Just Add Code

It’s almost time to sit.

Tonight is Tuesday, the night of my Sangha meeting, which I skipped this evening. Last week during the sit I felt a great deal of tension, which I think comes from the wrong seat — a rather uncomfortable plastic chair.

Say what you will about floor Buddhists: at least they know what they’re sitting on.

This week there was knowing about that, and darn it, just getting busy feeding some silly video game. So I get to write about it, which isn’t doing too much for me as you can plainly see, and then I get to sit on my lazy boy, which lately has been quite wonderful.

My meditation sessions since Tuesday have been some of the best ever, very deep, relaxed, insightful — almost as though I can feel my brain being reprogrammed. Yes, indeed that is a materialistic way to put it. One little exercise that I’ve been enjoying is shining the white metta light on whatever disturbances or ill feelings arise. Tonight however I feel like I should nap before the sit a while — there’s not much brain left at the end of the wick.

There was a cartoon once in which a character was accused by some mad doctor type of having “Schizophrenia of the Brainia” — I put up a variant spelling above so you can see how to pronounce it.

Probably it was a Flintstones episode. I was glued to those as a kid.

It’s in the spirit of schizophrenia of the brainia that I reflect today on my web site and blog here. On the one hand I have a personal blog that’s kind of fun, about Buddhism and Depression and what-note that I feel like what-noting. On the other hand, I really want to use this prime “internet marketing real estate” to talk about (and sell) “internet real estate marketing” as a service. Pardon the clever use of dyslexia.

But schizophrenia / multiple personality disorder isn’t really the metaphor I’m going for. The goal of a doctor treating a patient with multiple personality disorder is to get them to become re-integrated. But the goal of doctor me in treating this multiple personality web site, unless I miss my guess, should be to disintegrate it into two separate blogs.

Today I add a new category: writing. Hello, new category. It’s so easy to smile at such a friendly and welcome new visitor.

This first post in this friendly new category is also a bit of homework for a new book, “The Freelance Writer’s Bible”. The point of the exercise was to go write something, as an illustration of how simple it is to get over writer’s block.

I’m not so sure I have writer’s block, per se. I write all the time. What I do wish to remove, however, are my remaining getting-paid-for-it blocks.

One might say that insofar as my real estate business is based on my successful web sites, and inasmuch as my web sites are successful because I write, that I’m also already a professional writer.

What a joy, then, this weekend, to discover that there’s actually a business to be made of the activity of writing.

In my high school yearbook, I wrote down that my dream was to have one wife, one son, one dog, and one published novel. As it turns out, I am fortunate to have a lovely wife, a wonderful daughter, two four-legged dogs, and no published novels. Even to this day, having a novel seems a bit out there, something uncomprehended, a vague possiblity. But it’s less of a stretch for my impoverished imagination to get from a place where I blindly chase for search engine love with a mixed bag of sites both successful and fairly well free, to a place where I work on a business of writing for pay. This journey strikes me as altogether entertaining and worthy of my time.

So best of luck to you, new category. I sense the spark of greatness in you already, your potential to become the fulfillment of the goal I set recently, for this web site to be about something.

From the Buddhist Blog, we learn about some excellent podcasts from the Deer Park Monastery. While listening to one of these, the Heart Sutra was sung beautifully, leading me to look a little further into the idea of emptiness is form, and form is emptiness. Google was good enough to lead me to this excellent article on Emptiness is Form.

Very tasty.

Here’s a book I want to look into soon. I’ve seen it around for some time, waiting for me to read it. The other night a member of my meditation group mentioned this book to someone who was a Buddhist but not ready to accept certain ideas on faith, like rebirth. He might just as well have been talking to me, since I’m not ready either. Actually I sense a little bit of a difference, inasmuch as I find I don’t care too much.

There’s some great material in the Pali Canon that has a bearing on this issue, and is quoted in chapter 3 of Bhikku Bodhi’s “In The Buddha’s Words” — which is a book which waited a very short time indeed for me to read it. This is a wonderful book, that makes me want to stuff the whole Pali Canon into my head. Where’s my shoe horn?

I believe one can see Bikkhu Bodhi is wrestling with some of Batchelor’s concerns in some of his own prefaces to the Pali Canon material. But you don’t have to buy the book to see him grapple with it head on, since you can check out Bodhi’s review of Batchelor’s book. Since my last philosophical destination prior to Buddhism was atheism, I am very sympathetic to what I know about Batchelor’s position while at the same time being fairly untroubled about the whole issue.

I think some times those of us who are agnostic or atheistic in our beliefs fight a primarily social battle, in which we long to be accepted by our fellows, who may have some elements of a lifestyle we wish to pursue, but who have no compunctions about faithful leaps they’re supposed to be making in their tradition. I’m sympathetic to Batchelor, but I think at the same time I’d already fought this fight so well in another context that I don’t see much need for it in Buddhism. It helps to be a newcomer in some respects.

One thing that’s become evident this week is that, with my efforts to re-establish a career veering off in many different directions like some series of poorly made bottle rockets, there’s barely a smidgeon of rice paper or the like between charming motivated John and going back to bed.

Inasmuch as I’m not in bed but here being at least charming if not motivated, I am, ipso fatso, Fatso. But I’d rather be that than that idiot, Ipso.

Meantime, my categories checkboxes tell me that this post is also designed to be about Buddhism somehow, so it’s time for the weekly Sangha update, I suppose.

One of the meditation groups I’ve been attending has turned out to be somewhat untenable. It takes a while to find one’s way around, I suspect. The other group, which met last night again, was once again very tasty. Next week we’ll be sitting in a new hall instead of one of the member’s homes.

I find I prosper in such meetings to the extent they’re more like a group of meditators getting together, and less like a church. It’s nice that someone has robes and prostrates to the altar a multiple of three times and has other traditions — it’s just not for me.

This was a good week in my Buddhist devleopment, inasmuch as I went out and met many more live two legged Buddhists than I have in the last year or more. On Monday I was fortunate to drive somewhat quickly and arrive in time for the Dharma Practice and Teachings session at Lions Roar Dharma Center. This Sangha was very friendly and welcoming and I enjoyed my visit.

On Tuesday I had a wonderful time sitting with a sitting group in Placerville. Chris Basiletti led a great Dharma talk after the meditation period, and there was a fun discussion afterwards that I enjoyed very much. As if that weren’t enough, we then took a break for tea, and our host provided some tea for us that seemed a lot like unconditioned tea to me. OK, that’s an exaggeration, I’m sure, but it was very good tea.

On Wednesday I didn’t get to play with any Buddhist pals, because I was holding a house open with my good friend who is a Catholic loan officer, and only one inquisitive neighbor stopped by. Now this doesn’t sound entertaining, but it really was.

Thursday and Friday were days with a Y in them, too.

I have a goal for this web site. It’s an important goal, but I’m very much in the beginning phases of implementing it. The goal for this web site is to be about something.

That’s not too much to ask, is it?

It used to be this site was about software, and it was a good place to try out new web development techniques. So I’d rewrite it endlessly. In the same way, neolithic web developers would use the same wall on the same cave in France, and whenever they wanted to paint a new buffalo they’d just paint over the old buffalo. That’s why if you actually start clicking around here you’ll find the remnants of past mental civilizations, old articles on Assembly Language, even.

Buffalos.

Today the site might be described charitably as an eclectic brew of intellectual musings, or uncharitably as drive by victim of its author’s mid life crisis. But I don’t want to leave it at that. I want this site to be about something.

For one thing, I hate to give up this site’s modest but established traffic. There are links here, and page rank. It’s the postunmodern equivalent of having one paleolithic dummy saying to one another, “Hey Og, I know where there’s a bunch of pictures of buffaloes. Want to see it?”

And as we all know, Og famously replied: “What’s a picture?”

But what if the artist, Og Monet as it were, gets tired of painting buffaloes? Then you’ve got this neatly trampled dirt leading to the buffalo gallery, and some dispirited former artist scribbling to-do lists where the deer and the antelope played.

While I’m waiting for this site to be about something, I’ll link to some more Buddhist pals, and maybe it’ll end up being about that.

When it’s more earnestly about something, you’ll be the first to know.

I recently set as a goal for myself to learn all I can about depression and motivation. This is because I found that as I actively began to examine my life and create goals for each area (i.e., take control of my destiny), I found this process very enjoyable and anti-depressing in nature.

I suffer from what (I believe) is mild depression. So no need to send the marines out or anything — I’m not going to cut my wrists with a sharp debugger or anything.

However, one of my first forays onto the internet brought this to light:

One of the most insidious aspects of depression is that there is a tendency to attribute the symptoms to other factors in our lives. A lack of enjoyment, motivation or increased irritability at home may be considered to be due to a (possibly non-existent) problem with personal relationships. Similarly we may start to consider changing jobs believing that it is the external environment that is responsible when in fact it is a treatable illness affecting our interpretation of the external environment.

What often happens is that in looking to our environment to find the reasons for what are symptoms of an illness, we try to ‘fix’ things that are not broken which can have a very real destructive impact on our lives. Obtaining an accurate diagnosis and getting the most effective treatment for you, will make an enormous difference.

That’s from the Types of Depression page over at DepressionNet.com.

Wow, bulls-eye. Isn’t that the story of my career over the last four years.

So then what can I say at this point about motivation and depression? Not much, I’m just at the beginning of my inquiry, but I do know that I seem to feel best when creating my own life rather than suffering from it. Yet it’s the same set of external circumstances either way.