16-18 - Around the Fountain Lightly

from Adams the Scribe

Taking a break from watching ones own thoughts to watch those belonging to friends and colleagues. I close my eyes and see the stage, the lilac-colored wisteria, the white marble stones and columns, the blue and brown mats and the circular fountain projecting a narrow stream into the air. Like the fountain ideas are flowing up from the mats, up up into the superstructure and then off into the wiki. From there they are harvested by the scribe.

There are many appearances of political musings about the coming inauguration during these 12 sessions.

What happens if one Holds up a mirror to show people how they are? [ed.note: one is a scribe] This one thought is bounced back and forth between cushions ending in musings about right and wrong:

Fael Illyar: that's the thing about rules.
Wol Euler: mmhmm
Fael Illyar: they're overly simplified
Wol Euler: they are only as good and as useful as the exceptions they allow
Fael Illyar: because no-one could understand them if they were to be put out in all the necessary complexity

Thick clouds of gloom remind us of C.S.Lewis' Puddleglum...Does meditation give the same edge as alcohol without the next day effects?

Drifting up from another cushion:

Tarmel Udimo: I think being passionate about what we're feeling and thinking can sometimes from a Buddhist persepective be seen as wrong but the reality is that as human's we need it to keep driving us forward

There can be passion without attachment...can passion be an attachment?

Tarmel Udimo: so for me why I respect and follow Buddhist ways is that as a religion it takes us further into the why we are the way we are and then helps us to deal with that.
Tarmel Udimo: Christianity can do that too but its path is via love and the heart and surrendering to this path of unconditional love

Thinking about the economy during 9 second stops..how is economy like Being?...both are abstract concepts but affect us in concrete ways

Pema Pera: yes, much of what really affects us seems abstract in many ways, like money and monetary value, yet is very concrete in its consequences
Pema Pera: like the term Being that we use here, which sounds so terribly abstract, perhaps the most abstract of all, yet is most consequential of all, a most precious and concrete resource . . . .
doug Sosa: yes.good to be reminded. So besides being, what are the just one level lesser? I think most meditators tret the physical things as more real than the abstract, but i am coming to doubt it.
Pema Pera: oh, there are very many levels between Being and our every-day way of looking at the world . . . .

Pema Pera: Scathach, do you remember how you got started? That was a couple months ago?

Scathach Rhiadra: yes, when I started I was very surprised at how much I could refocus by the regularity of the 9 seconds
Scathach Rhiadra: within a few days, it took time to get into the regularity, so to speak, not forget so often

Hours pass and the air above the cushions is silent for awhile until: What are dreams?

Friend Oliva: Are dreams sort of real?
Zen Arado: no and I think life is a dream too

Scathach Rhiadra: has anybody read or heard the Chinese story of the butterfly's Dream?
Boone Enoch: butterfly dreamed it was a man?
Scathach Rhiadra: I read it when I was a child and it really affected me
Scathach Rhiadra: yes, Boone, a man had a dream one night, that he was a butterfly...
Friend Oliva: Kafka
Scathach Rhiadra: the dream was so realistic, he lived the butterfly's whole life
Scathach Rhiadra: and in the morning, he could not decide if he had dreamed of being a butterfly, or if his life was a butterfly's dream

The air above the fountain is again still and the cushions are empty until:

Scathach Rhiadra: I've noticed in the pheno experiments, I talk about 'centering' and other people talk about de-centring

From another cushion: What is centering?

Scathach Rhiadra: hmm, I suppose it means shifting my perspective back from my outward looking conciousness, if that makes sense

Pema Pera: One of the purposes of the phenomenology experiments is to recover a wider horizon, a more balanced and open way of looking at what presents itself. In contrast, in daily life, we tend to be either too narrowly focused on our self, in which case a kind of decentering may help, or too much scattered all over the pace, in which case a kind of centering may help . . . :-)

More quizzical thoughts drift upward about the economy:

Do we really need to rebuild the banks (and the bank owners)?

doug Sosa: but like how to get the group to focus on what we do not know rather than telling us what we do know.

doug Sosa: like why is "financial service" 30% of the whole economy?

Conversation settles on the conflict between rich and poor...relative wealth: is it the total wealth of everyone or the distance between rich and poor

doug Sosa: the promise of modern complexity is increased opportunity for all, but we have kept a kind of slave society of underpiveleged and bad distibution. the big house close to work drives the poorer to comute long distances..

Can the wealth of our grandparents be measured in family and spiritual values?...But then all that people in the past suffered in comparison to us...the class systems kept people from taking advantage of opportunities...but crisis = opportunity.

What it would be like in RL if we paused in the middle of conversations the way we do in SL

Finally a proposal for The Rules of Play-as-Being:

Wol Euler: rule 1: there is no "right answer"
Wol Euler: rule 2: there is no "wrong answer"
Thud Lorakeet: well, then there must be something positive
Wol Euler: exactly :)
Riddle Sideways: rule 3: there is no rule 3

It is time for someone else to watch...