Komputer Tidak Mengeluarkan Suara

Komputer memang merupakan kebutuhan yang cukup lengkap. Fasilitas yang bisa didapat pada komputer selain sebagai sarana untuk membantu pekerjaan, komunikasi, bahkan juga merupakan sebuah hiburan yang sangat lengkap.



Dari komputer kita bisa memainkan game-game baik itu game online maupun game offline, selain itu juga kita bisa menyaksikan film-film atau sekedar mendengarkan irama musik sambil

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A Swept Floor Never Stays Clean.

By Arnie Kozak

If you sweep the patio in November after leaves have fallen, you wouldn’t expect it to stay clean forever. The patio is like the mind. Mindfulness meditation practice can feel like sweeping the mind and clearing away the thoughts strewn about making a big mess.

It’s easy to get caught up in resistance and resentment toward these leaves: “Damn it, I just swept that floor!” Despite our protests, nature has another idea. Nature doesn’t care if we’ve swept the patio or how long it took us to do it. In the same way, the mind has its nature and it doesn’t really care about your agenda. The mind will continue to do what it does: give rise to thoughts. If we expect the mind to stay “swept,” we are setting ourselves up for disappointment.

Meditation will not “fix you”; it will not change things once and for all. Nothing can do this. Our job is to keep sweeping. Thoughts will continue to come and blow onto your clean-swept patio. Just sweep. No need to ask questions. No need to complain. Keep sweeping. We don’t need to analyze, interpret, or fix the leaves; time after time, we just need to sweep, returning to this moment just as it is, again, again, again.

With continued practice, we can start to recognize the wisdom in not reacting, or if reactions arise (as they sometimes will) of not amplifying them and feeding them. We can learn to enjoy the coming and going of the leaves—and even of the endless sweeping as well!

–Arnie Kozak, from Wild Chickens and Petty Tyrants (Wisdom Publications).

~Peace to all beings~

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A Fire Reflected in a Lake.

A fire reflected in a lake cannot burn the water. Neither can emotions disturb the mind when you don’t get involved in them. Don’t identify an emotion as your self. The fear or anger is not you, only an impersonal phenomenon.

Mentally pull back from the emotion and turn your awareness around to observe it. When in the grip of negative emotion we tend to believe it will never end. But emotions are no more permanent than thoughts.

With continued practice you’ll find that you only have to wait and any emotion, whether pleasant or unpleasant, is bound to change.

–Cynthia Thatcher, from Just Seeing: Insight Mediation and Sense-Perception (Buddhist Publication Society)

James: It sure is hard not to identify with emotions--especially when an emotional reaction is so ingrained within the psyche that its emergence seems totally involuntary. However, we know that at some level we have made a conscious choice to react in one way or another. We feel so helpless and at the mercy of these destructive and misery creating emotions. The suffering they engender is so great that it is like experiencing a nightmare.

A nightmare is a pseudo reality where the most ridiculous, terrifying and outlandish events stream through our mind like an all too real virtual reality, interactive video game. The nightmare seems so plausible--perhaps we find ourselves fleeing from a monster in our dream. Or maybe we get ourselves into some crazy situation such as a recurring dream of mine where I end up unjustly thrown in prison--an innocent man. The terror and suffering in those moments are so visceral that they can even cause the physical body to wake up sweating and gasping for air as if the body was in a real fight or flight situation.

There is, however, something called, "lucid dreaming" where a person is aware that they are dreaming--as they are dreaming. I have experienced this phenomenon every so often and it is often like watching things unfold from a third person point of view, which usually lessons the impact of the events. It is a way to step back from what is going on and get a bigger picture view of it all and see that in truth you are not going to die, or get thrown in prison or lose your parent, child or spouse. It is said that a person can train their mind to be able to go into this third person vantage point while dreaming to better deal with and process the events and impacts of the dreams.

In this way, I see meditation as the lucid dreaming of the waking state to be practiced and fine tuned to be a set of tools to enable us to walk through samsara and accumulate less heavy karmic debts.

~Peace to all beings~

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Spring Evening Contemplation.

Clean, steady rain falls. Smell of damp soil. Tranquility envelopes all like a warm embrace. One awakened essence shines forth. Svaha!!

~They Call Him James R. Ure

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Dana for Robert Aitken Roshi.

Robert Aitken Roshi is in very poor health and in need of our dana. I first heard about this from Al on his great blog Open Buddha. I can't say it any better than Al so I'm just going to re-post his great write up. I hope Al won't mind and please know that these words are his and not mine--thanks Al for bringing this to our attention (bowing):

Robert Aitken Roshi is one of the earliest Western teachers of Zen still alive today. He was exposed to Zen while in a Japanese internment camp in Kobe, Japan after being captured as a worker in Guam. Following the war, he went on to study in America and then in Japan before returning to the States. He has been teaching here in the West continually for 50 years now. I’ve read a number of his books and have learned a lot from them.

Aitken Roshi has been sick for a number of years now, suffering a stroke a few years ago. While he isn’t destitute, he does require round the clock care. I read today that he’s been diagnosed with Parkinson’s recently but has been active in his sangha in spit [sic] of his illness. Because of his care requirements, there has been a general call to the Buddhist community for support and financial help for Aitken Roshi, a man who has given his life to the Dharma. He is not going to be able to afford the care on his own for very long and there is no retirement plan for Zen masters.

I’ve donated to help and I would encourage others to consider doing the same as well. You can find out more information, as well as give donatations, at http://www.aitkenroshi.org.

James: Master Aitken has done so much for Zen and Buddhism here in America and around the world. Let us all come together and help make his suffering a bit less through a donation. He looks so old and frail in that picture yet noble and beautiful as ever--he shows us that growing old and getting sick need not be as miserable as our mind would want to make it.

Dana is a Buddhist principle of donating or giving something we value to others that helps alieviate the suffering of others and purify our minds of one of the three poisons--greed. Dana need not be money--in fact one of the things that is most valuable is our time. Spending time just being with other people and sharing a moment is sharing the precious gift of mindfulness and suchness. And it need not include a lot of talking--some of the most wonderful moments that I've shared with others has been just sharing silence together and enjoying the sounds of nature around us.

~Peace to all beings~

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