Best Of
Re: Just for fun: the random, useless announcements thread!
@Jeroen said:
Yes, I’ve seen them now. That was quite a trip! And not many western tourists…
I may have seen a couple of Western-looking people in Tiananmen Square and maybe four at the Great Wall.
It's interesting, during my 12-hour stopover in Beijing on my way to Europe, I traveled to the hotel with a young Russian Kiwi woman who was on the same plane. She had attended school and college in Aotearoa and now lives there. She spoke English fluently and was heading to visit her grandmother in Siberia.
At the end of the Great Wall walk, as I was making my way down to the train station, a Russian woman and her son approached me and started a conversation. They were from Moscow, her son had won a scholarship to one of Moscow’s top universities. The woman was quite fluent in English, though with a Russian accent, and her son spoke English too.
We walked together for a while towards the station, and she shared some insights about life in Russia.
The only ‘Westerners’ I really interacted with in Beijing were Russians. I had much more interaction with the local Chinese population, despite the language barrier. Most of our communication was through a translation app on my or their phone.
I had to get a reconditioned iPhone for the trip because I needed a phone that could support an eSIM so I could use it in China.
Shoshin1
Re: The Knowledge That Matters
@person said:
The ability to not get attached to our thoughts is an important part of the practice though. >I hear lots of people talk about how understanding that this was even possible was a major >turning point in their lives.
This was the case for me a few months ago while sitting in the waiting room at my neurologist's office. My outcome (which I will find out in a week), will quite literally change my life. I realised in the moments of waiting, that I will not possibly know what to expect or how to feel with the outcome. Why not start letting go now?
Laughter and the sense of being
I wanted to talk about the experience of being while you are laughing. It is difficult to be mindful while you laugh, but after you have had a good, deep laughter, immediately afterwards you can examine the memory of it and get a glimpse… Osho once said that this is what it is like to be a buddha.
So what I experience is a kind of absence of mind, and a space filled with light, and cheerfulness, a living, jolly, tinkling place of the sense of song and bells. Pure joy, sheer dance, overflowing energy. Not at all serious but playful.
It was my mother who occasioned this. We were eating dinner, and she had put on her spoon an amount of powdered Parmesan cheese. Just as she brought this to her mouth to eat, she suddenly drew a deep breath, as if in preparation for a sneeze, with as result that she sniffed up a good amount of the Parmesan cheese! She was hacking and coughing for a good ten minutes, and I had to laugh so hard…
It was afterwards that I started to recall how great it felt. Laughter is a wonderful thing…
Jeroen
Re: Just for fun: the random, useless announcements thread!
Yes, I’ve seen them now. That was quite a trip! And not many western tourists…
Jeroen
Re: What music are you listening to?
Heavy Foot - Mon Rovia
The highest form of wisdom is empathy.
Shoshin1
Re: Good and Bad People
Here are the actions I take to combat evil. I think the extreme partisanship of the US is undermining the possibility of consensus and the functioning of government, which are the foundation for all the other things we want. There are a bunch of reasons for this and many of the solutions are effectively out of reach (like amending the constitution), so putting energy into them is a waste of energy, dare I say a similar sort of evil to the good person who does nothing is the good person who tilts at windmills? One place that can be changed that would have a fairly big impact is in our primary elections. As they are now, the people who show up to vote are the most engaged and thus the most partisan, which pushes the candidates available in the general election to be the ones that won't reach across the aisle and won't build consensus, so nothing gets done and no problems are solved. You may like one side of this, but that one side comes with the other side in this system of high partisanship. So to fight evil and try to shore up the crumbling foundations of our liberal democratic system (a good in my view) I put some of my energy (albeit probably a small amount compared to the good™ people of the world) into understanding voting issues and at times emailing the appropriate people.
Another thing I do to combat evil is develop my inner resources to live a good and decent life. To acquire the knowledge and skills to understand and communicate ways other people can improve their lives so they can be happier and better people in the world.
person
Re: Just for fun: the random, useless announcements thread!
From time to time, the weight of those who or whom have passed flows over.
My parents and all my aunts and uncles are gone. My older brother and a son, friends..my graduation class will be having it's 60 year reunion with more on the wall of memory than remaining.
But, from anther light, for those still around and those who have fallen, for whatever span of time we each have or had, we all enjoyed the jewel of life. To die, one must first live. So, even as we miss the ones who have gone, we celebrate having shared our lives with theirs. We celebrate sharing and having shared the priceless jewel of life.
A toast - To those we have known, those we now know and those we shall know,
THANK YOU, ALL!
Peace to all
Lionduck
Re: Just for fun: the random, useless announcements thread!
I’m finding I’m in a more somber mood these days… feeling the weight a bit of all the people who have passed away and disappeared from my life in recent years… my uncles Kees and Henk, my aunt Elly, my stepfather and most of all my dad. It’s just me and my mother now.
I used to always be quite cheerful, a joyous person, usually with a smile on my face. But recently I have been surprising serious and anxious expressions on my face when I would return from being concentrated on something.
Jeroen