Offering multiple perspectives from many fields of human inquiry that may move all of us toward a more integrated understanding of who we are as conscious beings.
On the bright side, you can probably vote early and vote often, as they old joke goes.
For more information, check this out: Hacking Democracy, the full HBO film. The Diebold people tried to crush this film -- they failed.
No matter what side you are in this divided country, get your ass out there and vote. People who fail to vote have no right to complain about the government that represents them. A representative government is only as viable as the people it represents. If we do not vote, we deserve the government we get -- as has been in evidence for the last several elections.
On the fun side, I guess I'm supposed to be a Dem.
Your Vote Score: 16% Republican, 84% Democrat
You fit well with the Democrat party, and you should almost definitely vote Democrat this election.
In fact, you're so strongly Democrat, a political career (or at least some activism )may be in your future.
In reality, I've been an Independent for the last several years. Before that I was Democrat for quite a while, before that a Communist for a short time, and before that a Republican for a couple of years. Yep, a little schizo.
Mike Love created this thing, basing it on Wikipedia links, and it's damn interesting. It connects major players in the development of Western culture, giving larger boxes to bigger players and showing the lines of influence.
I'm not sure I agree with the thing (what does that say about Wikipedia?), but it's fun to look at.
You can view the map here. It will show up at first as just a bunch of dots. Click the cursor over it and it will zoom in to reveal more detail.
This is from a Shambhala Sun article by Pema Chodron, Stay with the Soft Spot, in which she talks about Shantideva's The Bodhisattva’s Way of Life (this was preview of her recent book, No Time to Lose, on Shantdeva's text).
It isn't easy to say what bodhicitta is. If you looked it up in a Buddhist dictionary, it would say something like: “The heartfelt longing or wish or aspiration to awaken fully, so that you could benefit sentient beings.” The aspiration is vast, because you wish to awaken not partially but fully. It’s vast because you wish to awaken so that you could benefit not just a few, but all sentient beings. And you aspire to benefit all beings not just at the relative level of housing and food and fear and abuse, but also at the absolute level of helping them help themselves so that they too can wake up fully. Full-blown bodhicitta is the global perspective that wants all beings to fulfill their potential. It is based on a growing confidence that all beings have the potential to wake up fully.
Shantideva says, “Virtuous thoughts do rise, brief and transient, in the world.” We’ve all had this experience: you're walking along, you're complaining and judging everyone, you feel like you're on a steady diet of poison, you’re driving everyone crazy—especially yourself—and then, BAM! Like a flash of lightning in the dark, something gets through your self-absorption. Sometimes it's just a car backfiring, or maybe it's a dharma teaching, but it wakes you up out of your self-absorption and you see that the sun has come out, the sky is beautiful, and there are birds flying across it. Suddenly the world is very large. Everybody knows the experience of being completely self-absorbed and then something gets through. That’s a flash of bodhichitta.
That flash, though, feels fragile and fleeting. Meditators describe it often: “I felt like every time I meditated I was waking up more, and then I seemed to lose it." That’s the fragility Shantideva is referring to: there’s a flash of lightning, you suddenly understand that the sun is always shining, but then the clouds cover over it. At some point, though, something shifts and you begin to have confidence that the underlying quality of your being is open and warm and radiant. You know that the sun is always shining.
Later, using grief as an example, she says:
Take grief, for instance. Grief is completely pregnant with bodhichitta—it’s full of heart, love and compassion. But we tend to freeze or harden against grief because it’s so painful. We bring in the clouds. In fact, we're good at bringing in the clouds and keeping them in place. We’re good at fixating on them.
But when you practice the teachings that say, “Stay with the grief, see it as your link to all humanity,” you begin to understand that grief is a doorway to realizing that the sun is always shining. You begin to understand that the weather is transient like clouds in the sky. You begin to have more trust in the underlying goodness—the underlying “sun quality”—of your being.
In this way, any experiences you have, particularly very strong emotions, are doorways to bodhichitta. The trick is to stay with the soft spot—the bodhichitta—and not harden over it. That’s the basic bodhichitta instruction: stay with the soft spot.
[Emphasis added.]
I have been doing a lot of shadow work of late, seeking out my destructive subpersonalities and trying to understand them. I think now it is time to get back to Buddhist practice, to trying to transform lead into gold.
Elsewhere is this fine article, Chodron uses alchemy as a metaphor for the work of bodhichitta. Now she's talking my language. I spent years studying alchemy both as an historical artifact and as Jung's metaphor for the individuation process. I think it's an apt metaphor here as well.
Part of shadow work is trying to bring the shadow material into the light of consciousness where it can no longer be hidden from view and, thus, exert unconscious influence on behavior. In alchemy this is equivalent to working with the nigredo, to cooking out the impurities in the psyche.
In bodhichitta practice we are doing the same work, but rather than seeking to remove the impurities, we seek to sit with them and get to know them. It is very equivalent to the shadow work of bringing things to consciousness. The end result, however, is the same as in the alchemical process -- the shadow material is neutralized and no longer can act on us without our knowledge.
The reason I keep coming back to Pema Chodron is because she infuses the process with a compassion that is lacking in the psychological models. It feels important to be gentle with ourselves as we unearth this material. For people like me (strong inner critic and strong pusher), there is a definite need to not push too hard and to not feel too much pressure to do it right. When seeking the soft spot, we need to be soft in doing so.
It so happens I am sick of being a man. And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.
The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs. The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool. The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens, no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.
It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails and my hair and my shadow. It so happens I am sick of being a man.
Still it would be marvelous to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily, or kill a nun with a blow on the ear. It would be great to go through the streets with a green knife letting out yells until I died of the cold.
I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep, going on down, into the moist guts of the earth, taking in and thinking, eating every day.
I don't want so much misery. I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb, alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses, half frozen, dying of grief.
That's why Monday, when it sees me coming with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline, and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel, and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.
And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses, into hospitals where the bones fly out the window, into shoeshops that smell like vinegar, and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.
There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines hanging over the doors of houses that I hate, and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot, there are mirrors that ought to have wept from shame and terror, there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.
I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes, my rage, forgetting everything, I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops, and courtyards with washing hanging from the line: underwear, towels and shirts from which slow dirty tears are falling.
And that's an interesting question. I used to like Love, back when Hole was new and she was marrying Kurt Cobain. Since his suicide, her life has been a train wreck of drug abuse, affairs, failures, and some amazing successes as well. Her fame is more about the extremes she will go to in order to stay in the public eye.
She recently discussed her conversion to Buddhist meditation to help her kick her drug addictions. Maybe it will stick this time. Fans of her music can only hope.
Now this new book, which she calls a diary. Here is a bit from the Salon article:
Why we should care about Love's private thoughts given her blatant lust for publicity is the more pressing question that her book raises. There are several reasons Love is a touchstone: She calls herself a feminist when it is a label many women, famous or otherwise, do not wear proudly. But feminists are reluctant to champion her, as her choices have often been embarrassing -- or worse -- from playing Larry Flynt's wife in a controversial film to allegedly using drugs while pregnant with her daughter. Love also commits what amounts to a mortal sin by overestimating her own beauty, talent and achievements, believing utterly in herself in a culture where women's self-esteem is undermined at every turn. And then there are the lingering doubts that she earned that fame at all, having been married to a man more successful than she was, and having refused to fade away graciously after his death. Instead, she has held on even tighter, trying ever harder to prove her worth through her music, her film roles and now her book.
Love is adamant in her author's note about the fact that she "really hasn't written a book." She will find no argument here. This is a pastiche, an assemblage, the most Barthian of texts. Yet it is undeniably a reflection of Love's psyche, confirming that Love's allure lies in her glorious disarray. As they say in the South, she's a hot mess. She is not from the starlet factory where they mint Jojos and Rhiannas and other girls who can do that sweet-yet-sexy-yet-a-little-tough thing. She comes from an era when women played their own instruments and wrote their own songs, but she's not one of those Jewel-ish whiners or Sheryl Crow lite rockers. She's the real deal: a grungy girl punk rock star. And she can't quite shake that aura no matter how high her heels or how fancy her borrowed designer gowns.
Read the whole article -- it's interesting.
Here's a clip of Hole live, singing "Awful" at the MTv Music Awards:
Whatever else she is, untalented isn't it. She was making music and rising in the punk scene long before she met and married Cobain.
The question that interests me is, how do we make sense of her self-destruction and self-promotion in the context of her career? Is that what it looks like to self-destruct in public and enjoy the exposure?
The Salon article looks at the feminism issue, which Love seems to be pushing with the authors she lined up to write commentaries on the book (the afterward is by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, the authors of "Manifesta"). There have been other female artists in the last 20 years to do the whole punk ethos and still be successful musicians, but none have sought fame the way Love has.
So maybe that is why she is still famous and worth looking at. She obsessively creates her fame while at the same time being a victim of it. She shows us our darkest impulses and their consequences.
If we're lucky, she will stay clean this time and get back to what she does best -- making riot grrrl punk rock with a touch of self-consciousness.
Specifically, he is talking about how we can devote pure attention to our partners. He uses breeder language here as though only men might have purpose (I guess he mostly writes for men), but the message is universal in its truth.
Every man knows that his highest purpose in life cannot be reduced to any particular relationship. If a man prioritizes his relationship over his highest purpose, he weakens himself, disserves the universe, and cheats his woman of an authentic man who can offer her full, undivided presence.
Admit to yourself that if you had to choose one or the other, the perfect intimate relationship or achieving your highest purpose in life, you would choose to succeed at your purpose. Just this self-knowledge often relieves much pressure a man feels to prioritize his relationship when, in fact, it is not his highest priority.
Your mission is your priority. Unless you know your mission and have aligned your life to it, your core will feel empty. Your presence in the world will be weakened, as will your presence with your intimate partner. The next time you notice yourself "giving in" to your woman, postponing your mission and denying your true purpose in order to spend time with her, stop. Tell your woman that you love her, but you cannot deny your heart's purpose. Tell her that you will spend 30 minutes (or some specific time) with her in absolute attention and total presence, but then you must return to carry on your mission.
Your woman will be more fulfilled with 30 minutes a day of undivided attention and ravishing love than she will with a few hours of your weak and divided presence when your heart really isn't into it. Time you spend with your woman should be time you really want to be with her more than anything else. If you'd rather be doing something else, she'll feel it. Both of you will be dissatisfied.
I can see the truth in this from my last relationship. There were often times when I spent time with her and would rather have been somewhere else, doing something that felt important to me at the time. She could always sense that, too. There were other issues involved besides my own stuff, but I didn't know enough to set a clear boundary that we both could be clear on. If I had known how to recognize what was happening and deal with it at the time, things would have been much better between us.
Deida is correct that most partners would rather focused quality attention for shorter periods than longer and unfocused, uncommitted attention. I wish I would have read his work years ago.
I found this very cool site on digg. There are 30+ pictures of insects -- in extreme close-ups. Here are a couple of my favorites. You can click on the image to see it full size.
As usual, Lance Armstrong set a goal and achieved it. He wanted to run the 26.1 miles in under 3 hours and he finished with a time of 2:59:37. To top it off, he did it with painful shin splints and having never ran for more than 16 miles in his life.
Many on the internet were betting on him finishing in less than 2 hours 30 minutes, which would put among the elite runners. Hi Lanceness warned in advance that that wasn't going to happen. He said: “I have no delusions of grandeur about my finish,” he told newspaper USA Today. “It's too late for any crazy marathon training. It's just too much pain. That might be the nail in the coffin.”
He was also quoted as saying it's unlikely he will run another marathon. This one was for the money: $600,000 for cancer research.
Too bad. He's a gifted athlete still in the prime of his athletic ability. He could easily be a competitive racer if he put in the miles and learned how to run such a race.
Oh yeah, the winner was Brazil's Marilson Gomes dos Santos who finished in 2 hours, 9 minutes and 58 seconds.
(2006-11-05) — A palpable wave of fear swept across the nation today as precinct-by-precinct voters began to realize that Wednesday morning they’ll probably wake up to news that, once again, they’ve elected the representatives they deserve.
“I want to vote for someone with personal integrity, honesty, solid moral character and a vision for the future of this nation that supercedes personal ambition,” said one Pennsylvania voter, “but instead it looks like we’re going to get someone who’s no better than me.”
The anxiety crossed political boundaries as Republicans and Democrats alike admitted that political advertising filled with gossip, innuendo, vitriol and lies was little more than what one voter called “my daily life, on steroids.”
After months of acrimonious debate on the national stage, insult exchanges on internet forums and blogs, and even some house-to-house political combat, many voters have begun to recognize that politicians behave badly toward each other because the U.S. government is “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
“You can pass laws to get the special interest money out of politics,” said one Chicago-area voter, “but that’s not enough. Real campaign reform would have to get the people out of politics. They’re what’s lousing it up, making it shameful. This would be a truly great government if it weren’t for the people in office and the people who elect them.”
Experts concede that while the government is hobbled by the handicap of human nature, it could still do some good if it had some checks and balances, limited power, rule by law instead of men, and if it were all superintended by some authority higher than mankind.
“If we could draft a document that would specify those constraints,” said one Congressional scholar, “Then we’d have the foundation for the greatest nation on earth.”
The sorrow of riverside blossoms inexplicable, And nowhere to complain -- I've gone half crazy. I look up our southern neighbor. But my friend in wine Gone ten days drinking. I find only an empty bed.
A thick frenzy of blossoms shrouding the riverside, I stroll, listing dangerously, in full fear of spring. Poems, wine -- even this profusely driven, I endure. Arrangements for this old, white-haired man can wait.
A deep river, two or three houses in bamboo quiet, And such goings on: red blossoms glaring with white! Among spring's vociferous glories, I too have my place: With a lovely wine, bidding life's affairs bon voyage.
Looking east to Shao, its smoke filled with blossoms, I admire that stately Po-hua wineshop even more. To empty golden wine cups, calling such beautiful Dancing girls to embroidered mats -- who could bear it?
East of the river, before Abbot Huang's grave, Spring is a frail splendor among gentle breezes. In this crush of peach blossoms opening ownerless, Shall I treasure light reds, or treasure them dark?
At Madame Huang's house, blossoms fill the paths: Thousands, tens of thousands haul the branches down. And butterflies linger playfully -- an unbroken Dance floating to songs orioles sing at their ease.
I don't so love blossoms I want to die. I'm afraid, Once they are gone, of old age still more impetuous. And they scatter gladly, by the branchful. Let's talk Things over, little buds ---open delicately, sparingly.
*****
Full Moon
Above the tower -- a lone, twice-sized moon. On the cold river passing night-filled homes, It scatters restless gold across the waves. On mats, it shines richer than silken gauze.
Empty peaks, silence: among sparse stars, Not yet flawed, it drifts. Pine and cinnamon Spreading in my old garden . . . All light, All ten thousand miles at once in its light!
*****
Morning Rain
A slight rain comes, bathed in dawn light. I hear it among treetop leaves before mist Arrives. Soon it sprinkles the soil and, Windblown, follows clouds away. Deepened
Colors grace thatch homes for a moment. Flocks and herds of things wild glisten Faintly. Then the scent of musk opens across Half a mountain -- and lingers on past noon.
*****
Here is some biographical information about Tu Fu from Wikipedia. For those who are interested, I highly recommend reading the whole entry -- it's very well-done and educational not just about Tu Fu, but about all Chinese poetry.
Du Fu or Tu Fu (712–770) was a prominent Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty. Along with Li Bai (Li Po), he is frequently called the greatest of the Chinese poets. His own greatest ambition was to help his country by becoming a successful civil servant, but he proved unable to make the necessary accommodations. His life, like the whole country, was devastated by the An Lushan Rebellion of 755, and the last 15 years of his life were a time of almost constant unrest.
In establishing a context for the entry, the authors of this piece on Tu Fu have added the following, which I think is very useful in reading any of the Chinese poets.
Traditionally, Chinese literary criticism has placed great emphasis on knowledge of the life of the author when interpreting a work, a practice which Watson attributes to "the close links that traditional Chinese thought posits between art and morality" (p. xvii). This becomes all the more important in the case of a writer such as Du Fu, in whose poems morality and history are so prominent. Another reason, identified by the Chinese historian William Hung, is that Chinese poems are typically extremely concise, omitting circumstantial factors which may be relevant, but which could be reconstructed by an informed contemporary. For modern western readers therefore, "The less accurately we know the time, the place and the circumstances in the background, the more liable we are to imagine it incorrectly, and the result will be that we either misunderstand the poem or fail to understand it altogether" (p. 5). Du Fu's life is therefore treated here in some detail.
I first came to Tu Fu through the translations of Kenneth Rexroth back in college. I didn't then appreciate the simplicity (which hides complex ideas) in the work of Tu Fu or Li Po, or any of the others. But many years later, living in Seattle, I came upon some translations by Sam Hamill and began to reread these amazing poets.
It's likely that my interest in Buddhism revived my interest in these poets, but I am also deeply impressed by the use of images to convey feeling and meaning. We have very little sense of how the images in these poems work as place markers for big ideas among Chinese readers, but if we envision our own depth of meaning for images such as doves, ocean waves, or cowboys we can begin to get closer. When we read about plum blossoms, or cranes, or the moon in Chinese poetry, these images have very defined meanings that become apparent over time and with a little research.
In the end, though, it is the poem itself that brings me back to Tu Fu over and over again. Each time I come back I find new things to admire in the brief lines.
Clear Autumn. I gaze out into Endless spaces. The Horizon Wavers in bands of haze. Far off The river flows into the sky. The lone city is blurred with smoke. The wind blows the last leaves away. The hills grow dim as the sun sets. A single crane flies late to roost. The twilit trees are full of crows.
*****
Clear Evening After Rain
The sun sinks towards the horizon. The light clouds are blown away. A rainbow shines on the river. The last raindrops spatter the rocks. Cranes and herons soar in the sky. Fat bears feed along the banks. I wait here for the west wind And enjoy the crescent moon Shining through misty bamboo.
*****
[This is a different translation of the "Full Moon" poem from above. Notice how differently two people can translate the same pictographs]
Full Moon
Isolate and full, the moon Floats over the house by the river. Into the night the cold water rushes away below the gate. The bright gold spilled on the river is never still. The brilliance of my quilt is greater than precious silk. The circle without blemish. The empty mountains without sound. The moon hangs in the vacant, wide constellations. Pine cones drop in the old garden. The senna trees bloom. The same clear glory extends for ten thousand miles.
