Category Archives: Thoughts

House with Bodhi Tree for Sale

Some 25 centuries ago, on the morning of December 8th, by the Japanese Buddhist
calendar, one Siddhartha Gotama Shakya, while sitting in meditation under a fig tree, woke up to the reality of life and the world.

This waking up to reality made him the Buddha Shakyamuni, the “Awakened Onesage of the Shakyas”. The specific type of fig tree under which he sat became known as the Bodhi Tree, in good old Latin – ficus religiosa.

In the good old tradition of Tony Robins many people then tried to imitate the Buddha’s actions and sat under a Bodhi Tree for hours on and, often falling asleep instead of waking up. One of the problems with sitting under THE Bodhi Tree was simple logistics – there is just finite space under one fig tree, even a special one.

So what to do?

The principle of homeopathic was adopted that the essence of this tree could be passed on even in very high dilutions. So, the essence of this one tree in Bodhgaya, India was taken, in form of a leaf, and planted in Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka. A branch of that tree was then given to a Mary Foster to be planted in the Foster Botanical Garden in Honolulu, Hawaii.

A branch from that tree was given to the University of  California, Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.) and grew joyously in its botanical garden.

Now the camera zooms in on Max, who, some dozen years ago, was in charge of part of UCLA’s computer systems, and who enjoyed his lunch break in that very UCLA botanical garden. This is how one little branch of that 4th generation bodhi tree ended  up in a glass of water in your’s truly house – with the plan for this branch to sprout some roots so that it could be planted and supply the space – in some twenty or thirty years – to mediate under, in order to finally awake.

It was a very difficult birth and early childhood for this fifth generation of bodhi tree indeed. Only with the greatest care was there finally a five-inch baby tree growing in a planter – only to be used by painters as a weight for their tarp when slapping paint on the house. The poor baby tree was beaten up, splattered with paint and almost died.

I nearly gave up there, but we started one last attempt, and this attempt coincided with the birth of our son Zen, who apparently chose his name because he had none of it and it was the goal of this life to gain some – Zen, I mean.

Surprisingly, growing up together, Zen and the bodhi tree, worked like a charm and after two years the tree had already surpassed the child as the picture above shows. The gap in size increased over the years and ten years later the child made to a bit over five feet but the tree grew to at least twenty.

I now have doubts that I will ever sit under this tree to suddenly awake, as the house might have to find a different owner and this tree can certainly not be transplanted. We also learned that by the type of Buddhism practiced in Thailand we made a mistake in planting this tree in our yard – these trees are reserved for temples and monks! But we did some ceremony/exorcism so smooth the waves. The tree is now wearing come colorful clothes around its trunk and all is OK.

Now your call to action – if you always wanted to have a house with a Bodhi Tree to sit under and meditate, now is the time to get in touch with me – going once, going twice, …

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If you were King

 

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Government is not Real

This year all things seem to come together right on this one weekend

  • Memorial Weekend
  • School’s out
  • Summer weather

and particularly the first point makes me ponder the eternal question of ‘what is real’. It helped a bit that I also listen to a talk by Larken Rose, one of my favorite anarchists.

Let us look at my spiritual path for a moment and see if we can somehow apply this to my pondering.

On this path, I have now reached a point where I believe that I create my own world. This is often expressed as “The world IS as I see it” and not the other way around, something that I did subscribe to at some point on my path.

However, I have to admit that this is still, to some degree, a belief and not a certainty, as sometimes doubt creeps in. Occasionaly I wish for just one very good and solid experience to show me that something that I had just created in my inner world, was also visible to my physical eyes – that would be a nice thing to have and would remove all uncertainty, right? To give a rude example – I create a Ferrari in my inner world, go out the door – and there it is – in RED!

Unfortunately, these examples work both ways, so every time I create something in my own universe, and it does not show up in the one that I share with other, or believe to share with others, is like a punch in the teeth of my certainty.

If I could only find one (oh so) little example where it really worked – creating in my own world and finding it manifested in the ‘real’ world!

Today I understood that I’d better not look for little things only – I have a really big one right in front of me and after being able to see it – it’s undeniable.

“So, what is it?” you might now ask.

I was tempted to write some more sentences in order to build tension before I tell you, but I can’t stand this excitement myself any more – so here it is:

Memorial Day!

Huh – that makes no sense, this is something everybody knows and agrees upon – we honor our fallen heroes and celebrate that they are dead!

Maybe that did not come out right – ‘celebrate’ might not be the right word. Let me try it a bit differently and start at the beginning.

  1. We, as a group, came over here from Europe, mostly to escape slavery from the kings and the nobility that owned us.
  2. We made the mistake of bringing with us the conviction that others can own us – we did not leave this behind. Could have – but did not.
  3. With this emptiness inside, of a leader telling us what to do, we quickly got us a new set of rulers. We got us better ones that did not milk us as much as the old ones, but we allowed them to take rights that we ourselves don’t have.
  4. The first few waves of leaders were very gentle with these rights but slowly but surely the thumb screws were tightened, not in the arrogant ways of the rulers we had left behind, but instead with delicate psychology telling us “You are free” while putting the chains on.
  5. And we did not notice because we were still feeling the old chains, and their weight might have actually felt good because it was so familiar – and the new ones were a bit lighter, so all was good.
  6. Leaders, like every other group of people, do not always agree, but they never had the need to work out their differences themselves because they had us to go into battle for them, to find out who’s view was the right one.
  7. Smart as they were, they did not tell the families left behind something like “Oops, George did not make it – maybe in the future you next son has more luck – but don’t worry, everything went fine and I got what I wanted.” Instead they said the same thing but with words like “George put his life on the line for a [insert noble cause here] and in doing so, he became a hero. You should be proud!” And then they handed the happy wife/mother a shard of metal with ‘George – Hero’ scratched into it.
  8. As the years went on the reason for George’s demise was quickly forgotten but everybody remembered that he was a hero.
  9. All this because we forgot to leave behind in Europe the conviction that somebody can (and should) own us.

Now let’s see how this would have played out had we actually left that conviction back in the old world.

  1. We had come over here into the new world and had started to interact freely and voluntarily with each other, knowing that I own myself, and you own yourself, and that we have every right to do anything as long as it does not infringe in these very rights of others.
  2. Now a strange group of people might have come along, claiming rights that they themselves did not have, like stealing or making random rules that carried cage time if not followed. That would have been normal, every society breeds some of those crazy individuals but in this hypothetical scenario, where we all know that we own ourselves and can not give what we don’t own, these strange individuals would have just been put into the loony bin where they belonged – Imagine, the idea of ‘I have the right to take your stuff without an exchange and without your consent!’ – They must be surly mad!

Today then, we would not have one hundred million people that give away up to half of their wealth obeying the command of a few hundred (congress, etc.) who back up their ‘power’ with about one hundred thousand enforcers. A nice graphic representation of these ratios can be seen in the ‘The Tiny Dot.’

This article you are reading here right now, also demonstrates the ratio of Us v. Them – taxpayers v. IRS employees: it has about one thousand words. If this article represents Us, then the total of the enforcers is ONE WORD – 100 million v. 100 thousand – and of those latter the bigger part are only pencil pushers and not real ‘enforcers.’

Imagine how strange it is that this whole article is terrified of one word.

The only explanation that would make sense is that this power is a creation of all those one hundred million tax payers. On a logical level the few could not terrorize those many. Only when those many would create the existence of this power, which, in a so-called ‘objective reality’ is just not there, can this government (and any other) exist. Neither does ‘the law’ exist in some kind of ‘objective’ fashion as it was created by the few that we put into existence and which we could just as easily un-create if we so decide.

We only have to answer this one question for ourselves:

Who owns me?

Everything else falls into place automatically – there is no ‘government’ – no ‘authority’ that could possibly make rules which I have to live by.

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In the face of imminent death

During my flying career, I have only once been really scared for an extended amount of time. Coming down from very calm air over Lake Isabella for a landing at Kern Airport I was hit by some serious turbulence.

I had the hardest time to keep the dirty side of the airplane down and at the same time initiating a very gently 180 degree turn – I knew where the air was calm and needed to get back there. As I write these lines clearly  I did make it, but after coming out of that turbulence I had to land at the next available airport and get my shaking knees under control.

I am contrasting myself to the professionalism and calmness of the pilot of the US Airways Flight that went down in the Hudson river some two years ago, and I don’t look that good. Sure, he is a professional and trained for situations like that, but it is, nevertheless, admirable how he stayed calm in the face of his own possible death. From a very detached point of view clearly this was the correct thing to do, to have the best chances for survival. The outcome proved him right.

From this day forwards, as we all understand now, we will always ask ourselves, when we are getting upset about something – “how will this upset help me in this situation?” If you just remember to ask yourself this question, I am sure it will get you over this upset immediately.

Here, for you to admire, the events of the ditching of the US Airways flight in the Hudson River…

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What makes Cool Cool?

Flemming introduced me to the violin-playing of Vanessa Mae.

Give me a break – the violin must be the most conservative and boring instrument of them all and I get stuck on Youtube watching all kinds of videos about her music?

This is how violin playing is supposed to look…

and not like this…

And then play music like this…

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I mean – this IS cool violin playing! Made me think about what makes cool cool?

I told my son, who is now at the age where he thinks that accessorizing with cool things will make him cool, a story from the days when I still tried to find that which would make me be cool…

It were the days of our first cars at the end of high school. I personally certainly had the un-coolest car your could get, but it was all I could afford. In our class we had one guy who was just the coolest, Mike. He had, at that tender age, traveled the world on a shoe-string budget. He was so cool, that he did not even give in to female attempts to reel him him. How cool was that – something I dreamed of  – he just shrugged off!

Once, a few of us planed to go on a social visit to our favorite teacher. Only few of us had cars, my car was too small for all of us, so Mike offered to drive us and got the car from his dad and thus was our designated driver.

You might have to learn a bit about car culture in Germany at that time to grasp the gravity of the following.

For example, you could not drive an automatic – you would be considered a grandpa – but those cars were too expensive anyways so that was never an issue amongst us. At the top of the un-cool list, right after the automatic, was a station wagon with the shift-stick at the steering wheel and a single bench in the front.

And that was exactly the car Mike drove up in to pick us all up that evening to go, visit Hartwig! But believe it or not – that car did not make Mike un-cool, instead his coolness rubbed off on the car and it became totally acceptable to drive a Taunus or Ford station-wagon.

Applying that lesson to myself took many years, so I don’t necessarily expect my son to understand when I told him this story, but for me this example of the violin of Vanessa Mae re-enforced the lesson for me.

She just did not let the un-coolness of the violin rub off on her, instead she made the violin cool.

So, now, how can I apply that right now?

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The Best Wishes for 2011

… That is 2011 – just one more year to 2012!

But be assured, this 2012 will be just a non-event as the the year-2000-catastrophe – so – get to work and find out what we have to say….

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Cynicism and Reservation towards Authority

There are now two-thirds in the family that more or less tell me I should not bitch so much about cops, politicians and consorts.

I could not help wonder if I am really that cynical towards authority. Looking at it from the point of view of somebody who is afraid of what authorities can do if you don’t honor and cherish them, I do see that I might appear rather cynical.

The example I have in mind is a remark that I have made probably more than once when I see some cops pulling over an old lady for some little traffic violation: feeling much safer now that those cops handled another hardened criminal and rid the streets of her!

Lately my son pipes in, in instances like this, with the (true) statement that not all cops are bad. Obviously I want him to be critical of authority – what else would you expect from an anarchistic father? – but do I cause the opposite to occur by making authority a victim of  my cynicism?

I actually don’t want to by cynical – it’s supposed to be funny! I know just too well that fighting again somebody or something will make that target only stronger, anywhere from actually winning against me to succumbing but becoming a martyr and thus gaining sympathy from well-meaning people.

I also know that the only way to rid us of these little tyrants is to ignore them. Just withholding any energy from them – good or bad – because this is what they live on. I believe it was Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio who predicted  that the current system will go out with a just whimper. It makes total sense to me that somebody or something parasitic will just whither away once the food source is withheld.

Everybody who understands this only has to do one thing – spread the word without falling into the trap of preaching. Say what you have to say and back off. No defending of the statement if it is attached, no arguing for it and not even cynical remarks of laughter. Just see, say and move on.

Here is a story, that appeared as a “letter the editor” in the Jackson, MS news paper on August 29, 2009, to practice that on…

Dear  Sirs:

During my last night’s  shift in the ER, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient with a shiny new gold tooth, multiple elaborate tattoos, a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and a new cellular telephone equipped with her favorite R&B tune for a ringtone. Glancing over the chart, one could not help noticing her payer  status: Medicaid. She smokes more than one costly pack of cigarettes every day and, somehow, still has  money to buy beer.

And  our Congress expects me to pay for this woman’s health care? Our nation’s health care crisis is not a shortage of quality  hospitals, doctors or nurses.  It is a crisis of culture — a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on vices  while refusing to take care of one’s self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance. A culture that thinks “I can do whatever I want to because someone else will always take care of  me”. Life is really not that  hard. Most of us reap what we sow.

Don’t  you  agree?

Starner Jones,  MD
Jackson, MS

We can look at this situation with fury and get all worked up about it or we could just look at it from the far future as an interesting historical deviation from sanity.

And it’s definitely nothing to get cynical about it – so, no more cynicism for me!

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Sunset in the Mountains

Even though in Southern California, we can now feel that the summer is over and the winter is getting closer. The reason is altitude. Six thousand feet above the ocean will give you some sense of seasons, even in the sub-tropics. It is only three weeks away from the time where we had the first snow last year.

Over the last week trees have put on their autumn outfit and are now wearing all brown after a short phase of a green-brown combination. Sure, there are many trees that will remain green all year, but the oaks around here now invite to collect colorful leaves and put them between the pages of a book to dry and preserve.

Days become noticably shorter and now, as I write this, half past five, it is completely dark. But a bit earlier I noticed a symphony of colors developing above the mountains and I was able to capture a glimpse of it…

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Getting the Perspective Just Right

In the olden day of photography, you know – before Photoshop and digital cameras, you had to get it right the first time. Sure, you could go back and try again once you saw the result, about a week after getting back home, but there were times when that was just not feasible. It always was an exciting time when the envelope with the developed slides was in the mailbox.

Sometimes the excitement went away quickly, but more often than not it was then, the following evening, after all the mishaps had been sorted out and discarded, that the slide projector was set up, aimed at the silver screen and everybody gathered in the darkened room to relive the time a few, or at least one, weeks back.

Slides and the silver screen were the best means to watch pictures at that time, much less expensive than prints and a lot bigger. That is why slides had always been my medium of choice when I took photos as my artistic expression.

Slides and the silver screen went out after I moved to the US and it became very difficult to actually buy a slide projector. Slide projection was replaced by – really nothing. Until about now. Now I am using a 32 inch monitor which is located much closer to me than the silver screen had been, so the apparent size of images viewed on that monitor is comparable in size, maybe even bigger. Additionally this is an active light source – not reflective as the silver screen – so the luminance is much higher, and I don’t have to wait to the evening or darken the room.

So, yes, we have come around and caught up with the size of the slide show in the evening and surpassed it in convenience and speed. Now I can take the picture and view it pretty much right away.

Slide scanners have also given me the opportunity to view these old slides on the new display medium. I never had noticed the grain in the images when viewing the slides natively, but with some creative filtering we can reduce this shortcoming over the film emulsion.

On looking through some old slides taken in Paris, France in the Tuileries (the gardens surrounding the Louvre) I ran into one image that prompted me to write this post…

It’s one where, if I had the chance, would go back and take it at a slightly different angle so that the hand would be really exactly above the head of the statue. With a lot of Photoshop work I could probably fix it after the fact but I decided to leave it as it is and just enjoy the charm of “missing it by that much” (quote Maxwell Smart.)

As for some newer pictures that get it just right, here a little collection of photos that made it into my mailbox (thanks, Beverly!)

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Irena Sendler v. Al Gore

Irena SendlerGot this very interesting and heart-warming story of Irena Sendler presented in an email today.

Here first the story, then I will tell what impressed me most:

There recently was a death of a 98 year old lady named Irena.

During WWII, Iliana, got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist.

She had an ulterior motive…

She KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews, (being German). Iliana smuggled infants out in the bottom of her tool box she carried, and she carried in the back of her truck a Burlap sack, (for larger kids). She also had a dog in the back, that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in, and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog, and the barking covered the kids/infants noises. During her time and course of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, and arms, and beat her severely. Iliana kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out, and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it, and reunited the family. Most of course had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes, or adopted.

A while back Iliana was up for the Nobel Peace Prize….
She LOST.

Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.
Check it out: www.irenasendler.org

I will say nothing about the story itself as I have decided quite some time ago that it is not possible for me to decide what about all the atrocities during WWII is true and what’s not. There are indications that’s just the story the victors want to tell to look good, but there is also the other side which would indicate that there really is something to all this mass murder.

But the fact that I have no first hand information and no way to get them, combined with my solidifying conviction that there is no independent reality I have given up deciding what historical story might be true.

So, nothing about saving Jewish kids, but what caught my attention was the tone of the writer in the last sentence, that Al Gore won the Nobel price for a slide show.

I just love it when politicians are finally seen for what they really are. And if the population starts to laugh about these guys for giving themselves prizes in self-adoration then I have high hopes for all of us that we will get over this celebritizing (hey, Oxford dictionary editors, this is a new word for you!) of our tyrants, kick them out and finally build a non-violent stateless society – one in which Irena would get acknowledged for her brave action.

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