If you’re curious, we’ve had challenges with our backup automation taking up too much space in the database server, and that server filling entirely is what triggered the downtime.

There is a lot of research showing that the quality of our lives revolves a great deal around the quality of our relationships. Again this is different than the sort of happiness that can come from spiritual attainment.

I've been trying to find a life of balance living in the world with a spiritual pursuit. However, I have a hard time with connection. I've mentioned at times that I readily take on the emotions of others, what "new agers" (not sure this is the term anymore) call an empath. So when I attempt to connect with people as it progresses it starts to become overwhelming for me. Its like having a big bucket of water dumped into my emotional cup. More often than I'd like, it can be fairly negative and unpleasant, not that I'm so pure, but I'm unaccustomed to the new feeling. Depending on how much time we spend together is correlated with how much time it takes to become clear and still again. It makes this element of a healthy worldly life feel largely out of reach.

Family seems doable, because I think we share enough emotionally that it isn't so overwhelming. So I'm not alone and I don't really have that lonely craving feeling. In its absence I suppose there is a tradeoff in that there is more peace and calmness in my life than most.

Just venting a bit, its a source of frustration in my life.

And to the old-timers, keep an eye out in case I let through any AI-based bots. Unfortunately, it's much easier for them to slip through these days since they can generate "reasons" to join based on the site. Feel free to use the 'report' button and I'll quietly take a closer look.

Let's be optimistic that everyone is a real human! 😁

Also I have found sometimes the Quote and Post buttons don’t work? I use the latest Safari on my iPad, but I suspect it has something to do with the automatic draft saving feature or maybe a server side error? Sometimes I can get Post Comment to work by pressing and holding on my iPad which brings up the Preview window.

One for you @Linc …

If not any precepts or resolves?

Mine:

• Gonna start yoga practicing
• Gonna be kinder to bees, butterflies and birdies
• Must stop ranting
• Solve everything by being smarter

I have been having difficulties when wanting to quote just part of a post that is relevant ie. that I want to respond to.

Maybe the answer/solution could be useful also to others...

Thanks!

You may have noticed upgrades AND you can have your own forum in a hosted Cloud. That will need paying for ...

I am sure there is a lesson in there somewhere ...

Bonus track ...

I just approved a bunch of new members (I'd forgotten to check for a few months), so I hope they all filter in. Do reach out if I accidentally allowed any spammers in, hard to tell sometimes and I'd rather let a couple spammers by than block any legitimate folks.

We don't have a formal rules doc (which we should, but that's another discussion) so I wanted to pop in and set an expectation about using LLMs ("large language models" like ChatGPT and its kin, often called "AI") here:

Please do not use an LLM to generate text that you post to NewBuddhist as your own. If you want to post a small section of LLM output for discussion, kindly delineate it clearly with a formatted blockquote or quotation marks. If you post LLM output as your own text and are discovered, you may be banned without warning. We are a community for humans, not word blender bots.

Thanks all!

I've been wanting to escape samsara as this lifetime has been extremely emotionally painful, stressful, violent and thought provoking for me yet simultaneously extremely boring and tiresome and in doing some very surface level investigating into past lives, it appears this may not be something new for my "soul".

In a lifetime full of spiritual restlessness and a year full of spiritual change, I began inquiring into The Greater Consciousness that many seasoned meditators sometimes refer to and many theists revolve their life around, when I began to recognize the seeming destiny of a predicament I found myself in, a few months ago. I then resigned myself to that destiny and felt a strong sense of both relief and love. I began relating to this as "my Creator" and repeated the process. The first few times I did it, it was so beautiful that I got the sense that I didn't deserve it and memories/insights came to mind of past pain I caused others, with my own senseless self interest. I might liken this to the traditional Christian ideal of repentance, or working out past karma. It's not exactly fun, to say the least. This also appealed to me as a fast track alternative to the very arduous mediation practice I had been pursuing for over a decade prior with good but limited results. I've also been consulting both the "traditional" biblical scriptures of the established Christian Church as well as apocrypha (including references to reincarnation) omitted by powerful and potentially "evil" institutions . In my pursuit of this "Creator", and in hopes of working out karma to achieve enlightenment through ego death from the pain this would cause me (that is, in pursuit of "Christ Consciousness"), I resigned my life to "Him" over and over. This was extremely painful.

It did produce profound change in my life and reoriented me with a perspective I hadn't had since childhood, during a brief period of peace when the family that I was with at the time was experiencing more love and going to Church. The flip side of this is that I became much more sensitive to the threats physical desire and ego posed to my existence. I also experienced something similar to a Bodhisattva urge and wondered if I was going to end up sacrificing my soul and my existence for a world that had done little for me but pain. These things were so profoundly scary and arduous for me that I stopped, despite a hunch that I should continue working through it.

During and after this period, I began getting a lot of insights both instantaneously and via signs and songs that would come to mind or that I would happen upon in public. I also began to see that these signs may have been coming to me, and from me, for years prior to this during periods where I related to the worlds as an atheist, with the seeming belief that when you're dead, you're dead (with some small but strong hope for extending my life through science). These insights have been both seemingly profoundly synchronous and perfectly placed. Usually these thoughts were mainly... well... informative, they helped my paradigm shift develop. But they could also be comforting.

Recently through, after a period of profound egotism during a rather emotionally violent reaction, I expressed ill will for and a resolve to action against a group of profoundly obtuse, physically/emotionally/psychologically violent, spiritually unaware and seemingly useless interlopers, I have become growingly frustrated with over a period of years. I also expressed apathy towards their problems regardless of any ability I could have to help them with them. I then achieved a brief state of peace. Then I happened across the song above. I looked up the lyrics and was profoundly disturbed. I thought God was full of unconditional love.

I think there's a good chance there's somehow meaning behind each and every line. If I spend enough time examining past clues, that was always the case.

I have had the nagging suspicion in the past that the original "God" I was relating to was part of a duality of sorts. I'm now wondering if this is a new "God" of sorts or the same one. This does seem kind of pointless, in some sense, either way.

Any thoughts?

I believe that students of the dharma should be paid a UBI (Universal Basic Income). I believe they should use free rather than proprietary software.

I am pleased to report that my teacher paid all my expenses. As I am pretty low maintenance, it worked out OK ...

How much is the dharma costing you or donating to your well ... being?

If you get an unwanted email notification, do me a favor and please adjust your preferences rather than reporting it as spam. You can do that here: https://newbuddhist.com/profile/preferences

Thanks!

Global warming? The shit show of 2020? Whatever the reason.......impermanence.

Today I was reading about the “Just Sitting” meditation, or shikantaza in Zen. It is one of my favourites, and I often practice it for clarity of mind, and I came across this:

This is a poetic description of shikantaza or “Just sitting”. It can't be deconstructed, only suggested poetically, and practised in a leap. . This Zen Buddhist way ain't everyone's cup of tea, and it is no better or worse than any other. If this description rings a bell, it does. If it doesn't, it doesn't. Either way, no problem.

From @richardh’s opening post in https://newbuddhist.com/discussion/14290/just-sitting/p1

Its a longish thread with some gems about Just Sitting and Zen, and also some fractious toing and froing with banned ex-members. But it does present different views about whether just sitting is a path to the cessation of dhukkha, or just a pausing of it.

I remember this happening very frequently some time ago, it just happened to me again, so it’s not entirely fixed.

Some years ago, I contracted cancer of the tongue. The angles of the radiation treatments altered my my vocal cords, so I can't sing even close to as good as I used to. Between the ages of 18 and 31, I was a rock 'n' roll singer. Along that timeline, I sang some funk songs and moved with the times, but there were always more rock "n" roll and pop-rock songs on the band's list. I also always had a guitar and played, even though I never played in any of the bands I sang in. I feel emotionally attached to music - often to tears. I feel nostalgic for the past, and I wonder if this will hamper my development along the path of Buddhism.

Having never played guitar when I sang professionally, I was constantly working out my own songs on my guitars. My songs are of a pop-rock nature, with hard-driving beats. I'm attached to these creations. Can I write this kind of music, but substitute lyrics having to do with "the path"? If so, what do I do about my emotional attachment to the music? Would I be better off letting go of music entirely?

I welcome and thank you all for your thoughts on this matter.

They should be sending again as of this post. If you missed any discussion updates, this is why.

...Has anyone else had problems logging in or accessing their accounts, at all, recently?

@Shoshin1 will join in soon, I hope!

I've had no problem getting into that thread previously, including earlier today. Why is this coming up? Thanks

I am a newcomer to Buddhism and am currently on a new spiritual journey in my life. I am looking to speak with anyone who would be willing to talk about their experience with Buddhism and how it has affected their lives.

I am currently working one of the AA programs to heal from the addiction I have. I hope to apply Buddhism to my life as a higher power to my program. My sponsor has recommended I speak with some people who feel their lives have changed for the better after turning their life and will over to their higher power.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you are willing to share your experience.

Best Regards,

• A

We've started a GoFundMe to make up the difference here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/icrontic-newbuddhist-2020-fund

If you're able and willing to contribute, we'd certainly appreciate it. I know many folks have asked about a way to contribute in the past, so here's what I hope will be the only necessary opportunity for it.

Please don't be alarmed. There really isn't much danger of the GoFundMe not reaching its goal, and there are other contingency plans I could use to keep the sites online if we needed to reduce costs further. There's no reason for anyone to put their grocery money into the fund. I'm posting it here to include y'all in the effort, not out of desperation.

Thanks everyone!

When the sign/log in box appears, it use to had my details eg email address and password all ready to go, but when I clicked on it, a notice appeared on the bottom left of the screen in black saying something along the lines of cannot use stdclass as array....

How do I fix it ? bearing in mind I'm not that computer savvy especially when it comes to tech talk...

However no rush...If I get logged out I'll just change my password...

It’s main difference is the changing of the order of the three marks of existence (impermanence, selflessness, and suffering instead of impermanence, suffering and selflessness) and the addition of a forth mark of existence (progress).

It also suggests that their understanding of the eightfold path somehow is different: fully personal is how they describe it

Quoted: The Noble Eightfold Path is therefore understood dynamically as an ongoing reflexion at the level of our personal lives of existence as a whole becoming over time, of pratitya-samutpada. It is for this reason that the eight steps of the Noble Eightfold Path as advocated by Advayavada Buddhism do depend sequentially on each other, are free of any conventional criteria set beforehand by somebody else to which one is supposed to conform, and are fully 'actual' in the sense that they are not done for a further purpose or motive which is not in the step itself.

Interested on anyone and everyone’s thoughts on this school of Buddhism.

So it reminded me, maybe it would be a good thing to have a “your best threads” feature, which would run an algorithm on the threads you had created to sort them by length, and some mix of the number of posts and the number of insightfuls/hugs you received in each thread in total, to create kind of a ‘greatest hits’ of your history on the forum.

I know we can currently bookmark old threads so that we don’t need to search for them, but it would be nice if the forum had a little overview of your best contributions at the click of a button.

The title says it all, really. I'm looking for a small, basic premises that is isolated (but close enough to walk to shops) in the UK countryside, and on a reasonable budget (max £600 pm) inc. of bills (to keep life simple). I don't know if anyone here owns anything like this or knows where / how I could find such a location, but any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

"Awesome" feels too cheery and somewhat dismissive; for many of us, online culture has moved around to the heart emoji being used to support and bolster our friends, both in times of joy and times of sadness. When you want to show solidarity, emotional support, and kindness to someone on something they post, a "heart" can seem appropriate, but the word "Awesome!" might not cut it. Hugs are more personal, and can be both celebratory and consoling.

Please let me know if you have any comments or questions about this change. I hope it helps.

Message just popped up on my screen. "Your Chromebook has updates. Restart for full update. Learn more"

So I clicked 'Learn more' and apparently the update also entails a full powerwash.

"Powerwash for added security
This upgrade resets your Chromebook and removes current user data. "

Wait... whut...?! Hang on... another 'Learn more' link later and...

Update your Chromebook’s security

You can install a firmware update to give your Chromebook stronger security protections.

The update is optional, but you should install the update if:

You’ve set up hardware-backed certificates or verified access. Learn what these are.

You want to keep your Chromebook settings, apps, files and other info as secure as possible.

Important: This update will erase your Chromebook and reset it to factory settings. Everything will be deleted from your Chromebook, including your files, apps and data. Make sure that you back up your files and sync your account settings before you install this update.

What -
The -
Actual -
F....?!

I have no idea how to go about doing this, what it entails, what I am meant to do, or how to make sure that when chromebook re-starts, everything will be just as it is now...(only, obviously, better, apparently!)

As it's optional, I need do nothing, right? Even if the message persists in popping up...

Currently, I'm working on rebuilding our humble server from scratch on a much less expensive service. I'm taking the opportunity to update quite a few things about how it works and performing much overdue maintenance to how I upgrade our software on it, so it's taking many full days of work. A member of our sister site, Icrontic, has been pitching in as well.

Sometime in the next few weeks, I expect we'll have some brief downtime as I do the final migration of the sites. I'll post an announcement beforehand with details. There won't be any changes or data loss.

Shortly thereafter, I'll be upgrading Vanilla (we're a year behind) which will bring some new features. I'll write more about those too as they launch, but the biggest thing will be an easier-to-use text editor.

Finally, not long after all that, I'll be updating the design of the site. It will be fairly dramatic, but you'll very much recognize it as NewBuddhist. We'll swap to the new logo and have a much fresher layout, but the general color scheme will remain the same. The mobile experience will also be made consistent with the non-mobile site so it won't feel like 2 different sites depending on where you browse from.

In general, the software will still work the same. It'll just look a lot nicer.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/14/the-mindfulness-conspiracy-capitalist-spirituality

The hypothesis seems to be that how mindfulness is being adopted plays into the hands of those with vested interest in how the world (supposedly) is because it encourages people to accept things for how they are and to change themselves rather than change a world that (supposedly) needs to be changed.

Thoughts?

Lets take an example - say you're a factory worker working in awful conditions, with an exploitative landlord who charges you the absolute maximum for a damp and dangerous accommodation, that the government has no respect for your rights - well if all that suffering that entails is soothed and ceased by "your practice", then who then is ever going to change those external conditions? Is the buddhist way simply to shrug one's shoulders and think "everythign would be okay if everyone become buddhist"?

If you look at history - in terms of social progress, i.e. the lessening of suffering, caused not by "equanimity" and "mindful wisdom", but by people engaging directly with their suffering, running into it, and angrily overhauling the structures that cause it?

Or, in summery, is Buddhist practice anti-intellectual, if intellectual means using the means of consciousness to restructure the world? Are there moral implications for constantly striving for "non thought" or "pure mind"?

Some peoples avatars including mine have all turned into a generic grey face on my Ipad ... ? (not that one)
My temp cure was going into settings and reloading my avatar ... ✔️

?

So.......?

For my part:
If I try to post a picture from my own files, I no longer get it appearing in the main comment box; it appears as a small icon UNDERNEATH, that members have to click on to access. This didn't used to happen; I could place my cursor within the comment box, click on the black, portrait-orientated icon, ('attach file')select an image, and press enter, and it would be posted in the comment box with the text.

If using the landscape icon ('attach image') you used to be able to EITHER choose a file OR enter the URL. If I paste the URL and click 'enter', occasionally it posts the URL in the comment box - but not always. It just sits there, doing nothing.
I have to come back to the post later, and try again. sometimes it wsorks, sometimes it doesn't.
Also, for me, the 'attach image' option box has changed. You used to be able to either select file, or enter url, via 2 different selection option 'buttons', but now, I don't get the 'or enter URL' option. It's 'select file' or 'enter URL' in the actual URL box....

Anyone else experiencing the same?
Any other current problems?

(I have had 2 members PM me with difficulties in starting new threads, although in both cases, the issue seemed to disappear....)

If the picture is supposed to illustrate a significant portion of the comment you're making, fair enough.
But if you're just adding a picture for the sake of it, because you feel like it, or because it's just an inconsequential decorative illustration, please use the countless and colourful words you are so gifted at using normally, to good effect, and write something, rather than plaster pictures all over the place for the sheer sake of lengthening a one-sentence post into half a page of unnecessary illustrations!

It takes three times as long to scroll a page looking for a post. Which for a Moderator, can be a royal pain in the put-upon.

That goes for unnecessary, off-topic, diversional comments, wisecracks and irrelevant asides, too.

If it assists the thread, great. If you've posted for the sake of filling space, it will BE DELETED!

THANK YOU!!

(EtA: I really don't want to have to go through posts editing and deleting illustrative pictures, or banal, off-topic flippant wise-cracks, simply because they're there for the sake of it.... Please help me to avoid the label of 'heavy-handed'!)

Many thanks.

I also wonder why the "Location" option is repeated twice.
Just wondering...

It's not bad, really, but it's also not a logo so much as some website header art that happens to have the site's name embedded in it. It's essentially just the typed-out address of the site in a sans serif font next to clip art with a drop shadow. It can't really be used in any other context besides the top of the site. Heck, we're not even using it on the mobile site because there's no way to make it that small and still be legible.

In May 2017, I started tinkering around with creating a proper logo for NewBuddhist shortly after I finished a new Icrontic.com logo. I was super happy with how that project turned out and looked forward to taking on some new creative challenges. I started with some simple font explorations. Eventually, I sent a font sampler list to Brian to get his input.

He liked the first and last ones best, so I played with those until I determined the latter was going to make a better logo base. There's a lot to think about when doing logo work, and that font checked several boxes. The most important among them was legibility, distinctiveness, and ability to be clearly reproduced in many types of media, not just in a website header.

Then I set the project aside for a while.

In January of this year I came back to the project for a few weekends and started playing with the idea of a lotus outlining the name of the site in the chosen font. It was good, but not great. The lotus outline wasn't symmetrical, which caused it to not read as a lotus very well. It also felt a little too complicated.

In mid-March, I circled back for another crack at it. I rounded up some new lotus contenders and collected them into a folder and thought about them for a few days. I picked a new one and started again. First, I tried a revamp of the last iteration with a new lotus, but that didn't pan out much better. Then, I mocked up an all-new third iteration (with copy/pasted lotus art) and passed it by Brian to see if we were in the right ballpark, and it felt like we were quite close. Next was re-balancing it and trying different ways of making the lotus into a vector image for a proper logo (full outline, solid fill, disconnected outline, etc). At that stage it was basically about getting the art to read as what it represented with as few simple lines as possible while maintaining scalability.

What's most interesting about this tail end of the process is that I started the "wordmark" version (a condensed logo that doesn't spell out the entire name) as I was doing these iterations, and that helped guide me to the simplified lotus version for the final full logo. Working on them in tandem really helped nudge both of them across the finish line faster.

Here's the final product!

And here's the wordmark version.

I'm pretty pleased with how this project turned out after nearly a year of off-and-on effort. It'll probably be some time before they're full worked into the design of the site, but we'll get there.

It's getting to be less and less about Buddhism, and more and more a personal space people can discuss whatever they want, under the occasional guise of "...in a buddhist way..."

It's also getting to be a bit like an 'old boys club', by which I mean same posters, same discussions... We haven't had much in the way of new blood, in spite of me accepting quite a number of new applicants. I'd love to be able to change that.
It's possible the general discussion atmosphere is not what they're looking for, which is a shame.

I remember when I joined, discussions were far more focused, generally...Now, IMHO, it's getting to be less and less like a Buddhist forum with other topic matters, and more and more like a general discussion group with a nod to Buddhism.

Just thought I'd put that out for general Information...