*SHOCK* April Fools Gag That DOESN'T Suck!

This just came through on the Opera stream on Twitter:

Opera's back with a brand new invention--Face Gestures. Try it for yourself: http://tinyurl.com/cc52fg

I like some of the "known issues" on the release notes. My favorites include...

• For compatibility reasons Face Gestures auto-detects financial news services and disables itself. The current version of the recognition software is unable to adapt fast enough to the sudden change in the users expression.
• Bushmen beards and emo haircuts are not supported.

The "gestures" for scrolling up/down are pretty good too. Wonder how it'd respond to Spock's one-raised-eyebrow expression...

My Guest Post on DailyBuddhism.com

Many thanks go to my friend Brian Schell, the man behind Daily Buddhism. He was kind enough to accept an article I wrote called "Transformational Practice," and today it is the article of the day on the Daily Buddhism web site. Thanks a lot, Brian!

Please read my article and let me know what you think!

Falling for Opera Again

No, not singing -- I mean Opera, the web browser. Specifically, the alpha release of version 10. Aside from a few very minor rendering glitches from time to time, this is much more stable than the name "alpha" might lead you to believe.

I've used Opera off and on for years. Back in the old days, it was my browser of choice -- the competition was Internet Explorer 4.x (which sucked and didn't run on Linux) and Netscape 4.x (which also sucked, but ran on Linux). Netscape was big, slow, and crashy, whereas Opera was (and still is) very slim, speedy, and stable. Firefox eventually grew up and kicked everyone else's ass, though Opera has always held its ground pretty well. I inevitably became a Firefox geek and have found it hard to leave Firefox behind for very long.

Recently, I installed a bunch of recommended updates for software on my Ubuntu system, including Firefox. It updated to 3.0.8 and I began to notice that Firefox was suddenly extremely slow. Of course, it's always been rather slow, and I'm not sure if my suddenly noticing it was due to some real problem compared to the previous version, or if I was just made aware of it. Anyway, I decided to give a look at the competition.

What I really want is Google Chrome for Linux. I installed Chromium, which is the very, very unstable and incomplete code that will eventually become Chrome. Chromium is extremely fast; it's almost ridiculously fast. But simple things like tabs and copy/paste don't work yet, and the browser eventually screws itself up after a few minutes of use no matter how careful you are. So while Chromium or Chrome will probably be my speedy browser of choice a year from now, it's nowhere near stable enough yet.

That leads me to the only other real contender: Opera. My on-again off-again love affair with Opera over the years has been filled with smiles and tears. I recently played with Opera 9.62 (an official "stable" build, unlike Opera 10) and was not all that pleased. It wasn't performing much better than Firefox on the same system. I decided to try the alpha release of Opera 10 to see if the new engine was faster.

Long story short: Opera 10 is awesome. It is wicked fast. Opera 10 also doesn't bloat up and take all my memory, which Firefox does. That is a big problem for me since I have a laptop with limited RAM. If something eats up lots of memory, things end up using swap space on the hard drive. And anybody who knows anything about laptops knows that most laptop hard drives are slow as molasses. That means everything slows to a crawl as the hard disk churns away. That kind of performance hit is frequently annoying enough to make me ponder throwing the damn laptop into moving traffic.

Anywho... It's not without troubles. Opera 10, like Opera 9.x, still has problems with some keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, especially the most important one: the key to delete messages! Also, it doesn't play very nicely with the newest Facebook interface, but who cares. I hardly even use Facebook these days, and it's probably a good thing it doesn't work well with Opera. That keeps me from wasting time on it.

So for now, I'll be using Opera 10 as my main browser. I highly recommend you go try it out now. It's screaming fast, very stable, and I love the flexibility Opera has always offered. But we'll see what happens when Chrome finally makes its official debut on Linux... *geek drool*

Pug Worship

Worship, originally uploaded by Thomas Hochmann.

Recession

From around the watercooler today at work...

My Co-worker: I'm trying to make the recession fun.
My Boss: I refuse to participate in the recession.

Amen to that!

Why I Ditched My iPod Touch

Last year, I inherited a mostly-new iPod Touch from my then-roommate, Mark. He had only had it for a month, but he bought it to cheer himself up on a sad day. It didn't take him long to realize that he basically only listened to three songs, and he could put those on his phone instead of lugging around a second piece of electronics. So, he gave the iPod to me.

I already had two iPods -- an aging iPod Shuffle and an iPod Video (30GB) which I had brought with me to China a year and a half earlier. Since the iPhone and the iPod Touch are very sexy devices, I was really happy to get one for free. Wifi web browsing anywhere I can get a signal, beautiful video, podcasts, mobile e-mail, etc. It seemed like a perfect upgrade for a perfect price (zero dollars).

The problem is, the iPod Touch and iPhone are not friendly to anything except Apple software. I always knew this, but the Touch/iPhone are extremely unfriendly. They're encrypted, and highly unstable if you bypass the bullshit security that keeps you from doing simple things like... Oh, adding music. Unless I used iTunes, I couldn't even put music on the damn thing. I couldn't use iTunes anymore, because that requires Windows XP -- and I hate XP with a passion. I refuse to use it.

So I did the most logical thing: I jailbroke the iPod. I unlocked it and put free software on it so I could download podcasts, and copy music to it from Linux. But this turned into a game of Russian roulette. Frequently, the iPod Touch would get corrupted beyond repair. No apps would work, no music, no video, no data. I'd have to go to XP and completely erase the iPod Touch, and jailbreak it again. I'd lose all my stuff, and lose an hour or two of my life setting things up each time.

I'm done. This week, I put the iPod Touch away after it had F!#%ED UP yet again, even without my adding any music to it. I dug out my trusty iPod Video, and within minutes I had it loaded up with all my favorite music and podcasts. It works like a dream with Linux, and it is 100% reliable.

From what I hear, the new iPods are becoming even worse. Take the iPod Shuffle that just came out -- it has no controls. You have to use headphones with controls embedded in the cable. But of course Apple has a special chip in the Shuffle so that third parties cannot make those headphones without paying a special license fee first. And of course this fee will be passed on to you, the customer.

Though Apple products tend to be superior for interface and overall experience, in the case of recent iPods, it seems things are getting worse each year. I thought I would always be a treadmill iPod upgrader, but I've decided to jump off the treadmill. When/if my iPods die or need to be replaced, I sure won't be doing so with an Apple product. I'll do my homework like I do with every other device I buy, and choose the most open and widely supported, rather than the coolest. It's not like I take advantage of the special features of iPods anymore, anyway. I just play MP3s and podcasts, all of which work on any music device these days.

Side note: The regular iPods have a far superior interface compared to the iPhone and iPod Touch, for things like music playback. I can ride my bike and have my iPod Video strapped to my hip, and I can adjust it without looking at it. I can change songs, adjust the volume, scan forward/back, etc. all by touch. Ironically, the iPod Touch is the one iPod you cannot use by touch only. And on-screen controls are inferior compared to the smooth, physical, and fine-grained control you get with the clickwheel on the other iPods. Another good reason to switch.

Adios, walled garden, and adios iPod Touch. It was a fun fling, but it's time to go back to hardware I can have a more mature relationship with.

Worship

Tonight I was reading through one of my new books, Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Naht Hanh. In this book, Thay explores a lot of common ground between Buddhism and Christianity. One section of the book, titled "Living in the Presence of God", really got me thinking. Here's part of the passage:

"Piety" is an important word in Judaism, because all of life is a reflection of God, the infinite source of holiness. The entire world, all the good things in life, belong to God, so when you enjoy something, you think of God and enjoy it in His presence.

This got me thinking about worship. Buddhism, at its core, does not seem to be about worship. After all, the Buddha was not a god, he was just a man. Many branches of Buddhism (especially Chinese Buddhism) include various spirits and gods, sometimes making the Buddha himself into a god. But essential Buddhism is not really about gods -- even many branches of Buddhism that include gods continue to stress the teachings and generosity of the Buddha.

Anyway, I felt a momentary sadness upon reading this part of the book, because it seemed to me that Buddhism lacked something relative to Christianity -- worship. When I eat a meal, I do not chew each bite with worship and gratefulness for the Buddha. The Buddha did not create my food, nor did he bless it in some way. Yet this kind of worship would seem to be a part of Christianity: appreciating everything around you as a reflection of God, or as part of God's creation.

Buddha pointed the way to peace, but that doesn't make him worthy of powerful worship, does it? Worshiping Buddha for pointing the way to peace would be like worshiping a highway exit sign for pointing the way back to your house. So, "real" Buddhists don't worship... Do they?

My next thought was, of course they do! Many Buddhists (even those who don't believe in gods) have little statues of Buddha or whole altars that they use for bowing down before the Buddha. But if the Buddha was just a man, why would anyone worship him? Though I have a number of Buddha statues, I've felt little reason to bow or pray to them. In China, many people I saw at Buddhist temples bowed before the Buddha as if he was some kind of wishing tree -- clasp your hands together and fall to your knees, and beg the Buddha to bring you a plastic rocket and a pony.

I've now realized why Buddhists such as myself can and should show reverence to a statue of the Buddha. He was not a god, but he also was not an ordinary man. Not only did he figure out a lot of important truths about life and how to cope with them, he also had the compassion to share these things with everybody he could. That is a good reason to bow before somebody. Don't bow to the Buddha because he is/was a god, or because he was wise and enlightened. Bow before the Buddha because he lived a life worth emulating. He taught great things not just by saying them, but by living them and expressing them with actions. Bow before Buddha because when you show great respect to something, you reinforce it as something that you will align your daily life to.

Similarly, we can worship Guan Yin or Green Tara or any number of Buddhist gods/spirits/bodhisattvas, not because of the heavenly nectar and gifts they can rain down upon us, but because they are examples of outstanding intentions and conduct. Who among us wouldn't want to be like the beautiful Guan Yin, whose 10,000 eyes see the suffering in the world, and whose 10,000 hands reach out to ease the pain? Of course we'd all love to live a life of such purity.

So during my day, I can feel grateful to the Buddha not because he created the blessings in my life, but because he had the insight and the compassion to share his way of embracing those blessings. That insight and the impeccable role model of his actions are worthy of some worship in my opinion.

(Monk photo courtesy of buck82.)

A Great Gift

In Peace Is Every Step, Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) says:

Western civilization places so much emphasis on the idea of hope that we sacrifice the present moment. Hope is for the future. It cannot help us discover joy, peace, or enlightenment in the present moment... I do not mean that you should not have hope, but that hope is not enough...

Peace is not a means. Each step we make should be peace. Each step we make should be joy. Each step should be happiness. If we are determined, we can do it. We don't need the future.

This is, up to now unknowingly, the great gift that I have received from Buddhism and Taoism and the other traditions I have studied. I would take Thay's statement even further and say that it applies not just to hope, but all future-thought in general.

Of my 25 years so far, the vast majority of those years have been spent gazing forward. As an elementary school student, I gazed towards the happiness of coming summer vacations and winter vacations. As a middle school student, I gazed towards the possibilities of high school and college. As a college student, I gazed towards graduation and moving to China. Once I actually got out of school completely and started to live a daily life not so goal-centric, there was a shift in my feelings. I soon discovered that making lots of money was not enough, having a highly respected job was not enough. None of those external things were enough.

The great gift I've gotten from Buddhism is the gift of the present moment. It's also the gift of not being so future-centric. American life seems to really be a lifestyle of inertia; you spend your whole life from birth onward trying to go faster, farther, higher, better. It's like a locomotive rushing along the flats, trying to build up steam to make a mad rush up a steep climb. But what is there at the end of the climb? It's almost like the American lifestyle is a marathon race to death. You run, jump, dash, push your way to the finish line -- the really big finish line where you're on your deathbed and you can't account for a moment of real peace or joy in your life.

I no longer have a high-paying job. I don't even have a particularly respected job. I haven't yet made any concrete plans for further university study, or certifications. I'm not all that sure where I'm going to go next. But I enjoy my work, enjoy my daily life, and enjoy each moment as best I can regardless of the flaws of my life or the tight budget I have to live with right now. The mad dash to live up to other people's dreams, to measure up to family members' or society's vision of success -- it's not satisfying. I want to do more and see more, but I'm going to do it by living. I'm going to smell the roses on the way, which is something you can't do if you've got your running shoes on and you're pounding the pavement.

Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.
- Rumi, "Where Everything Is Music"

Guiding Thoughts: Part 1

Of the many spiritual ideas I've been exposed to from various traditions over the years, there are a few that have stuck in my mind. They've influenced my life in positive ways, often in small ways that add up over time. Occasionally I lose sight of them and have to remind myself to apply them. I'd now like to share some of those ideas with you -- just the ones that pop into my head a lot and seem to have a positive impact on me. Perhaps they will do the same for you!

Thought 1: To escape the cold, be cold.
I read parts of the Liezi (a.k.a. the Lieh-Tzu, by 列圄寇 Lie Yukou) some years ago. Most of it I have since forgotten, but one idea lingers with me still: "To escape the cold, be cold."

It seems like nonsense, but I've applied it in my life and it does not fail. Master Lie is not saying you should give up being warm. That misses the point completely. The secret of escape is to break down the subject-object relationship, which is the root of your uffering when you are "cold."

The cold does not make you suffer. You suffer because you have an "I" that is being subjected to cold. There is a separation here; cold is something from outside. It is an intruder and an enemy. But you can escape the cold by simply being cold. There's no "I" being victimized by cold. Cold is what you are in this moment. Unless it is in your power to definitively change the situation, accept it and become it.

The instant I recall this idea in a moment of annoyance or pain, I feel relief. Giving up on pointless whining of "poor me! damn cold!" cures the suffering of cold. This is not manly endurance of pain -- it is elimination of an "I", so there is nobody to endure it and nothing to be endured! There is only cold. Only this. Cold cannot suffer cold any more than a tooth can bite itself or a fire can burn itself.

To be continued...

(Photo courtesy of EugeniusD80.)

Returning

Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it.
Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing,
where something might be planted,
a seed, possibly, from the Absolute.
-- Rumi, "The Fragile Vial"

Rumi's poetry is absolutely magical, and even my brief encounters with it over the last couple of days have sent my spirit soaring to unimaginable heights. This melded with my reading through the original Chinese version of parts of the Tao Te Ching, especially chapter 40:

Tao is dreaming you,
and its dream is a gentle circle --
the movement of Tao is to return to Tao.

We hear this a lot in Taoism and Zen Buddhism: "return to the source." But what does it mean? Tonight I saw it in my heart, and I felt it. Tao is everything around me and in me. It is me, or I am it. I am nothing more than Tao dreaming these two eyes, these two ears, the fingers which type these words. I exist so Tao can discover itself, to see itself through my eyes. The stars outside are Tao, and through my eyes Tao sees the stars -- and so sees itself. I discover the Tao in my heart, and so the Tao can discover itself. It returns to itself endlessly through me, you, and all things.

Tao is the foundation of all that you are,
yet no gratitude is necessary.
Real gratitude comes through Te,
through the virtue of living authentically.
-- Tao Te Ching, Chapter 51

In The Book, Alan Watts said that we are the supreme ultimate dreaming us so that it can experience things. This is the true teaching of Taoism, Buddhism, Toltec wisdom, and so many other traditions. Authentic living is not playing a role or existing as some mere identity constructed of body parts and an ego. Authentic living is living fully and vibrantly. You are the Tao's chance to experience being you, to experience what you see and think and feel.

Lo, I am with you always means when you look for God,
God is in the look of your eyes,
in the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self,
or things that have happened to you.
There's no need to go outside.
-- Rumi, "Be Melting Snow"

Rumi Ruminations

Just got an almost-new copy of The Essential Rumi second hand, for only 99¢. Even just a few pages into it, the beauty of Rumi amazes me even more than I remember from reading him years ago. Some striking quotes I wanted to pass on:

Why do you stay in prison,
when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.

~~~

[The fighting of mankind...]
It's like a squabble with play-swords.
No purpose, totally futile.

Like kids on hobby horses, soldiers claim to be riding
Boraq, Muhammad's night-horse...

Your actions mean nothing, the sex and war that you do.
You're holding part of your pants and prancing around,
Dun-da-dun, dun-da-dun.

Don't wait till you die to see this.
Recognize that your imagination and your thinking
and your sense perception are reed canes
that children cut and pretend are horsies.

~~~

When the ocean surges,
don't let me just hear it.
Let it splash inside my chest!

(Photo courtesy of Jungle_Boy.)

Overlap and Monkey Toys

Lately I've been thinking about The Four Agreements, the Toltec teachings of don Miguel Ruiz, and more established traditions like Buddhism and Taoism. The great thing about these various teachings is that they all get at a common point (authenticity) while doing so from somewhat different angles. I think the variety of angles is a benefit, because each can illuminate some dark corners that the others may miss.

Buddhism talks about our idea of "self" and insists that happiness can be found in the realization of "no-self." That is, nothing is really what you think it is. Nothing has any inherent, separate existence if you take it out of the context of everything else. Our minds love to freeze things into little conceptual boxes, and we act upon those things we think are rigid, separate, and undeniably true. My mind conjures up the idea of "dad" and a certain bunch of descriptions and qualities and memories pop into my mind -- but in truth, dad is not nearly so limited as those ideas in my head. The same applies to me; I may have any number of ideas about who I am, but they are only ideas. Ideas fall short of reality unless they are backed up with action that comes not out of duality (dividing the world into isolated "selves") but out of unity (realizing that there is no self, all things depend on and support each other).

The Toltec tradition has a similar idea to "no-self," with various names. One name I like is the name don Miguel uses for The Voice of Knowledge: the main character. He says that each of us has a storyteller in our head, who is constantly spinning out stories about everything -- who I am, who you are, who that girl over there is, what life means, how I "should" act, what a "real" Republican is, etc. The problem is that these stories are only that -- stories. We invest our belief in them; we especially invest our belief in the story of "I," the main character.

The real trouble comes when we have a really solid idea of what the main character is and is not, what the main character can and cannot do. That's where self-limiting beliefs and harmful habits come from. We surrender our free will. We construct a detailed, fictitious main character, and we let it run on autopilot most of the time. It's as if our idea of who we are is one of those little wind-up toy monkeys with the cymbals. We wind-up the monkey and let it loose to go marching around, clattering away, going wherever it wants and doing whatever it wants. We've built up this rigid idea of a self and unleashed it on the world. The main character runs rampant, causing misery for us and others. We've surrendered our power to really live the way we want to.

This all comes back to the idea of authenticity. Authenticity is not just being true to who you are -- that could easily degenerate into simple-minded clinging to rigid ideas in your head. Real authenticity is going beyond those ideas; you stop living through the main character, you stop believing your own fictions of what you are and what the world is. Buddhism, Taoism, and Toltec philosophy all point towards living authentically through the heart and spirit, without the graspings and delusions of the mind. The deluded mind and the storyteller are not nearly as smart as they think they are -- nor are they the real essence of how our lives should be lived.

Happy Birthday, AMY-LAAAA!!

Today is the 21st birthday of one of my favorite students of all time, and one of the most quirky people I've ever known... Amy!

Happy Birthday, Qingyuan Mountain Duck!

Flow of Life

The trees and the mountains -- all of nature is changing because Life is passing through everything and everything is reacting to Life.
-- don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements Companion Book (p. 120)

This line jumped out at me as I was thumbing through various parts of the Companion Book last night. Immediately a beautiful image sprang into my mind. In my mind's eye, I saw trees, and grass, and water. I also saw people and buildings and all the artifices of humanity. But in my mind, all these things were not as substantial as they appear to us in daily life. These things were all slightly translucent; and through the whole vision I saw gentle waves of soft, golden light. The light was the pulse of Life, the gentle flow of Life. It didn't just pulse through the trees and other "natural" things. It also pulsed through the people and buildings and cars and everything else.

An analogy then popped into my head. Just as a breeze caresses and bends the branches of a tree, or flutters the delicate petals of a flower, so too does the gentle breeze of Life energy caress and bend all things. The wind encourages a tree branch to bend; Life encourages our bodies to grow up, to mature, and eventually to pass away into something else.

If you look at things around you and see them as just a teensy bit insubstantial, and imagine that gentle stream of Life flowing in, over, around, and through each thing, it is a striking and wonderful vision. No doubt this sounds very New Age-y, and it kind of is. But wouldn't it be nice to see the world with those eyes more often -- or perhaps all the time?

(Photo courtesy of LunaDiRimmel.)

Probability of Precipitation

From the AccuWeather.com forecast for Albuquerque:



Good ol' desert. ;-)

Review: The Four Agreements Companion Book

So as I mentioned a few days back, I was lucky enough to grab a shiny new copy of The Four Agreements Companion Book for $1. In case you didn't notice, I have a lot to say about the Four Agreements. Well, I've made my first pass through the Companion Book and I wanted to share my thoughts with you.

One of the shortcomings of the original Four Agreements book is that it is rather lacking in practical advice or exercises for putting the Agreements to work in your real life. It's not a big deal -- if you read the book, hopefully you're mature enough to figure out the practical side yourself. But the truth is that a lot of people would probably have liked some basic guidance on where to go with this great code of conduct.

So, in comes the Companion Book. Sure enough, it does include a lot of exercises and advice. Kudos to don Miguel and Janet Mills for covering the practical side. But the book is remarkably redundant and even manages to sometimes contradict or cast a little doubt on itself and The Four Agreements. If you've read the original book, 70% of the material in the Companion is a severely disorganized rehashing of the ideas you already learned. Honestly, it feels like the Companion Book was the first draft of The Four Agreements.

However! The book does include a lot of exercises for self-inquiry that can illuminate things in ways you may not expect. Those exercises are valuable, and I think they can help you find a place for the Four Agreements in your life.

My basic opinion on the Companion is this:

• If you've read The Four Agreements: skip the blathering parts and go straight to the exercises in each chapter. They're worth serious contemplation and exploration -- and you'll have plenty of time for said exploration, if you don't waste your time re-reading all the stuff you already learned in the first book.
• If you haven't read The Four Agreements: you could just buy this book by itself and you'd basically get a refresher course on what the other one covers... However, I would actually recommend against that. The Four Agreements is the superior book, and it covers everything much more coherently and concisely than the rehashing treatment you get in the Companion.

The Companion Book could have been about 50 pages instead of 200+ if it didn't include so much doubling back on what the original Four Agreements already talked about. The practical exercises are worthwhile, the interview with don Miguel is fun to read, and the "true stories" of people's experiences with the Agreements can be encouraging (though they are a bit two-dimensional). I just wish the bulk of the book was not an inferior imitation of The Four Agreements itself. That part just wastes paper and wastes readers' time, with the added risk of confusing or turning people off of the Agreements entirely.

Artists, Not Just Humans

We can see how wonderful it is to call ourselves artists instead of humans. When we think of ourselves as human, we limit the way we express ourselves in life. We hear, "I'm just a human; I'm not perfect." But if we call ourselves artists, where is that limitation? As artists, we no longer have any limitation; we are creators.
- don Miguel Ruiz, The Voice of Knowledge (p. 50)

(Photograph courtesy of Edward Leger)