Let us amuse ourselves for a moment with a dance, so that we can better understand "knowing". Suppose I say, "I know that it's windy." "I" refers more to my mind than my body, so this sentence really means, "My mind knows that it is windy." Mind is the knower, so really we are saying, "The knower knows that it is windy." "The knower" is the subject, "knows" is the verb, and "it is windy" is the object. But it is funny to say, "The knower knows," isn't it? We imagine that the knower is an entity which exists independently of its object and which resides in our brain making brief excursions into the "outside world" to see what is happening out there. Just as we use a ruler to measure something, we fit our mind to a preconceived model, one that was created by our mind itself. Therefore, what we call "mind" is not pure and true mind. It is enmeshed in concepts.
When we say, "I know the wind is blowing," we don't think there is something blowing something else. "Wind" goes with "blowing". If there is no blowing, there is no wind. It is the same with knowing. Mind is the knower; the knower is mind. We are talking about knowing in relation to the wind. "To know" is to know something. Knowing is inseparable from the wind. Wind and knowing are one. We can say, "Wind," and that is enough. The presence of wind indicates the presence of knowing, and the presence of the action of blowing. If we reduce the sentence "I know the wind is blowing" to simply "Wind", we can avoid grammatical mistakes and approach reality.
In daily life, we have grown used to a way of thinking and expressing ourselves that is based on the idea that everything is independent of everything else. This way of thinking and speaking makes it difficult to penetrate non-dualistic, non-discriminatory reality, a reality which cannot be contained in concepts.
Sunshine is green leaves
Green leaves are sunshine
Sunshine is not different from green leaves
Green leaves are not different from sunshine
The same is true of all forms and colors.
Meditation is not imitation, but creation. Meditators who only imitate their instructors cannot go far. The same is true of cooking, or anything. A good cook is someone with a creative spirit. You can enter the Meditation on the Interdependence of All Phenomena through many different doors -- observing your internal organs: blood, heart, intestines, lungs, liver, kidneys; or thousands of other means, including thoughts, feelings, images, poetry, dreams, or a river, a star, a leaf, and so on.
A good practitioner uses meditation throughout daily life, not wasting a single opportunity, a single event, to see deeply the nature of dependent coarising. All day long practice is carried out in perfect concentration. With eyes open or closed, the nature of meditation is no other than samadhi. You can discard the idea that you must close your eyes to look inside and open them to look outside. A thought is no more an inner object than a mountain an outer one. Both are objects of knowledge. Neither is inner or outer. Great concentration is achieved when you are fully present, in profound communion with living reality. At these times the distinction between subject and object disappears and you penetrate living reality with ease, are one with it, because you have set aside all tools for measuring knowledge, knowledge which Buddhism calls "erroneous knowledge."
Fearless in Life and Death
Continue to practice the meditation on interdependence for awhile and you will notice a change in yourself. Your perspective will widen, and you will find that you look at all living beings with compassion. The grudges and hatreds that you thought were impenetrable will begin to erode, and you will find yourself caring for each and every being. Most important, you will no longer be afraid of life and death.
To meditate means to observe.
The secret of meditation is to be conscious of each second of your existence and to keep the sun of awareness continually shining -- in both the physical and psychological realms, in all circumstances, on each thing that arises.
Meditation reveals not a concept of truth, but a direct view of truth itself. This we call Insight, the kind of understanding based on attention and concentration.
The notion of "not self" is a method, not a goal. If it becomes a concept, it must be destroyed along with all other concepts.
These four virtues: lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and non-attachment are the fruits of the meditation on the principle of the interdependent co-arising of things.
Peace can exist only in the present moment. If you truly want to be at peace, you must be at peace right now.
Related:
Sunshine is Green Leaves.
There is Knowing in the Wind.
Forgiveness: How to Let Go of Grudges and Bitterness.
Original article at Seishindo by Charlie Badenhop.
"Whoever... sees in illness a vital expression of the organism, will no longer see it as an enemy. In the moment I realize that the disease is a creation of the patient, it becomes for me the same sort of thing as his manner of walking, his mode of speech, his facial expression, the movements of his hands, the drawings he has made, the house he has built, the business he has settled, or the way his thoughts go: a significant symbol of the powers that rule him, and that I try to influence when I deem it right."Georg Groddeck; MD
About 35 years ago I had the good fortune to study with a woman who was a powerful healer. Among her many talents was her gift of helping people heal themselves from cancer. She worked with herbs, diet, energy healing, self awareness, and prayer. I learned a great deal from her, and in the years since I've continued to use and further develop what she taught me.
My teacher believed that disease was a life affirming communication from the person's deeper self. A strong voice calling out to the person, letting them know they needed to redirect their energy and live their life differently. The more serious a disease appeared to be, the stronger the signal from the deeper self. The more serious a disease appeared to be, the more of the person's whole self was being activated for the task of healing. Life threatening illnesses were understood to show a strong desire to live a better life.
Clients were taught to listen carefully to the wisdom of their symptoms, so they could appreciate what their body was telling them, and begin to decode the life affirming messages their body was communicating.
On one occasion a man in his early thirties showed up who had late stage cancer. My teacher asked him to tell her about his life and a compelling story of self destruction followed. The gentleman was a highly accomplished stock broker who was using cocaine, alcohol, and stimulants to keep himself on a wild roller coaster ride of "success".
Over the following months the man cleaned up his life. He changed his diet, took a range of supplements, got into meditation and praying, and gave up his debilitating habits. As often but not always happened, the man wound up healing himself of his cancer.
A few months after he'd been declared fully healthy by his doctors the man showed up at one of my teacher's classes. He said he was in the final stages of writing a book called "Cancer can save your life!".
"As weird as it might seem," he said, "I'm now truly thankful for having had cancer."
"Without the cancer I would have certainly gone on living the kind of life that in some strange way had felt like a 'privilege' of my success."
"It would have only been a matter of time before my many excesses would have killed me!"
I remember the first time I told the story of the stockbroker to a client who was suffering from a life threatening illness. She said, "Easy for him to be so positive after regaining his health!"
"Yes," I said, "It is easy to appreciate your illness after you’ve regained your health."
"The task we have before us now," I suggested, "Is to begin to engage your own process of appreciation prior to recovering your health, so that the healing energy hiding within your disease is given the opportunity to be activated."
"Simple but not necessarily easy," I said.
"At least one of us needs to start out believing you are indeed capable of recovering your health. I will thus sit here trusting in your capacity to activate the healing energy that resides within you, until such time that you're ready and able to join me. Together, we will find the best way to appreciate and respond to your system's call for help!"
Request for prayers and assistance
Charlie 's Russian friend and colleague Inessa Rebeyko (the webmaster for Seishindo) has been recently diagnosed with cancer and is beginning to undergo various treatment methods.
Please keep Inessa in your thoughts and prayers. The more of you who can find the time to send caring thoughts her way, the better!
The cost for Inessa's treatment and rehabilitation will be considerable, and beyond the resources she currently has. If you would like to make a donation to a health fund for Inessa, please go to the following link:
http://www.seishindo.org/making_a_donation.html.
It was originally filmed in September 2004 by videographer David Budzinski and photographer Jason Schlosberg at a watering hole in Kruger National Park, South Africa. The video depicts an unfolding confrontation between a herd of Cape Buffalo, a small pride of lions, and a pair of crocodiles over a baby buffalo. The baby buffalo survives!Battle at Kruger - Wikipedia.
Related:
Lions: Africa’s Magnificent Predators.
From Nature News.
A pack of killer whales uses waves to knock seals off the ice.
They made large waves to wash the seal off the relative safety of the ice. Later the orca put the seal back on the ice and dislodged the seal a second time which suggested strongly they were training their young.
It is not the first time a complex behaviour has been seen in just a few orcas. In the early 1970s, an orca was seen in Argentina beaching itself next to seals. At first it seemed to be in distress, but then it lunged at seals nearby, grabbed one by the neck, and dragged it back into the water. This beaching hunting technique has since been observed hundreds of times in Argentina among a small group of orcas. Studies have shown that the orcas can time their forays onto land to coincide with the tides, so they run less risk of becoming permanently beached.
Both the beaching and the wave hunting seem to be techniques that pod elders teach to younger animals. The Argentinean orcas have been seen nudging youngsters onto the shore, encouraging them to try the tactic, often coming up alongside to demonstrate. In the group at the Antarctic Peninsula, young orcas are often present during the hunt, and adults sometimes put living seals back on the ice after catching them, seemingly so that the young can have another try.
“This is orca culture,” says Visser.
The long-eared jerboa, a tiny nocturnal mammal that is dwarfed by its enormous ears, can be found in deserts in Mongolia and China.
Zoological Society of London (ZSL) scientist Jonathan Baillie said the footage was helping researchers to learn more about the mysterious animal.
The species is classified as endangered on the IUCN Red list.
"These creatures hop just like a kangaroo; it is amazing to watch. Little hairs on their feet, almost like snow shoes, allow them to jump along the sand," he explained.
"And in terms of mammals, they have one of the biggest ear-to-body ratios out there."
The footage revealed that the creatures spent daylight hours in underground tunnels beneath the sand, and that their diet was mostly made up of insects.
We travelled to the Gobi to find out about the animal's status and learn more about it so we can develop a thorough long-term action plan."
The expedition formed part of ZSL's Edge programme, which focuses its efforts on conservation plans for animals that are both endangered and evolutionarily distinctive.
The long-eared jerboa is one of 10 species that the programme is looking at this year.
"Everyone thinks the desert is a totally desolate area, void of biodiversity, and often when conservation planning is done, deserts are overlooked.
"But there are some remarkable species in the desert, so we really need to start paying attention to this environment."
Scientists scanning the deep interior of Earth have found evidence of a vast water reservoir beneath eastern Asia that is at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean. (view image)
The discovery marks the first time such a large body of water has found in the planet’s deep mantle.
The finding, made by Michael Wysession, a seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis, and his former graduate student Jesse Lawrence, now at the University of California, San Diego, will be detailed in a forthcoming monograph to be published by the American Geophysical Union.
The pair analyzed more than 600,000 seismograms—records of waves generated by earthquakes traveling through the Earth—collected from instruments scattered around the planet.
They noticed a region beneath Asia where seismic waves appeared to dampen, or “attenuate,” and also slow down slightly. “Water slows the speed of waves a little,” Wysession explained. “Lots of damping and a little slowing match the predictions for water very well.”
Although they appear solid, the composition of some ocean floor rocks is up to 15 percent water. “The water molecules are actually stuck in the mineral structure of the rock,” Wysession explained. “As you heat this up, it eventually dehydrates.
The researchers estimate that up to 0.1 percent of the rock sinking down into the Earth’s mantle in that part of the world is water, which works out to about an Arctic Ocean’s worth of water.
Wysession has dubbed the new underground feature the “Beijing anomaly,” because seismic wave attenuation was found to be highest beneath the Chinese capital city. “China is under greater seismic risk than just about any country in the world, so they are very interested in seismology.”
Water covers 70 percent of Earth’s surface and one of its many functions is to act like a lubricant for the movement of continental plates.
It has taken more than two years, but the One Laptop Per Child initiative has finally released its much-anticipated laptop: the OLPC XO-1.
The XO-1 costs $200 each to donate, but for a limited time — until Dec. 31, 2007 — people can avail themselves of the "Give One, Get One" promotion to give a $399 donation ($200 of which is tax-deductible).
One laptop goes to a disadvantaged child in a developing nation, while OLPC gives you another one as a thank-you gift of sorts.
Just be advised, this limited-time offer is the only way you'll be able to get your hands on the XO-1 for the foreseeable future. After the end of the year, people can still donate the laptops, but they won't be getting one as a gift.
The OLPC XO-1 has an LED backlit screen; it's compatible with 802.11b/g Wi-Fi; and it also offers 802.11s "mesh networking" — a type of peer-to-peer ad hoc networking that requires zero configuration. And it uses so little power that an external hand generator or a solar panel can power the system.
..
A drop from child height is unlikely to break the impact-resistant plastic case.
The keyboard has a lot of new symbols on it, including a row of buttons representing the neighborhood, classroom and individual.
These buttons modify the GUI so that you see the world in general (over Wi-Fi or mesh networks), local users (if you are in a classroom environment with an OLPC XS school server) or the activities you are working on now or in the past.
So far it's up to the individual countries' respective departments of education or local organizations to get the laptops actually into students' hands.
You don't get to choose what country your charitable laptop goes to if you buy an individual unit, but if you donate 100 to 10,000 units or more, you get to choose where they go.
Our Stories was founded by UNICEF, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), and Google, and to help collect, preserve, and share online the stories of the world's people and their cultures and communities. The OLPC initiative, partnered with existing UNICEF projects, gives children the tools to interview, record, and share the stories of their parents, grandparents, and others in their families and communities. The focus during this phase is on children in developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia where OLPC computers are available. Eventually, children and others will be able to share and access recorded stories directly through the Our Stories Children's site.
Found only on the islands of Oahu, Molokai, Maui, and Hawaii, the happy face spider, such as this one guarding its eggs on a leaf in Maui, is known for the unique patterns that decorate its pale abdomen. :)
A Sumatran rhinoceros has been photographed in peninsular Malaysia in the first sighting for more than a decade, raising hopes the animal can avoid extinction, a report said Sunday.
The report did not reveal where the rhino was snapped, but said the photo was taken in a wildlife corridor targeted by the Wildlife and National Parks Department which also spotted elephants, sun bears and the bison-like gaur.
"We're going back to areas where the rhinos were once recorded, looking for more signs and taking samples," said Siti Hawa Yatim, head of the department's biodiversity conservation division.
World Wildlife Fund Malaysia announced earlier this year that it had captured video footage of the extremely rare Borneo sub-species of the critically-endangered Sumatran rhino. The footage, taken in a forest in Malaysia's Sabah state on Borneo island, showed a rhino eating, peering through jungle foliage and sniffing the automatic video camera equipment used to shoot it.
The Bornean sub-species is the rarest of all rhinos, distinguished from other Sumatran rhinos by its relatively small size, small teeth and distinctive shaped head.
WWF says scientists estimate there are only between 25 and 50 of the Bornean sub-species left.
When someone you care about hurts you, you can hold on to anger, resentment and thoughts of revenge or embrace forgiveness and move forward.
By embracing forgiveness, you embrace peace, hope, gratitude and joy. Here, Katherine M. Piderman, Ph.D., staff chaplain at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., discusses forgiveness and how it can lead you down the path of physical, emotional and spiritual well-being.
Forgiveness is the act of untying yourself from thoughts and feelings that bind you to the offense committed against you. This can reduce the power these feelings otherwise have over you, so that you can a live freer and happier life in the present. Forgiveness can even lead to feelings of understanding, empathy and compassion for the one who hurt you. You can forgive the person without excusing the act.
When we're unforgiving, it's we who pay the price over and over. We may bring our anger and bitterness into every relationship and new experience. Our lives may be so wrapped up in the wrong that we can't enjoy the present.
Forgiveness is a commitment to a process of change. One step is to recognize the value of forgiveness and its importance in our lives at a given time. Another is to reflect on the facts of the situation, how we've reacted, and how this combination has affected our lives, our health and our well-being. Then, as we are ready, we can actively choose to forgive the one who has offended us. In this way, we move away from our role as a victim and release the control and power the offending person and situation have had in our lives. Forgiveness also means that we change old patterns of beliefs and actions that are driven by our bitterness. As we let go of grudges, we'll no longer define our lives by how we've been hurt, and we may even find compassion and understanding.
Keep in mind that the key benefits of forgiveness are for you. It can also be beneficial to pray, use guided meditation or journal. In any case, if the intention to forgive is present, forgiveness will come in its time. Keep an open heart and mind.
Forgiveness brings a kind of peace that helps you go on with life. The offense is no longer front and center in your thoughts or feelings. Your hostility, resentment and misery have made way for compassion, kindness and peace. Also, remember that forgiveness often isn't a one-time thing. It begins with a decision, but because memories or another set of words or actions may trigger old feelings, you may need to recommit to forgiveness over and over again.
Getting the other person to change their actions, behavior or words isn't the point of forgiveness. ..
What if I'm the one who needs forgiveness? .. Keep in mind that you can't force someone to forgive you. They will need to move to forgiveness in their own time.
In any case, we have to be willing to forgive ourselves. Holding on to resentment against yourself can be just as toxic as holding on to resentment against someone else. Accept the fact that you — like everyone else — aren't perfect. Accept yourself despite your faults. Admit your mistakes. Commit to treating others with compassion, empathy and respect. And again, talking with a spiritual leader, mental health provider or trusted friend or relative may be helpful.
Forgiveness of yourself or someone else, though not easy, can transform your life. Instead of dwelling on the injustice and revenge, instead of being angry and bitter, you can move toward a life of peace, compassion, mercy, joy and kindness.
anonymous
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