Archive for the 'On My Shelf' Category

Caught On The Subway

Monday, July 7th, 2008

I am visiting New York city for the mostly annual visit to my wife’s family. We are having a grand time. I love this town! As we were headed to Chinatown from the Upper East side o the subway, I was approached by one Garth Wolkoff. Garth is an English teacher and a writer, who has a blog dedicated to what New Yorkers are reading on the subway. I think the fact that my wife, and her Mom, are both New Yorkers kind of grandfathered me into being qualified to be an item on the blog. Also, the fact that Garth used to live in my tow, San Francisco, probably helped. You can read the entry, One Taste, over at undergroundreads.blogspot.com. Enjoy!

A Great Free Resource: Sacred Texts Online

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

Just wanted to put out a quick note about a couple of excellent sites for anyone wanting to study up on religious/spiritual writings who doesn’t want to spend lots of cash or clutter up their book shelves.

SacredTexts.com is a huge site with more writings than I have future days.  From their About section, it is “a freely available archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and esoteric topics. Texts are presented in English translation and, where possible, in the original language.  This site has no particular agenda other than promoting religious tolerance and scholarship.”

Celextel’s Online Spiritual Library is an enormous repository of all things Vedantic & Hindu.

And, for those of you with iPods out there, there is the iPod eBook Creator, a labor of love from Daniel Duris which converts text files into iPod notes files.  Never has it been easier to get your spiritual study groove on!

Cheers!

Meditating on the Possibilities

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007

sivakempfort.jpgI have recently re-taken a daily meditation practice. In line with my new method of being more gentle with the demands I make on myself, I have not dove in full bore. Instead, I am taking it at an easy, but consistent pace. I meditate everyday, sometimes in the morning, sometimes at night, sometimes both. My sessions are occasionally timed for 15 minutes, but sometimes I just “go until I am done.” I am trying to remind myself each time that there is a reason it is called a practice. It is the developing of a skill and the strengthening of a view point, it is not perfection.

There’s an old parable about meditation that I have always liked. It goes something like this: Imagine the whole of the universe as one mountain, impossibly immense. Once every millennium a bird flies from the edge of the cosmos, alights on the peak of the mountain, takes one peck with it’s tiny beak, then flies away. When the mountain is whittled down to dust, then will all sentient beings be liberated.

Each time we sit in meditation, the bird takes another peck. Some days the peck is slight. Some days the bird barely lands before skittering away. Some days the mountain reverberates like a colossal bell with the force of the blow. So it goes.

The particular style I am using is derived from The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. In a nutshell -

  • Sit comfortably with back straight
  • Focus on breathing for several breaths to quiet the mind chatter
  • Actively witness my thoughts and turn attention inside to the inner body
  • Breathe without focusing on the breath and Be

I find that as thoughts come up I can either stay in a watchful mode of my inner body and they pass by like clouds, or I can get swept along with them until I realize I am participating in thinking rather than witnessing, and then gently go back to witnessing.

In the interest of strengthening the practice I did some online research about meditation techniques and came across the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra. The Vigyan Bhairav Tantra is an ancient Indian text some 5000 years old. It contains a list of 112 meditations. I believe that the only way to get good benefit from meditation is to stick with one for a while to give it its full day in court. But, I also find it stimulating to compare with other methods.

With that in mind, I present the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra here for your enjoyment.

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It means what we make it mean

Tuesday, February 6th, 2007

ErisBear with me. This is going to go the long way around.

I believe in Discordianism. To the followers of Eris the numbers 23 and 5 are sacred. The number 23 has a strange way of showing up in all sorts of interesting places, and of course 2+3 is 5.

You can find all kinds of interesting things about 23 here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_(numerology) and here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_(number)

For me the best bit is - “In interviews, (Robert Anton) Wilson has acknowledged the self-fulfilling nature of the 23 enigma, implying that the real value of the Laws of Fives and Twenty-threes lies in their demonstration of the mind’s power to perceive “truth” in nearly anything.” “Truth” here meaning meaning.

So, the other day I saw a poster for the new Jim Carey movie “The Number 23″. It’s a paranoid delusional joy ride through the 23 Enigma. Looks to be fun. It got me thinking on such things as how we make up so much of our own meaning and what the philosophers I have been studying lately have said about that - Nietzsche, Kant, Hume, Heidegger, etc. They have all had interesting things to say on the subject. Even occasionally very meaningful. ;-)

I belong to the Eris of Discord tribe and was taking a gander in between frantic bursts of work activity. There is a thread there titled - “grab nearest book. turn to page 23. post 5th sentence.” It’s fun. So, I grabbed the nearest book and this is what I find on page 23, sentence 5 - “You are going to write.”

This is beautifully meaningful (at least I am making it so) because over the last two years I have been slowly ramping up on living my long held dream of being a fiction writer. I finished my second novel (to first draft stage) a couple of weeks back and have been steadily writing more. I take the above to mean Eris is on my side, and with the matron of discord at my back I can hardly fail.

Of course it’s all made up anyways, but then again, what else is fiction?

Fitness Crazyness

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

I find it useful to have models for achievement that go far beyond what I intend to accomplish. I am no slouch, but I came across an article in the current Wired magazine about Dean Karnazes that made me happy. Hailed as the fittest man in the world, I was really taken with his tips and adventurous philosophy. I went to Borders and picked up his book, Ultramarathon Man, I’ll let you know how it goes.

One thing is for sure, his story and website, make me want to strap on my running shoes again!