reduction plan required by this provision is an important step in that effort," Obama said of the provision.

These are just a selection of the bills that Obama has introduced and co-sponsored. You owe it to yourself to be able to cite a few of these off the top of your heads so you can give people the gist of them when they challenge the Senator's accomplishments.

At the end of the day, I will take Obama's good judgment over McCain's longevity in Washington any day of the week. It's more important for a politician to learn from his or her mistakes than it is for them to present the same old failed ideas over and over and expecting a better result.

It's true Obama is a relative newcomer on the politican scene, but he has already accomplished much in the areas of nuclear non-proliferation, government accountability, environmental responsibility and others.

So get out there and let some people know what our guy is capable of. Don't be caught unaware when someone asks you for your candidate's resume!

Bookmark this, follow the links, share with friends. Wash, rinse, repeat. Always repeat.

What Buddhists shouldn't do when given a microphone...

Link

PARIS — Christian Dior, the French fashion brand, has become the latest global company to learn a hard lesson about the danger of offending Chinese pride.

Facing the possibility of a boycott of its products, the luxury company said on Thursday that it had dropped the American actress Sharon Stone from its advertising in China after she suggested last week that the recent earthquakes in Sichuan Province were karmic retribution for Beijing’s treatment of Tibet...

Ms. Stone said last week during the Cannes Film Festival: “I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else. And then the earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that karma? When you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?”

I'm not sure if Stone is a Buddhist or not, but that comment was heartless and idiotic, and not unlike John Hagee saying a Katrina devastated New Orleans because of the gays or something like that.

Junk Food, Stress, Monkeys and Modern America

Danny Fisher, by way of this article from the NY Times on meditation, inadvertantly reminded me of this article from last week...(mostly) about what's in the title of this post...

The ladies who lunch do not obsess about their weight in the rhesus monkey compound at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. Food is freely available, and the high-status females do not pride themselves on passing it up. They don’t seem to stigmatize obesity — there is no equivalent of a Kirstie Alley joke — and they certainly don’t turn themselves into Social X-Rays.

In fact, the dominant females ordinarily eat a little more than the subordinates. The lower status monkeys can get as much food as they want but seem to have less of a desire to eat, perhaps because of the higher level of stress hormones in their brain. The anxiety of constantly toadying to their social superiors seems to curb their appetite, researchers suspect, at least when their regular high-fiber, low-fat chow is on the menu.

But suppose you tempted them with the equivalent of chocolate and potato chips and ice cream? Mark Wilson, a neuroscientist at Emory University, and a team tried that experiment at Yerkes by installing feeders with a constant supply of banana-flavored pellets — not exactly Dove bars, but they had enough sugar and fat to appeal even to human palates. (In the interest of science, I sampled a few pellets.)

Once these foods were available, the low-status monkeys promptly developed an appetite. They began eating significantly more calories than their social superiors. While the dominant monkeys dabbled in the sweet, fatty pellets just during the daytime, the subordinate monkeys kept scarfing them down after dark...

In that experiment, the dominant monkeys didn’t show much interest in pressing a lever that administered an intravenous dose of cocaine. But the subordinate monkeys, who started off with compromised dopamine receptors, kept pushing the lever to get more cocaine, just as the subordinates in the new study kept munching on the fatty pellets. Dr. Wilson suggests that the snackers are reinforcing the dopamine systems that had been diminished by stress.

“Essentially, eating high-calorie foods becomes a coping strategy to deal with daily life events for an individual in a difficult social situation,” Dr. Wilson said. “The subordinates don’t get beat up, but they get harassed by high-ranking monkeys. If they’re sitting somewhere and a dominant monkey comes over, they give up their seat and move away. They’re always looking over their shoulders.”

These results seem to jibe with the famous Whitehall study of British civil servants, which found that lower-ranking workers were more obese than higher-status workers. Even though the subordinate workers were neither poor nor lacked health care, their lower status correlated with more health problems.

The new monkey data also jibe with an American study that looked at women’s snacking tendencies. After they worked on puzzles and recorded a speech, the women were tempted with an array of chocolate granola bars, potato chips, rice cakes and pretzels provided by the research team, led by Elissa Epel, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco.

The women who seemed most stressed by the tasks, as measured by their levels of cortisol, ate more of the sweet, high-fat snacks, the same pattern observed in the subordinate monkeys with high cortisol levels. But as Dr. Wilson and others caution, there are plenty of other factors besides status and stress that affect humans’ diets and waistlines.

Debra A. Zellner, a psychologist at Montclair State University, tested both men and women by putting bowls of potato chips, M&Ms, peanuts and red grapes on a table as the participants in the study worked on solving anagrams. Some of the people were given unsolvable anagrams, and they understandably reported being more stressed than the ones given easy anagrams.

Well, Americans are certainly more stressed due to the economy, due to suburban planning forcing long commutes, due to every last nickel being squeezed everywhere.

Americans don't hardly cook at home anymore, I'm told. (We eat out way too often.)

This low cost petroleum lifestyle isn't so healthy.

Marx was only 1/2 right: sometimes the satire goes first...

From today's WSJ:

Fertilizer prices are rising faster than those of almost any other raw material used by farmers. In April, farmers paid 65% more for fertilizer than they did a year earlier, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That compares with price increases of 43% for fuel, 30% for seeds and 3.8% for chemicals such as weedkillers and insecticides over the same period, according to Agriculture Department indexes.

Those skyrocketing costs are making it harder for farmers to expand their harvests in response to the global food crisis that has sparked rioting, rationing and export controls in many countries. Food prices have soared in recent months as the world's growing demand for grain, which has exceeded production for much of this decade, has reduced stockpiles to extremely low levels...

Major fertilizer producers deny any allegations of gouging. They say they are simply raising prices to reflect tight supplies and growing demand after years of relatively low prices.

But there's an unusual piece in the pricing puzzle: In several countries, obscure laws shield makers of potash and phosphate from certain antitrust rules. In the U.S., for example, phosphate makers are among a handful of industries empowered by the 1918 Webb-Pomerene Act to talk with competitors about pricing and other issues...

Phosphate, a mineral found in fossilized marine life, provides essential nutrients for plant-cell development, while potash, a rock mined from the earth, helps plants grow strong. Prices of both are climbing faster than those of nitrogen, which is manufactured in a process that requires lots of natural gas.

In North America, nitrogen fertilizers are applied liberally to corn and wheat fields. Urea, a nitrogen-carrying fertilizer, is selling for around $600 a ton, twice the price a year ago, mostly because of a steep run-up in natural-gas prices.

The price of phosphate has climbed to about $1,000 a ton, up from $365 last year, according to Green Markets, a trade publication, while the price of a ton of potash is now more than $700, up from $230.

Even though - like with oil, we're consuming the biomass of What Went Before, and therefore yet another leading indicator of how screwed we are, I realized that this is one possible solution to the problem...:

... A hospital lobby. A line of people are being ushered through. A sign says 'Blood Donors' with an arrow in the direction they're all going. Mr Samson is in a white coat.
Samson Blood donors that way, please.
Donor Oh thank you very much (joins the line).
Samson Thank you. (Grimshaw comes up to him and whispers in his ear, Samson looks at him, slightly surprised) What? (Grimshaw whispers again) No. No, I'm sorry but no. (Grimshaw whispers again) No, you may not give urine instead of blood. (Grimshaw whispers again) No, well, I don't care if you want to. (Grimshaw whispers again) No. There is no such thing as a urine bank.
Grimshaw Please.
Samson No. We have no call for it. We've quite enough of it without volunteers coming in here donating it.
Grimshaw Just a specimen.
Samson No, we don't want a specimen. We either want your blood or nothing.
Grimshaw I'll give you some blood if you'll give me...
Samson What?
Grimshaw A thing to do some urine in.
Samson No, no, just go away please.
Grimshaw Anyway, I don't want to give you any blood.
Samson Fine, well you don't have to, you see, just go away.
Grimshaw Can I give you some spit?
Samson No.
Grimshaw Sweat?
Samson No.
Grimshaw Earwax?
Samson No, look, this is a blood bank - all we want is blood.
Grimshaw All right, I'll give you some blood.
He holds out a jar full of blood.
Samson Wher did you get that?
Grimshaw Today. It's today's.
Samson What group is it?
Grimshaw What groups are there?
Samson There's A...
Grimshaw It's A.
Samson (sniffing the blood) Wait a moment. It's mine. This blood is mine! What are you doing with it?
Grimshaw I found it.
Samson You found it? You stole it out of my body, didn't you?
Grimshaw No.
Samson No wonder I'm feeling off-colour. (he starts to drink the blood; Grimshaw grabs the bottle) Give that back.
Grimshaw It's mine.
Samson It is not yours. You stole it.
Grimshaw Never.
Samson Give it back to me.
Grimshaw All right. But only if I can give urine.
Samson ...Get in the queue.

If you're in Portland on June 7...

Come down to the Portland Buddhist Festival.

June 7, 2008, 12:00 pm to 4:30 pm
Colonel Summers Park, SE 17th and Taylor, Portland, Oregon

.....Food and Festivities.....
+Buddhist talks and workshops
+Teachings and activities for Adults and Children
+Tabling by Buddhist Communities

planning meetings April 27, May 18

Contact bpfportland@yahoo.com for more information.

Note: People aren't simplistic.

Link

The New Paradigm for Financial Markets includes Soros’ verdict on the credit crisis. He thinks, as has been widely reported, that it is the most severe since the 1930s, and that it marks the end of a 25-year “era of credit expansion based on the dollar as the international reserve currency”...

His insights are clear and concisely expressed. They are worth reading for anyone interested in the topic. But what is most interesting, and obviously engages Soros at an emotional level, is the idiosyncratic philosophy he has developed to explain the metaphysics of how markets work. Even before the emergence of the efficient markets hypothesis, which has dominated academic thinking on markets for at least three decades, Soros had devised his own theory to prove markets were not efficient. He acted on this philosophy as an investor with spectacularly successful results.

That philosophy derived from his undergraduate studies at the London School of Economics under Karl Popper. The “relationship between thinking and reality”, Soros calls “reflexivity.” It fills the book’s centre in chapters which he admits many will find “heavy going”. In markets, Soros says, participants’ thinking plays a dual function: they try to understand the situation (the “cognitive function”), and to change it (the “manipulative function”). The two functions can interfere with each other; when they do so the market displays “reflexivity”.

So an investor’s misperception of reality can help to change that reality, begetting further misperceptions. When market actors’ decisions affect outcomes, patterns emerge. If a lot of people are bullish about internet stocks their price goes up. Soros used the theory to predict, and profit from, a series of “initially self-reinforcing but eventually self-defeating boom-bust processes, or bubbles”. Each bubble “consists of a trend and a misconception that interact in a reflexive manner”.

A key implication of this is that markets do not tend towards “equilibrium”, as predicted by modern portfolio theory. And they will not move in the “random walk” promulgated by efficient markets theory, which holds that prices always incorporate all known information and so move randomly in response to new information.

So "The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means" has to be added to my reading list, along with Ariely's book "Predictably Irrational."

Oh, wait, I gotta put in one more quote...

Many will dislike Soros’ politics. Others will find the book self-indulgent. He calls himself a “failed philosopher” and badly wants his theory to reach a broader public. It is hard to imagine it would have been published were he not so famous and successful.

I have become fond in recent years - especially with the exigencies of my current project - of quoting Deng Tsao Ping's "It does not matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." I could rephrase the last sentence in this as "It is hard to imagine it would have been published were he not so famous and successful his results indicative of the usefulness of his approach."

Within economics you have the classic issue of measure/probability theory: the underlying space - think of the set of all humans engaging in the economy or all humans' economic actions -just doesn't behave as the theory demands it to in order for all the other nice juicy stuff to follow.


Soros is right. Conservative economics - supply side Reagan/Thatcher/Norquist BS is as dead as a McDonald's Big Mac.

Keith Olbermann at his best...

Book Review: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

In The Godless Delusion, Dawkins doesn't mention Buddhism much at all, except to say he thinks they're philosphies, not religions. This Buddhist disagrees on that point. Dawkins arguments against the existence of a monotheistic god are cogent, powerful, and above all, far more accessible than the tripe you get at infidels.org. Unfortunately, as a man trained in biology, every argument looks like it can be addressed with evolution. That said, one argument - the argument that says an "Intelligent" "Designer" would have to be hopelessly complex and hence far more unlikely than an evolved ecosystem built up by its own bootstraps a step at a time - is actually quite new to me.

Also unfortunately, he himself doesn't quite get probability theory, or to put it another way, he readily and humbly admits he's confused by quantum theory, but when he says "no no no there's no randmoness" in evolution, he protesteth too much. However, his wonderment shines through even here.

His basic arguments are spot on though.

Two points:

1. He doesn't quite mention theological positions of folks like mine - perhaps because there's so much kinship with his position, he doesn't see the difference. That is, he does not see that much of what he's saying is eventually irrelevant to folks like me, because the question's irrelevant, except perhaps as fodder for keeping busy in coach class.

2. He brings up what is likely some nonsensical controversial book about language and voices in one's head- the title escapes me at the moment and I am too comfortable frankly to get my copy of Dawkin's book to look it up. His point is that perhaps at one time the dialog in one's head was regarded as real. Perhaps it was, but as we have no model for how the ancients perceived consciousness until...yeah, Buddhists...OK, maybe some Hindu writings address such issues, I'm not familiar...but until Buddhists wrote about enlightenment, there wasn't a heckuva lot the ancients wrote about consciousness, though I'd suspect that at least among the lower classes, R.D. Laing's quote of Kierkegaard was probably right: the ancients probably did see angels and halos and all that what-not. Again, it doesn't matter because the dialog in your head is just that anyway; it's the picture of the cake...and that implies that we're likely miles apart from Quakers, despite the alleged similarities of practice.

All in all, very much worth reading. Go out and read it today, in fact, it's in paperback, and a bargain.

Ok, how do you talk about a nice wristwatch on a Buddhist blog?

When I first moved out to the Northwest, I realized that the old Seiko 5 that I had had for decades was beat up, didn't quite look professional, especially when my company's early literature talked about wearing suits and all that.


I had wanted a replacement watch. I didn't really want a quartz movement - first of all there were the batteries. Secondly, a pure (automatic) mechanical movement such as the Seiko 5 had required no attention.




Unfortunately, I could not at the time, find a jewelry dealer in Vancouver that sold a decent non-quartz watch. It was the sticks, you know.

And Rolexes? I couldn't afford one, I wouldn't afford one, and they reeked of being yuppie toys to me.


So I wound up getting an at-the-time nice looking, but essentially cheap Citizen Quartz Chronograph, which tended to need batteries more often than I expected, and at times when it was unfortunate to replace them.

Still, it served me faithfully, more or less, for about 12 years though it got quite beat up. And of course I never actually used any chronograph functions.

And then...I realized that it was really beat up, from being on my wrist in all those coach-class international flights. It looked ridiculous on my hand when I met the CEO of my company.

I just didn't have the ceremonial robes down right, so to speak.

What had really tipped me in the direction of getting a new watch, though, was this article, which I read because my wife got me a subscription to Forbes Life, because frequent flyer miles were expiring, and, you know, it'd be a waste not to use them... Your logic may vary - anyway a variety of magazines started showing up at my home, but that's another story. Ok, let's just say, Forbes Life is conspicuous consumption porn, but it's worthwhile compared to Fortune.

Anyway, I came upon this article, and the engineer in me was fascinated.

The first collectible watch I ever bought was a Rolex Bubbleback, the only timepiece in the 1940s to enclose a self-winding movement in a waterproof case. Admittedly that wasn’t especially impressive by the time I acquired it in 1991—modern quartz didn’t need winding, and watertight plastics were abundant—but what mattered to me was the sheer inventiveness, the audacity of making a watch bulbous as a submarine just so that it could be powered by swimming. In the mid-20th-century, Rolex thrived on technical bravado, making sport of staid jewelry counters by displaying watches inside goldfish bowls, while other companies such as Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin tested the limits of mechanical complexity with watches that tracked phases of the moon or multiple time zones.

Today, that grand old tradition of bold mechanical innovation is back with a vengeance. Aided by the latest advances in chemical and mechanical engineering—and computers, of course—an agile new generation of independent watchmakers is building timepieces that would have been unimaginable in the ’40s, or even the ’90s. Richard Mille combines platinum and steel with resilient new materials developed for fighter jets. Franck Muller engineers gears that rotate only once every thousand years. The most extraordinary contemporary timepieces don’t remind me of 20th-century wristwatches so much as 18th-century philosophical toys such as the mechanical doll that delighted savvy audiences by writing Descartes’famous line “Cogito ergo sum” with a quill pen.

(Note the irony of the last sentence...)



Too, I was reminded of the remonstration Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly made regarding her profession in "The Devil Wears Prada," which struck me as valid: people design this ridiculously expensive stuff not only so that the wealthy have something to conspicuously consume, but also because it helps the rest of us define our image of ourselves to each other. It's a bit of communication.

Andy Sachs: No, no, nothing. Y'know, it's just that both those belts look exactly the same to me. Y'know, I'm still learning about all this stuff.

Miranda Priestly: This... 'stuff'? Oh... ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.

That movie is probably the only good date-movie I've seen in 5 years, but that's another trajectory...



I realized that it's high time I searched for a decent non-quartz watch. One that's not as accurate as my cell phone's time function.

I also realized there's the huge sub-stratum of society - like the folks who build model railroads obsessively or collect rocks (not necessarily jewels) who collect watches.

I'm not one of them. But I understand the allure. Here's what I got: the Oris BC3:




This watch should be environmentally correct, last decades to be handed down to my son, and didn't set me back anywhere near like a Rolex. It's readable on a plane on an international journey, it's readable without my reading glasses, and it's got a saphire crystal, so it won't likely get any kind of a serious scratch while I'm alive.

Moreover, you can see the movement moving through the saphire crystal see-through back, and it's movement's movement is reminiscent of Mary Roach's description of the human heart beating - it's doing some kind of wild St. Vitus dance in there. The watch appears alive; its second hand dances across the face.

It's deliriously, beautifully, obsolete and irrelevant. That's quite similar to a description once made by Thomas Merton about monks.

And somehow, I can't think it's totally, completely immoral to have a decent reliable watch in this day and age whose only future environmental footprint is characterized by its tuneups that will be needed years from now.

One final plus: my 6 year old asked me, "Daddy, why does it sound like it's going so fast?" He had never heard a mechanical wristwatch before, and so I got to explain to him about mechanical analogs of phase locked loops and whatnot.

The trouble with the death penalty...

Now that the "Supreme Court" has OK'd lethal injection, it's killing time again in prisons...

“The Supreme Court essentially blessed their way of doing things,” said Douglas A. Berman, a professor of law and a sentencing expert at Ohio State University. “So in some sense, they’re back from vacation and ready to go to work.”

Experts say the resumption of executions is likely to throw a strong new spotlight on the divisive national — and international — issue of capital punishment.

“When people confront a new wave of executions, they’ll be questioning not only how people are executed but whether people should be executed,” said James R. Acker, a historian of the death penalty and a criminal justice professor at the State University at Albany.

Texas leads the list with five people now set to die here in the Walls Unit, the state’s death house, between June 3 and Aug. 20. Virginia is next with four. Louisiana, Oklahoma and South Dakota have also set execution dates.

Some welcome the end of the moratorium.

“We’ll start playing a little bit of catch-up,” said William R. Hubbarth, a spokesman for Justice for All, a victims rights group based in Houston.

“It’s not like we have a cheering section for the death penalty.” Mr. Hubbarth said. But, he added: “The capital murderers set to be executed should be executed post-haste. It’s not about killing the inmate. It’s about imposing the penalty that 12 of his peers have assessed.”

Which means that the "State," that entity representing you and me, create a behavior, on behalf of you and me, explicitly bound by the behavior of another.

And this particular behavior is based on the notion that if you kill someone who is causing the worst kind of trouble, you will reduce the numbers of people who cause that kind of trouble.

The problem is you cannot extirpate vile hatred this way. You cannot exile desperate murderousness from the human heart this way.

So you're only making more murder, on our behalf.

Freakin' wonderful. All we need is more of this...

Coincidentally...

A mystery donor leaving $1 million to Naropa University informs me of its founder....

Naropa was founded in 1974 by a Tibetan lama, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a charismatic spiritual leader who also cut a rakish and unforgettable presence in Boulder. The reputation of Rinpoche was of a hard-partying man and a genius who was the first to adapt Buddhism to American tastes.

Rinpoche attracted a rebel generation to Naropa, including Howl poet Allen Ginsberg, who founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, named after the famous "beat" writer.

At Naropa, a more measured Buddhist influence spread, too, with visits from ordinary teaching lamas to the Dalai Lama.

Chogyam Trungpa was rakish indeed, if Wikipedia's right...

An incident that became a cause célèbre among some poets and artists was the Halloween party at the Fall, 1975, Snowmass Colorado Seminary, a 3-month period of intensive meditation and study of the Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana vehicles of Tibetan Buddhism. The poet W. S. Merwin had arrived that summer at the Naropa Institute and been told by Allen Ginsberg that seminary was where it was really at. Although he had not gone through the several years worth of practice required, Merwin was insistent he attend, and Trungpa eventually granted his request - along with his girlfriend as well. At seminary the couple stayed to themselves. At the Halloween party, after many, including Trungpa himself, had taken off their clothes, Merwin was asked to join the event, but refused. On Trungpa's orders his Vajra Guard forced entry into the poet's locked and barricaded room; brought him and his girlfriend, Dana Naone, against their will, to the party; and eventually stripped them of all their clothes, onlookers ignoring Naone's pleas for help and for someone to call the police.

Also this week:

Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102...

He then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug’s value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity’s oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life.

Dr. Hofmann was born in Baden, a spa town in northern Switzerland, on Jan. 11, 1906, the eldest of four children. His father, who had no higher education, was a toolmaker in a local factory, and the family lived in a rented apartment. But Dr. Hofmann spent much of his childhood outdoors.

He would wander the hills above the town and play around the ruins of a Hapsburg castle, the Stein. “It was a real paradise up there,” he said in an interview in 2006. “We had no money, but I had a wonderful childhood.”

It was during one of his ambles that he had his epiphany.

“It happened on a May morning — I have forgotten the year — but I can still point to the exact spot where it occurred, on a forest path on Martinsberg above Baden,” he wrote in “LSD: My Problem Child.” “As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light.

Who was a spiritual adpept? Who was the imposter? Both? Either? Neither?

My 2 cents: It's irrelevant. The whole damn question. And luckily there are other choices...and they don't involve brain-checking at the door or signing properties over to somebody who's really "just some guy."

Hadley *didn't* "misspeak" Nepal/Tibet mixup.

From my Kos diary today:

The dialog was ridiculed far and wide in the blogosphere, showing how inept Bush regime toadies were. Bush regime national security adviser Stephen Hadley "mixed up" Nepal and Tibet during an interview with George Stephanopolous on Sunday.

But was it a mistake?

Media Matters has a good reference:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (host): Let's talk about the Olympics. President Carter came out against a boycott, but President Bush has been under tremendous pressure to stay away from the opening ceremonies. Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain won't go. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany won't go. The president has said his plans have not changed. Does that mean he'll attend the opening ceremonies, or not?

HADLEY: What the president said is that he will go to the Olympics. He wants to support our Olympic athletes -- the wonderful men and women who are going to participate.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So that means he'll go see events but he won't go to the opening ceremonies?

HADLEY: The president has said he is going to the Olympics. I think this whole issue --

STEPHANOPOULOS: How come you can't -- how come you don't want to answer the question?

HADLEY: This whole issue of opening ceremonies is a nonissue. I think it is a way of dodging what really needs to happen if you're concerned about Nepal.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So does that mean the president will be going to them?

HADLEY: The president is going to the Olympics. The president is going to -- thinks that the way to deal with the issue of Nepal is not by some -- a statement that you're not going to the opening ceremonies and say, "Therefore, I've checked the Nepal box."

STEPHANOPOULOS: But he may not go to the opening ceremonies, you just don't want to say it.

HADLEY: No, the president is going to the Olympics. What he's doing on Nepal is what we think the international community ought to be doing, which is approaching the Chinese privately through diplomatic channels, and sending a very firm message of concern for human rights, of concern for what's happening in Nepal, urging the Chinese government to understand that it is in their interest to reach out to representatives of the Dalai Lama, and to show while the whole world is watching China that they are determined to treat their citizens with dignity and respect.

Nepal? That's not Tibet, right?

Right.


Just like Iran is not Iraq...



Did ya know this?

Nepal's Maoists, poised to win national elections by a large margin, have called on King Gyanendra to abdicate "gracefully" rather than be removed.

Baburam Bhattarai, the Maoists' second-in-command, on Wednesday said: "The best thing for the king would be to bow out gracefully to pave the way for a democratic republic."

The statement came as the Maoists continued to further their lead in Thursday's elections to the 601-seat Constituent Assembly...

In an effort to establish a communist republic, the Maoist fight to take down the monarchy left at least 13,000 people dead.

The king took power in 2001 after eight members of the royal family were killed by Crown Prince Dipendra, who also shot himself.

Gyanendra then took absolute power in 2005 to fight the Maoists.
Some politicians have said Nepal should keep a monarch as a national symbol of neutrality between China and India.

Not many in the West know about this, but this is fodder for conspiracy theories amongst Indians and others who hail from this region.

Was Hadley's Nepal/Tibet mixup an attempt to indirectly blame China for the bad karma floating around in Nepal? Are they to blame? Are we by installing Gyanendra?

My interpretation is: I don't really know the answers to those questions, but I think Hadley was deliberately phallus-waving towards China in that region of the world, and certainly that is how China would have taken it.