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Zazen, or who knew “just sitting” could be so much work?

Sentient entities are limitless;
I vow to liberate them.
Passions are inexhaustible;
I vow to release them.

Went to my first Zen Buddhist sitting in, uh… lots and lots and lots of weeks. Having my mind wandering was NOT one of my problems. It’s been so long since I did Zazen that I was forced to concentrate on my posture and my breath, otherwise I would receive a harsh rebuke from my back. The quote above is from the first two lines of the Boddhisattva Vows, which were the subject of the host’s Dharma Talk.

He discussed how the “standard” English translation differred from the midieval Japanese of the oldest known version of the Vows. For example, what was translated as sentient beings didn’t just mean people. Or other animals, or plants… He spoke about how we are an ongoing kaliedoscope of shifting, and even frequently contradictory thoughts and “personas”, and that each of these were “entities” too in the original sense of the vows (among many other things). also, the word that is usually translated as “desires” actually refers to something more akin to “passions” or “obsessions”, whether we covet something, or we try to avoid something unpleasant.

Also, in the “standard version” that last line was “I vow to ‘save’ them” rather than “I vow to ‘liberate’ them.” Obviously, there’s a Christian influence going there.

Anyway, I could go on for hours, but it’s waay past my bedtime, and I gots to go…

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A Good Man is Hard to Find

“My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. ‘You know,’ Daddy said, ‘it’s some that can live their whole lives out without asking about it and it’s others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He’s going to be into everything!’ “
“I never was a bad boy that I remember of, but somewheres along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary. I was buried alive…”
“Turn to the right, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor. I forget what I done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain’t recalled it to this day. Once in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never come.”

“Maybe they put you in by mistake,” the old lady said vaguely.

“No’me,” he said, “It wasn’t no mistake. They had the papers on me.”

“You must have stolen something,” she said.

“Nobody had nothing I wanted… I found out the crime don’t matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you’re going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it…”

from “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, posthumous winner of the Pulizer Prize

(this was the first short story assigned to me by my first creative writing teacher in College (Jayne Anne Phillips, at Humboldt State University) as well as my second teacher of same (Jim Galvin).

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Genesis Hall by Richard Thompson

Genesis Hall
Richard Thompson solo acoustic

My father he rides in your ships
And I know he would never mean harm
But to see both sides of a quarrel
Is to judge without hate or love

Oh, oh, helpless and slow
And you don’t have anywhere to go

You take away homes from the homeless
And leave them to die in the cold
The gypsy who begged for your presents
He will laugh in your face when you’re old

Oh, oh, helpless and slow
And you don’t have anywhere to go

Well, one man he drinks up his whiskey
Another he drinks up his wine
And they’ll drink till their eyes are red with hate
For those of a different kind

Oh, oh, helpless and slow
And you don’t have anywhere to go

When the rivers run thicker than trouble
I’ll be there at your side in the flood
It was all I could do to keep myself
From taking revenge of blood

Oh, oh, helpless and slow
And you don’t have anywhere to go

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Scientists “define” evil

To be truly evil, someone must have sought to do harm by planning to commit some morally wrong action with no prompting from others (whether this person successfully executes his or her plan is beside the point). The evil person must have tried to carry out this plan with the hope of “causing considerable harm to others,” Bringsjord says. Finally, “and most importantly,” he adds, if this evil person were willing to analyze his or her reasons for wanting to commit this morally wrong action, these reasons would either prove to be incoherent, or they would reveal that the evil person knew he or she was doing something wrong and regarded the harm caused as a good thing.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=defining-evil

“I wouldn’t release E or anything like it, even in purely virtual environments, without engineered safeguards,” Bringsjord says. These safeguards would be a set of ethics written into the software, something akin to author Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” that prevent a robot from harming humans, requires a robot to obey humans, and instructs a robot to protect itself—as long as that does not violate either or both of the first two laws.

“Because I have a lot of faith in this approach,” he says, “E will be controlled.”

And we read in Philip K. Dick’s novel how that worked out…

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Where I’m At

Fightin’ for My Life
Joe Ely Butch Hancock

I’m ridin through the middle of some god forsaken town
Dark figures from the shadows, theyre tryin to cut me down
Some hero of the hour needs a rival of some kind
So dont talk to me right now, I’ve got survival on my mind

It might seem a little strange to you
But babe I got some things to do
Things for me that just cant wait
Dont let your love turn to hate
I got nothin in the world against you babe
But its gonna be a rough night out tonight
I got a feelin Im fightin for my life

Some street gang in the alley is tryin to tan my hide
I give aem all my money but theyre still not satisfied
Theyre callin out some names but it dont reflect on you
So dont bother me Im tryin to makeem see my point of view

It might seem a little strange to you
But babe I got some things to do
Things for me that just cant wait
Dont let your love turn to hate
I got nothin in the world against you babe
Its gonna be a rough night out tonight
I know the kung fu and Im fightin for my life

They say those silly phantoms are only in your mind
But I swear that even some of them get out from time to time
Some are rough and some are rowdy, some are fast to make the scene
But the ones that move so slow, theyre the ones that treat you mean

It might seem a little strange to you
But babe I got some things to do
Things for me that just cant wait
Dont let your love turn to hate
I got nothin in the world against you babe
Its gonna be a rough night out tonight
I better meditate you know Im fightin for my life

I used to read the Bible and Paradise Lost
now it looks like everybodys been gettin double-crossed
I dont mean to crash the cymbals, I dont mean to beat the drum
I dont wanna waste your time, you know Id rather save you some

It might seem a little strange to you
But babe I got some things to do
Things for me that just cant wait
Dont let your love turn to hate
I got nothin in the world against you babe
Its gonna be a rough night out tonight
I better meditate you know Im fightin for my life
My eyes are open, Im fightin for my life