Tech Tips: 6 Ways to Maximize Your Internet Speed
Tech Tips: 6 Ways to Maximize Your Internet Speed |
- Tech Tips: 6 Ways to Maximize Your Internet Speed
- Early Morning Buddhist Spirituality Inspiration - 6/11/2013
- Jay Lake is dying. Honestly. Bravely. Read his blog!
- The “near enemy” of mudita, or joyful appreciation
- Not taking into account
| Tech Tips: 6 Ways to Maximize Your Internet Speed Posted: 11 Jun 2013 11:00 AM PDT  A fast Internet speed comes with many benefits, whether you're a gamer, an artist, or a FarmVille fanatic. When you want to browse at faster speeds, stream media in the blink of an eye, and run several programs at once, you need your Internet to carry you. Fortunately you can do a number of things to get a better browsing speed. Today I'll show you 6 easy ways to maximize your Internet speed and get the most out of your computer. Read more »  Read More @ Source |
| Early Morning Buddhist Spirituality Inspiration - 6/11/2013 Posted: 11 Jun 2013 06:00 AM PDT  "There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting." ~The Buddha      Read More @ Source |
| Jay Lake is dying. Honestly. Bravely. Read his blog! Posted: 10 Jun 2013 11:00 PM PDT Jay Lake has a terminal cancer diagnosis. He expects to die within a year. I love Jay Lake. Yet I've never met Jay Lake. I probably never will meet Jay Lake. I only heard of Jay Lake yesterday, from a story about him in the Portland Oregonian. Last night I wrote about him on my other blog. I donated $ 10 to the Jay Wake pre-mortem celebration of his life/roast that is happening next month. I left a comment on the Oregonian story. I can't believe my comment was, and is, just one of two readers of the story have written. Because already Jay has changed my life. People need to read what he has been writing. It is damn good. More, fucking good. The guy is an excellent writer. But what makes his blog posts so fascinating and inspiring to me is Jay's brutal honesty. He is facing terminal cancer head-on. He is facing death head-on. Tonight I read some of Jay's blog posts to my wife. She said, "Why are you so engrossed in this? I thought you were afraid of death and didn't like to think about it." Both are true. I'm afraid of dying. I don't like to think about my death. However, I used to be more afraid, more avoidant. Aging has a way of bringing me closer to reality. My Medicare card came in the mail today. I'm not eligible yet, but the card is stamped with the date when I am -- not many months away. Soon I will be an official freaking Senior Citizen. And that much closer to death. When I get right to the edge of death's door, I want to be like Jay Lake. Laughing at death as much as I can; crying honestly when I can't laugh. Anyway, enough about me. Now read Jay's writing. Here's some places to start: His blog's home page. A post about hope and despair. So real, so honest. Over the past few years, hope has been frankly poisonous to me. Every time I've started to have serious hope, I've been shot down by another round of cancer, another round of bad news, to the point where even proudly logical me has become immersed in that species of magical thinking that says, "If you hope, you'll just lose what you hope for, so better to despair and have the potential to be pleasantly surprised, than to hope and be shot down yet again." I can only stand to have my head pounded into the metaphorical concrete so many times, and I'm past my limit. The "religion" category of Jay's blog. He's a truth-telling atheist. A post about what a bad Mindfulness he would be. Me too, Jay. I would be a terrible Mindfulness these days because the literalized metaphor of my suffering is written in scars across my body, in the daily convulsions of my stomach and my bowels, in the despair and fear and occasional triumph of my thoughts. I live in the valley of the shadow of death, and there is no one here to succor me except myself, and those whose hands reach back from the light beyond. This suffering would make me a terrible Mindfulness, because it keeps me too focused on my sense of self and my narrative in this world. But it might be making me a better human being. At least I love more thoughtfully and live more carefully than I used to. If I am coming to believe in anything in the faith-holding sense, it is that I have come to believe in my own death. Which is of course the least surprising aspect of life. The narrative? She keeps changing. |
| The “near enemy” of mudita, or joyful appreciation Posted: 10 Jun 2013 10:00 PM PDT
But here's a trickier one. Someone asked me about joy that's based on luck, or worldly gains: "I know too many folks (above all in the IT field) who stumbled into riches and others who worked themselves to the bone yet nonetheless are still struggling just to get by." This question really got me thinking. Could we end up focusing on cultivating joy for people who are, perhaps, privileged? Could rejoicing in people's good fortune lead to us ignoring the plight of people who are struggling against the odds? After all, gains are often not fair. There is bias in the job market against people of color and against women. There is bias against people who are currently unemployed, who are less likely to receive a job offer than similarly (or even less) qualified people who already have jobs. There is bias against people with disabilities. Is mudita, to put it in extreme terms, elitist, siding with the most fortunate? Let's take a look at how Upatissa describes the practice of mudita in his Path of Liberation:
So this account of mudita is entirely to do with good qualities and good choices, and with the joy and peace brought by having good qualities and making good choices. It's nothing to do with "luck" in the sense of nice things happening for no apparent reason, or indeed about worldly gains or any sort. I think that responding to worldly good fortune — for example your friend gets a job — is in the same ballpark as mudita, and may even be a form of mudita, but it's not what Upatissa seems to have imagined us celebrating or cultivating in our meditation practice. In fact Buddhaghosa, in the 5th century Path of Purification, describes the near enemy of mudita (the near enemy being a quality that is similar enough to mudita that it can be confused with it) in terms that sound very like the luck or worldly gains that the original question raised:
So Buddhaghosa seems to be suggesting that celebrating in worldly gains and luck is a distraction from mudita. I think that he's right — if that's the only thing we celebrate. I don't think mudita at all excludes rejoicing in people's good luck but it's not the main focus, which is celebrating good qualities and good choices and the peace and joy that follow from them. That's the way I've consistently been talking and writing about mudita. But I do think mudita can include celebrating people's good luck. When a friend is looking for somewhere to live and finds a new apartment, it's natural and proper for us to be happy for their gain (and although there can be a large component of hard work and initiative involved in that kind of gain, there's also a large element of chance).  If you benefit from the work I do, please consider supporting Wildmind. Click here to make a one-time or recurring donation. But such strokes of good fortune often come at others' expense. There are inevitably losers in such a gain. Your friend was lucky and got the apartment, but there would have been even more people who were unlucky, since his or her signing a lease on the apartment necessarily excluded other from getting it. The world becomes a better place if your friend develops a skillful quality like courage, patience, or compassion. And although your friend's world is improved is she or he gets a new apartment, the world as a whole isn't really a better place. How should we deal with all this? Well, I'd suggest that our mudita may celebrate our friend's luck, and that compassion is there for those who were unlucky, if we happen to be aware of someone in that situation. I don't think we have to go seeking the unlucky applicants for your friend's apartment in order to "balance out" the mudita we're feeling for our friend. I'd suggest that there is plenty of suffering in the world and therefore plenty of opportunity to cultivate compassion. When there's something to celebrate, celebrate it. When there's reason to be compassionate, be compassionate. But in the practice I'd suggest focusing mainly on good celebrating qualities, good choices, and on the joy and peace that arise from them. Although we should celebrate worldly gains and good fortune when we come across them, that's not the main point of the practice. Read More @ Source |
| Posted: 10 Jun 2013 09:00 PM PDT The view of pop Buddhists and Theravada monks is that the Buddha taught there is no self. Part of this view rests on the assumption that the self is like horns on a hare or a barren woman's child. In other words, self is an illusion—a mere fiction. The other part, rests on the assumption that the Five Aggregates of form, feeling, perception, predispositions and consciousness are the standard on which a judgment may be based for determining whether or not a self or attâ/âtman is real. Such views are all wrong. In many of the Buddha's discourses he asks us to reflect that the conditioned world is impermanent, suffering and not self or anattâ. Interestingly, what is impermanent, suffering, and no self or anattâ is also regarded by the Buddha to be the Five Aggregates. As reason tells us, they cannot be a standard for judging anything about self. If someone believes the self is an illusion, there is no basis for judging such. The guess is capricious. In one particular discourse (S. iii. 33-4), the Buddha asks us to abandon what is not ours, namely, the Five Aggregates. So, evidently, the abandoner of the aggregates is real who is not the conditioned Five Aggregates. Heretofore, I was clinging to the aggregates in the belief that they were my self. I believed I was form, feeling, etc. In short, I believed I was this psychophysical person. Now I know that the one who abandons or rejects the aggregates is me. This first-person is like an island and a refuge along with the Dharma (S. iii. 42). It alone knows what is true and what is false (A. i. 149). The view of pop Buddhists and Theravada monks, that the Buddha denied the self, is not taking any account of the many discourses in the Buddhist canon in which we are taught by the Buddha not to identify with the Five Aggregates for various reasons. These discourses are being addressed to the first-person, that is, the self or attâ—not the anattâ.
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As I've pointed out before, we shouldn't experience mudita, or joyful appreciation for happiness that arises in others through unskillful actions. If someone feels joy because they just swindled an old lady or robbed a bank, or because they're high on cocaine, those would be forms of joy based on unskillful motivations and actions, and those therefore aren't the kinds of things that we should, in our own turn, feel joyful about.| You are subscribed to email updates from BuddhaRocks ☸ To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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