Imad the Hypno Magician; Dhr. Seven, Pat Macpherson, Sheldon S. (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
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He's from another world! 😱
COMMENTARY
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Showing posts with label hand. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hand. Show all posts
Thursday, March 9, 2023
World's first "Hypno-Magician"? (video)
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Gil Fronsdal on everyday mindfulness
Read or download
The Issue at Hand is an excellent book written by Gil Fronsdal as a gift to the community. It is freely given and available online in the following languages:
- English (PDF)
- Espa̱ol РSpanish (PDF)
- Fran̤ais РFrench (PDF)
- Deutsch – German (PDF)
- Italiano – Italian (Partial)
- í•œêµì–´ – Korean (PDF)
- Chinese (Partial)
- Portugu̻s РPortuguese (Partial)
Order a free English or Spanish paperback in the U.S.:
Contact IMC.IssueatHand@gmail.com, and include your name and address. Allow up to three weeks for delivery.
Contact IMC.IssueatHand@gmail.com, and include your name and address. Allow up to three weeks for delivery.
Donations: are always welcome.
Gil Fronsdal is the primary teacher for the "Insight Meditation Center" in Redwood City, California; he has been teaching since 1990. He has practiced Zen and Vipassana in the U.S. and Asia since 1975.
He was a Theravada monk in Burma in 1985, and in 1989 began training with Jack Kornfield to be a Vipassana teacher. Gil teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center where he is part of its Teachers' Council.
Gil was ordained as a Soto Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982, and in 1995 received Dharma Transmission from Mel Weitsman, the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. He is currently serving on the SF Zen Center Elders' Council.
Gil has an undergraduate degree in agriculture from UC Davis, where he was active in promoting the field of sustainable farming. In 1998 he received a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University studying the earliest developments of the bodhisattva ideal. He is the author of The Issue at Hand: Essays on Mindfulness Practice, A Monastery Within: Tales from the Buddhist Path, and the translator of The Dhammapada, published by Shambhala Publications.
Hundreds of Gil's talks on meditation and Buddhist practice can be found on audiodharma.org.
He was a Theravada monk in Burma in 1985, and in 1989 began training with Jack Kornfield to be a Vipassana teacher. Gil teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center where he is part of its Teachers' Council.
Gil was ordained as a Soto Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982, and in 1995 received Dharma Transmission from Mel Weitsman, the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. He is currently serving on the SF Zen Center Elders' Council.
Hundreds of Gil's talks on meditation and Buddhist practice can be found on audiodharma.org.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Celibacy: Helpful vs. Unhelpful (cartoon)
Wisdom Quarterly (SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS COMMITTEE)
The high or supreme life (brahmacharya) is one of study, self restraint, and a vehicle to the world of the brahmas, which are neither male nor female and without sex. These heavens were the goal of Brahmins in the Vedic Brahmanism of the Buddha's time.
Sages, mendicants, yogis, ascetics, monks, spiritual seekers, shaman wanderers (shramans), temple priests (brahmins), and magicians all found it useful to turn away from sensual indulgences. Even food became a healthy necessity taken in moderation (often combined with complete fasts).
This left a surplus of life-energy (spiritus, prana, or chi) that could be dedicated to spiritual exertions -- cultivating an open, unbiased heart, a serene and luminous mind, a receptive attention span, unswerving dedication to knowing and seeing, enlightenment, liberation, or various meditation objects to cultivate such useful qualities as:
The high or supreme life (brahmacharya) is one of study, self restraint, and a vehicle to the world of the brahmas, which are neither male nor female and without sex. These heavens were the goal of Brahmins in the Vedic Brahmanism of the Buddha's time.
Sages, mendicants, yogis, ascetics, monks, spiritual seekers, shaman wanderers (shramans), temple priests (brahmins), and magicians all found it useful to turn away from sensual indulgences. Even food became a healthy necessity taken in moderation (often combined with complete fasts).
This left a surplus of life-energy (spiritus, prana, or chi) that could be dedicated to spiritual exertions -- cultivating an open, unbiased heart, a serene and luminous mind, a receptive attention span, unswerving dedication to knowing and seeing, enlightenment, liberation, or various meditation objects to cultivate such useful qualities as:
- mindfulness
- loving-kindness
- concentration (samadhi)
- serenity
- absorption
- supersensual bliss
- purification
- intensified or higher mind
With all the benefits that come of withdrawing and secluding oneself from sensual pursuits, there are few benefits to guilt, shame [unless it guards against karmically unprofitable actions], or hypocrisy. When one eats, one should enjoy it mindfully. When and if one has sex, one should enjoy it. Since there is value to restraint, when one is practicing restraint, one should enjoy it, reflecting on the benefits.
To do otherwise makes celibacy a farce, a front, a hypocritical veil. What benefit is there to deny the body while obsessing and indulging the mouth and mind and waiting for an opportunity to act on it?
To do otherwise makes celibacy a farce, a front, a hypocritical veil. What benefit is there to deny the body while obsessing and indulging the mouth and mind and waiting for an opportunity to act on it?
Friday, April 1, 2011
Yeti lends helping hand to Nepal monastery
It's no laughing matter: stealing Himalayan artifacts from ancient Buddhist cultures. 
KATHMANDU (TNN) - It sounds like an implausible April Fool's Day stunt. But after almost a decade, a centuries-old Buddhist monastery struggling in the foot region of Mt. Everest is now going to get a fresh lease of life, thanks to the yeti (Pali, yakshi, female ogre, in Buddhist cosmology).
Pangboche Monastery, built around a rock in Khumbu in northern Nepal, called the gateway to the world's highest peak, survived for centuries on donations given by foreign trekkers and mountaineers who visited the over 600-year-old edifice lured by tales of it possessing the skull and a hand of the yeti, the legendary beast who inspired an expedition by Sir Edmund Hillary himself and was the subject of a book by another Everest hero, Reinhold Messner. 
"I saw the skull and the hand in the late 1980s after I returned from New Zealand," says Ang Rita Sherpa, senior programme manager at The Mountain Institute that last year helped restore the crumbling down monastery with financial assistance from the US Ambassador's Fund. "Both were stolen in the early 1990s. After the monastery lost its main source of tourist attraction, it fell into hardship, barely able to sustain itself." More
Friday, April 17, 2009
Brahma's "Big Bang"
WQ edit of Religious interpretations of the Big Bang theory
Helix planetary nebula nicknamed "Eye of God" (NASA)
The Sound of Silence
Some Hindus believe that with the pranava mantra -- the AUM sound, or the "Word" in the "Beginning" -- the Universe was started. This is similar to the Big Bang theory. Omkara, the sound of ohm, is posited as the means of creation.
Capra, in his popular book The Tao of Physics, writes that:
Buddhist View
The Buddhist view of the universe (cosmology) can be found in a Buddhist scripture called the Agganchcha (Pali, Aganna) Sutra. According to Buddhism, as with everything within it, the universe itself is subject to radical imperma-nence. It is in a perpetual state of becoming (rather than "being) and while no discernible beginning is declared, there is also no definitive end. There are instead many beginnings and ends, cyclical ages (aeons) and epochs, and countless other universes (world systems) in all directions.
When the existing universe or world system dies, it goes into a state of undifferentiated chaos. It emerges again due in part to its own nature and partly as a result of karma. At that time, living beings are mostly reborn into a Brahma world (abhassara-brahma-loka). There they subsist on "joy" and fly about.
Billions of years later (immeasurable cycles of time, aeons), an empty space emerges as a result of karma. There a first being, who thus earns the title Maha Brahma (great divinity), is said to be reborn alone. Soon after, other beings (brahmas) are reborn. Often this leads the Great Brahma to imagine that It called them into existence. Later It may say, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first, the last, the always, the creator, the sustainer, the destroyer. As I will it, so it becomes" and other similarly faulty deductions and declarations.
However, the state of Brahmas are only for beings with a store of high caliber karma (merit). Their mental state is such that they are not attached to sensual pleasures. They are neither male nor female but neuter. Other beings, habitually desiring the enjoyment of less refined pleasures, take rebirth in denser worlds.
As a result of their "karma" (those actions previously willed, carried out, and accumulated coming to fruition) appropriate worlds emerge. These worlds are appropriate to the fruition of various actions. This coming into being can take place as the undifferentiated chaos organizes itself into order -- a Big Bang? The universe gradually evolves from entropy into a state where (carbon or physically based) life emerges -- again, largely as a result of karmic-force.
Beings' craving for sensual pleasure forms part of a process known as Dependent Origination (paticca-samuppada). Rebirth takes place based on this principle. Nothing emerges from one thing or cause, but by a confluence of factors. (These are summed up and explained in detail in the Abhidharma or Buddhism's Higher Teachings).
The cycle of Dependent Origination completes itself and repeats until one or more of its factors are weakened and eliminated (e.g., ignorance, craving, etc.). Otherwise, the process cycles and cycles -- marked by impermanently, unsatisfactorily, and (above all) impersonally. The time it takes between the rise and fall of worlds is called a maha kalpa (great age). It is difficult to reckon; therefore, the Buddha described it by way of a staggering analogy. If there were a solid mass of granite a mile high and a mile wide, unbroken, and a tiny bird were to come and whet its beak with a silk cloth only every century...that entire mass of granite would be worn down before a maha kalpa were finished.
The Buddhist view of the universe (cosmology) can be found in a Buddhist scripture called the Agganchcha (Pali, Aganna) Sutra. According to Buddhism, as with everything within it, the universe itself is subject to radical imperma-nence. It is in a perpetual state of becoming (rather than "being) and while no discernible beginning is declared, there is also no definitive end. There are instead many beginnings and ends, cyclical ages (aeons) and epochs, and countless other universes (world systems) in all directions.
When the existing universe or world system dies, it goes into a state of undifferentiated chaos. It emerges again due in part to its own nature and partly as a result of karma. At that time, living beings are mostly reborn into a Brahma world (abhassara-brahma-loka). There they subsist on "joy" and fly about.Billions of years later (immeasurable cycles of time, aeons), an empty space emerges as a result of karma. There a first being, who thus earns the title Maha Brahma (great divinity), is said to be reborn alone. Soon after, other beings (brahmas) are reborn. Often this leads the Great Brahma to imagine that It called them into existence. Later It may say, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first, the last, the always, the creator, the sustainer, the destroyer. As I will it, so it becomes" and other similarly faulty deductions and declarations.
However, the state of Brahmas are only for beings with a store of high caliber karma (merit). Their mental state is such that they are not attached to sensual pleasures. They are neither male nor female but neuter. Other beings, habitually desiring the enjoyment of less refined pleasures, take rebirth in denser worlds.As a result of their "karma" (those actions previously willed, carried out, and accumulated coming to fruition) appropriate worlds emerge. These worlds are appropriate to the fruition of various actions. This coming into being can take place as the undifferentiated chaos organizes itself into order -- a Big Bang? The universe gradually evolves from entropy into a state where (carbon or physically based) life emerges -- again, largely as a result of karmic-force.
Beings' craving for sensual pleasure forms part of a process known as Dependent Origination (paticca-samuppada). Rebirth takes place based on this principle. Nothing emerges from one thing or cause, but by a confluence of factors. (These are summed up and explained in detail in the Abhidharma or Buddhism's Higher Teachings).
The cycle of Dependent Origination completes itself and repeats until one or more of its factors are weakened and eliminated (e.g., ignorance, craving, etc.). Otherwise, the process cycles and cycles -- marked by impermanently, unsatisfactorily, and (above all) impersonally. The time it takes between the rise and fall of worlds is called a maha kalpa (great age). It is difficult to reckon; therefore, the Buddha described it by way of a staggering analogy. If there were a solid mass of granite a mile high and a mile wide, unbroken, and a tiny bird were to come and whet its beak with a silk cloth only every century...that entire mass of granite would be worn down before a maha kalpa were finished. 
Hindu view
Science writers Carl Sagan and Fritjof Capra have pointed out similarities between what they consider the latest scientific understanding of the age of the universe and Hinduism's (more technically Brahmanism's) concept of a "day and night of Brahma." This is much closer to the current known age of the universe than other creation myths (when taken literally).
The days and nights of Brahma posit a view of the universe that is divinely created. Like Buddhism and other "Eastern philosophical" view, it is not strictly evolutionary. Instead, it is an ongoing cycle of birth, death, rebirth, and redeath for the universe. According to Sagan:
"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still.[Ref]
Science writers Carl Sagan and Fritjof Capra have pointed out similarities between what they consider the latest scientific understanding of the age of the universe and Hinduism's (more technically Brahmanism's) concept of a "day and night of Brahma." This is much closer to the current known age of the universe than other creation myths (when taken literally).
The days and nights of Brahma posit a view of the universe that is divinely created. Like Buddhism and other "Eastern philosophical" view, it is not strictly evolutionary. Instead, it is an ongoing cycle of birth, death, rebirth, and redeath for the universe. According to Sagan:
"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still.[Ref]
The Sound of Silence
Some Hindus believe that with the pranava mantra -- the AUM sound, or the "Word" in the "Beginning" -- the Universe was started. This is similar to the Big Bang theory. Omkara, the sound of ohm, is posited as the means of creation.Capra, in his popular book The Tao of Physics, writes that:
"This idea of a periodically expanding and contracting universe, which involves a scale of time and space of vast proportions, has arisen not only in modern cosmology, but also in ancient Indian mythology. Experiencing the universe as an organic and rhythmically moving cosmos, the Hindus were able to develop evolutionary cosmologies which come very close to our modern scientific models. One of these cosmologies is based on the Hindu myth of lila — the divine play — in which Brahman transforms himself into the world.[Ref]
The Hindu cosmological view of a cyclic universe has received further support from recent activity in loop quantum gravity theories [Bojowald 2007; Corichi and Singh 2008] that postulate that the existing universe is identical in terms of its physical laws to a previously contracting universe across the Big Bang window.
Taoist view
There may also be a suggestion of a Big Bang to be found in Taoism, a branch of Chinese philosophy. The first verse of the Tao Te Ching ("Book of Changes") is:
The Hindu cosmological view of a cyclic universe has received further support from recent activity in loop quantum gravity theories [Bojowald 2007; Corichi and Singh 2008] that postulate that the existing universe is identical in terms of its physical laws to a previously contracting universe across the Big Bang window.
Taoist view
There may also be a suggestion of a Big Bang to be found in Taoism, a branch of Chinese philosophy. The first verse of the Tao Te Ching ("Book of Changes") is:"…It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang; the named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind."[Ref]
- PHOTOS: 1) Spitzer space telescope, artist conception (NASA); Hammurabi (Indian, Manu) receiving the Code of Laws from Surya, the sun deva (ranajitpal.com); image taken by the Kepler telescope, released by NASA on 4/16/09, shows an expansive, 100-square-degree patch of sky in the Milky Way galaxy where it hopes to find Earth-like planets. (AP/NASA/JPL CalTech); Shiva (the destructive face of Brahman, the godhead (astromandir.com); aum (om) symbol, a letter and sound in the sacred Sanskrit language of the Vedas;
Kepler: New Space Photos
PASADENA, Calif. – NASA's new planet-hunting telescope has beamed back the first images of a patch of faraway sky in the Milky Way galaxy where it hopes to find Earth-like planets. NASA on Thursday released several images snapped by Kepler earlier this month, including a view of a distant part of our galaxy containing some 14 million stars. Scientists say more than 100,000 of those stars are potential candidates for research. More>>
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