IntenseDebate - Ben Tremblay

12 years ago @ LEDFace Blog - Knowledge is not mine,... · 0 replies · +1 points

I wrote http://bit.ly/cNlarO to try and clarify my own thinking on something: while facts ("truth"?) matter, it's also true that "subjective narrative" matter (truth!) even when it's disregarded.

What I realized after many, many years of partisan politics is that winning the argument often leaves a trail of new conflicts. There's something fundamentally wrong there. Even when we agree on the facts (Let's face it, that doesn't often happen!) the way we go about making decisions leaves a lot of hard feelings. Democratic process? Maybe ... nominally ... but not social. In fact, just plain rude.

So my "GNodal" project is all about that: not just getting the data, not just presenting the information, but getting to what matters ... to people ... as though people matter ... cuz, ultimately, they do.

Very nice to meet you!
@ITGeek | @bentrem

13 years ago @ elephant journal: Yoga... - Yoga, Truth, and Dogma... · 1 reply · +1 points

Wonderful ... I mean, after all, we share "yoga" ... and a yogin/i by any other name, right? :-) BTW with a bit of a stretch I could compare yoga to the Christian notion of "oblation". A stretch, but there's a commonality.

namaste
Karma Chöpal
__{*}__

p.s. was thinking of talking to drum kidz about getting Krisna Das up here ... I'm sure kirtan would float their boats!

13 years ago @ elephant journal: Yoga... - Yoga, Truth, and Dogma... · 2 replies · +2 points

"Actually, he did say exactly that. .... So he is even worse than those who say you will go to hell ..."
Oh my ...
... got to get the details right, don't you agree?
He said, basically, "Check it out; test it by your own experience!"

"These hell realms actually exist." Oh, my ...

13 years ago @ elephant journal: Yoga... - Yoga, Truth, and Dogma... · 3 replies · +2 points

I feel myself disbarred from certain activity (kirtan, for example) because of my views as Vajrayana Buddhist. (Exaggerating slightly for the sake of discussion.) I'd really like to see something like the rime movement, where commonalities are the basis for sharing experience. Deity and atman shouldn't be obstacles to people of good will!

13 years ago @ Shambhala SunSpace - How the Buddha cut the... · 0 replies · +1 points

Related, sorta / kinda.
Years ago (Someone out there recall the August '85 issue of Scientific American?) things "fractal" were all very new. (I got in on the ground floor, having studied non-linearity before it was a term.) The community was small, so soon after cobbling together a Mandelbrot microscope (using the C=64's BIOS routines, surprisingly effective) I connected with the fellow who was running the Hubbard supercomputer at Ithaca. (Dear Homer ... miss you tons.) He very kindly sent me a set of very, very, very high-res slides. Glorious.

Fast forward slightly.
During a conversation / audience, I pulled out the slides and showed them to the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. (I had been talking with him about Professor Guenther's "From Reductionism to Creativity; rDzogchen and the New Science of Mind".) He peeked at them and huh huh responded with something like, "Yes, yes, it's like that *giggle*"

E.Ma!

ben

p.s. you've tuned into "self-directed neuro-plasticity"? Alaya-vijnana, n'est-ce pas?
:-)

13 years ago @ Buddhist Geeks : Disco... - BG 177: Working with S... · 0 replies · +1 points

So two monks were in a heated argument on the subject ... seems they both had the same lover.
Buddha told them to look at their squabbling and think about the roots of conflict. heh ... no addiction to soap-opera there!

14 years ago @ elephant journal: Yoga... - The Dzogchen Ponlop Ri... · 1 reply · +1 points

Sure, Bob, all good, I'm sure we're basically on the same page.

I appreciate the poetry of ecstasy (Do you read Rumi?) but sometimes folk use language that (seems to me) amounts to huge claims of accomplishment and realization ... can get to be a habit, that.

14 years ago @ elephant journal: Yoga... - The Dzogchen Ponlop Ri... · 3 replies · +1 points

I know why I said "no" to "Guru within" ... because it sounded too precious.

Why did you? Do you know?

14 years ago @ elephant journal: Yoga... - The Dzogchen Ponlop Ri... · 5 replies · +1 points

Some might make reference to "the Guru within" ... too precious for me.
I like the notion of "each of us, a sage general". I came up with that after a workshop with the translation team for the Shambhala edition of Sun Tzu.
As Rinpoche pointed out: thinking for ourselves.

14 years ago @ elephant journal: Yoga... - The Dzogchen Ponlop Ri... · 0 replies · +1 points

I hear tea is good for cooling the mind.

c(_)~

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