This will be the music for our second “marketing” (announcing) video. It is a soundtrack for an entire life of practice… This so haunts me and challenges and inspires me.
The bum knee has me laid out. Most everyone is gone from the house to their family huddle-ups — just me and the precious Cretan, both equally inept at food-making. The normally chit-chattering back-atmosphere of passers-by outside Mun Su Am has been reduced to the sudden ambience of a tomb. Ah, there, now, are some ancient bells, pre-auguring the Midnight Mass in the cathedral unfolding. As the minutes pass, ever more layers of bells are added on. Every church in this ancient city now, it seems — they’re all filling now the dark empty night. The spirit opens. There is this still vastness, covering all things and in all things.
What’s a monk and a Greek to do in a Zen center without people? We have already done evening practice. It’s back to the editing lap-desk with heating pad installed and stoking.
Morrissey’s eternal bleating comes to mind, a revelatory Christmas Carol from hell: “The devil will find work for idle hands to do.” Even on Christmas Eve.
An excellent and very practical study of the brain-mind neighborhood of what we mean when we say/study this something called “mind”.
Author of Mind Hacking: How to Change Your Mind for Good in 21 Days, Sir John Hargrave shares tips to hack your brain. This discussion is jam-packed with tips you can use in your daily life to get the most out of your brain function. In this episode:
The positive definition of hacking
Programming your own brain
How the mind and computers are alike
How mental clutter impairs optimal brain power
Creating good habits and getting out of ruts
The ZUG Book of Pranks
How Sir John’s drinking and drug use led him to mindhacking
Guest Bio: Sir John Hargrave is the CEO of the media and communication company Media Shower (www.mediashower.com). He is the author of MIND HACKING: HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND FOR GOOD IN 21 DAYS, which was an Amazon and Audible bestseller. His other technology books include BLOCKCHAIN FOR EVERYONE (Simon & Schuster, 2019), as well as BLOCKCHAIN SUCCESS STORIES (O’Reilly, 2020).
Someone caught me here fuelling up on Christmas Eve after a few hours of hard mental work on these current projects. This is the only meal of the day, as usual, so we make it count: a large bowl of homemade broccoli soup loaded with ghee and coconut oil, fresh garden salad with a block of feta cheese, hard-boiled eggs, and fresh German bread with slabs of real Irish butter. Everything is centered around helpful portions of organic locally-made kimchi – – the best, most living kimchi I’ve experienced in 30 years of eating the stuff. (It can be delivered Europe-wide from http://www.completeorganics.de — it’s the best kimchi that either I or our resident-Korean have ever experienced.)
The very latest work by one of my favorite contemporary artists, Matt Semke of www.catswilleatyou.com. Released just today, it’s titled “Meditation Ponzi”, and I better take its implications to heart, especially as we plow forward with soon releasing the upcoming “Online Course in Zen” and — maybe one day — that meditation app we designed just because we didn’t have better uses of our time during the rolling lockdowns.
“Meditation Ponzi” — is this what we’re building, our little digital Frankenstein’s monster?