The following quotation was contributed by Isaiah:

“And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.” - Rainer Rilke: Letters To A Young Poet

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The folk tale is for entertainment. The myth is for spiritual instruction. There is a fine saying in India with respect to these two orders of myth, the folk idea and the elementary idea. The folk aspect is called desi, which means “provincial,” having to do with your society. That is for young people. It’s through that that the young person is brought into the society and is taught to go out and kill monsters. “Okay, here’s a soldier suit, we’ve got a job for you.” But there’s also the elementary idea. The Sanskrit name for that is marga, which means “path”. It’s the trail back to yourself.

— Joseph Campbell

Campbell, Joseph; with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. Anchor: New York. 1988. (71, 72)

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Firefox
Mozilla’s Firefox browser is something I’ve been intermittently using for quite a while. Meanwhile, I’ve continued to post in IE. Now I am going to start posting with Firefox.

There are some minor issues that I don’t know how to fix. If you can help me, I’d appreciate it.

1. For example, sometimes when I set up the post in Firefox, and then view it in IE, there are extra lines between the pics and the first line of the post that exist in IE but don’t exist in Firefox. One unproven theory is this only happens when I import an image in via Blogger versus bringing it in via Hello.
2. Another problem is that the Technorati search window doesn’t work or display properly in Firefox. As soon as you start typing a search word, it immediately goes to the Technorati default page. The same HTML works and displays just fine in IE.
3. My site ‘icon’, displayed in the blog header, doesn’t show up in Firefox although it works fine in IE.

I’ll get this stuff worked out. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Firefox Note
Wikipedia notes that “Web-surfers have adopted Firefox rapidly, despite the dominance of Internet Explorer in the browser market. According to several sources (as listed in statistics reference), by September 2005, Firefox had around 7.6% of global market share - 10% for North America. Europe, according to a study released by the firm XiTi on September 25, 2005, generally had higher percentages of Firefox use, with an average of 15.15%. Firefox has reached a market share of 1/3 in Finland, 1/4 in Germany, and about 1/8 in Belgium. Australia has a similarly high usage, while Asia, Africa, and Latin America trail behind with around 5%.”

On my site, I’ve seen Firefox grow from a 5-7% browser share, to its current 19%. IE is at 75%.

Site Meter Filtering
I found a function in Site Meter recently, that gives you more accurate site statistics.

You have to login to Site Meter. If you haven’t logged in for a long time, they sent you a login name and password when you first signed up. Check your past emails.

Once logged in, there is a function that you can enable that will prevent your site’s statistics from being artificially inflated by your own site visits. There are two things that can distort your statistics: your own visits, and anytime you are ‘in’ site meter and you ‘click’ on one of your visitors attributes, e.g. ‘referring URL’.

If the referring URL is something like a Goggle Image search that ended up bringing the visitor to your blog… then when you ‘click’ on the referring URL and it brings up your blog, well, that gets counted by Site Meter as a visit… even though it was you.

I’ve enabled this function in Site Meter and my statistics are clearly more accurate. My own time zone, for example, is no longer such a dominent time zone.

GMail and Web-based Email - Off Line Backups
I am not a big fan of MS Outlook. I use it at work and at home, and often get frustrated with VPN access when I travel, or the limitations of web-based access to my Outlook synchronized accounts. It is also s-l-o-w to open up.

Once I started using GMail, I became more and more sold on its speed, ease-of-access and also ‘labels’, etc. So, I started toying with the idea of getting rid of Outlook altogether. I could forward everything to GMail accounts. But then I realized I’d not have any off-line backup or access. I don’t know about you, but there are some emails (like work) work that I don’t want to risk losing. And being able to view my emails when I am off line is also important to me.

Having off-line back up of your web-based email may be important to you too. It is easy to do. Download Mozilla’s Thunderbird (or similar program). Thunderbird’s Help gives excellent directions on how to use Thunderbird to synchronize and import your POP email accounts. I used it with GMail and it was a snap. During setup, Thunderbird automatically found my Outlook accounts (home, work and Hotmail), and like magic they appeared the first time the application ran.

Using Thunderbird as a backup works great. I may start using it as my primary email program - who knows? Meanwhile, I am no longer worried that someday Goggle’s GMail server(s) may crash and all of my past emails are gone (even though I believe Goggle is highly motivated to protect its user’s emails). All of my past emails, from every account, now reside on my own computer.

Incidentally, Thunderbird has some cool functions. One of them is similar to GMail’s ‘labels’. It also has a function that will associate emails that you send/reply, called ‘threads’. Enable that function and all related emails are grouped together. Overall, it is a nice clean program. Highly recommended.

Blogger Search - Something New
Maybe its been there forever, but at Blogger ‘Dashboard’ I found a new search function called Blog Search. It searches blogs all over the web. Blogger just keeps getting better.

Speaking of Goggle
Goggle has its own blog here. And here is Blogger’s official blog.

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Whatever thou desirest will come to pass.

Be not distracted. The boundary line between going up and going downwards is here now. If thou givest way to indecision for even a second, thou wilt have to suffer misery for a long, long time.

This is the moment. Hold fast to one single purpose.

Evans-Wentz, W.Y., editor. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Oxford; London, 1960. (177)

My comment: Well, that sure explains why I’ve been suffering “misery for a long, long time.” I think it is describing the consequences of not centering on and maintaining my inner connection, of losing focus on the inner ‘knowing’ that we each possess.

Here is something really hard for me (yet when I do it, it is incredibly easy):

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Your own heart is the dwelling place of the Essence of the Universe.

- Sufi Master Attar

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What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Before enlightenment-chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment-chop wood, carry water.

- Zen Buddhist Saying

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Hopefully we each have something in our life that guides us through self improvement, helps us learn to positively adapt to change, and helps us learn to navigate more successfully through the unknown. For me, training in martial arts has been my greatest tool for improvement in these areas. But the inner journey has many highways and backroads. The following quotation is from the perspective of martial arts, but it can be applied to any avenue of the deeper journey, whether that journey is defined in philosophical, religious, spiritual, agnostic or even atheist terms.

Ethics in Asian philosophy are central to both the personal life and the social life, providing standards for conduct and character, governing the judgment of good and evil, influencing choice of action, helping human beings to move harmoniously in society, in order to enable the most pleasant and useful life, personally and socially. It is along these ethical lines that the martial arts as originated in the East have offered the world their contribution to society and the individual. The Western world, however, has viewed the martial arts in a very different light.

In the West, a person seeking martial arts instruction often goes after it like a shopper in a shopping mall. In the West one is likely to enter a school of martial arts with the same attitudes and some of the same expectations with which one enters a department store, sometimes with credit card in hand. One may bargain with the clerk, pay the money, learn the routines, take the merchandise and leave the store. That’s all there is to learning the martial arts, the merchandiser appears to say.

Training in the martial arts, as one finds it in this “mall” approach is often a purely mechanical process with no true human contact between the seller and the buyer, merely one more transaction in a day’s busy schedule for both. In terms of the essence of martial arts study, however, it is not that simple at all. In fact, the relationship between students and teacher in the Eastern tradition is quite complex and extraordinary because the true teacher doesn’t sell knowledge and the true student cannot buy it.

Today martial training too often pays homage only to the outer aspect to attract more customers who might please themselves in the transient satisfactions and limelight of personal power. Such training usually progresses no farther than entertainment and disregards the necessary work toward inner growth.

Authentic study of martial arts involves intense study in the art of living and is dramatically different from business transactions. We know we have strayed far from the true martial arts when students and teachers, having launched the transaction as a business venture, demonstrate concern only about appearance, showing off with spectacular combat techniques designed merely to impress others, while neglecting the cultivation of mindfulness, compassion, and love. This crass attitude makes old martial arts masters complain that nowadays people are merely infatuated with martial arts and train to compete only in order to gain a prize or win a colored belt or title. It seems they have lost their original meaning, the serious purpose, and vitality of the martial arts. The art remains art in name alone.

In a very real sense, these old masters are quite correct in their assessment, and most competent young martial arts instructors will agree that the greatest failure in the adoption of Westerners of Eastern practice has to do with the general absence in Western teaching of ethics, values and the art of living. Too often, the martial arts as presented in the West means combat, self defense, and war games involving violence-oriented, aggressive fighting. Only rarely does one find that martial arts instruction in the Western world actually speaks to the art of living and to the inner quest for courage and authenticity.

Today, true seekers after the martial arts are very likely to find themselves lost in darkness and frustration, left alone to identify with the appearance, the outside, but never to live in the center of their being.

At some point in our training we reach a place where the choice is ours: to jump back into the dark well of our own egos where we can pretend to be master, though that place may be tiny and insignificant; or to open ourselves to the light of the infinite universe and to the teachings themselves with hearts that are open and pulsing with life.

Tri Thong Dang. Beyond the Known: The Ultimate Goal of the Martial Arts. Rutland; Tuttle, 1993. (10-12)

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Picture credit:
http://www.paraethos.com/images/smug.jpg

Retlaw Kram was quietly smug. After all, he was hot. At least that’s what he had been told. Yep, tropical, he thought. Pretty darn cool. Well, actually pretty darn hot, he chuckled; steaming, some might say.

I like that, thought Kram. Hot as a lightning bolt, rolled into a Mexican burrito, covered in fire sauce, and chased down by a cup of steaming Columbian coffee. Sizzling.

That was another thing he had been told. He was sizzling. Hot and sizzling. Oh yeah.

It had taken quite a long time to get there. Years actually. And that’s not even talking about all the jungle treks and climbs through the mountains. Dead ends, followed by hope. Oh, and the sacrifices before the trip, the saving of all that money to finance a three year sabbatical traveling through Asia, looking for the secrets.

How can it get better? I found the inner secrets. And the old teacher had told him, “Mr. Kram, you are hot. How do they say in America? Sizzling?” He laughed very loud. The other disciples were quiet, avoiding his eyes. Strange, thought Retlaw. Well, we all have our crosses to bear. He found himself smiling and looking down at his feet.

It was a long flight back to the States, but it seemed short. Retlaw was on a high. Unstoppable.

His book became a bestseller. Suddenly he was a celebrity. Everyone was clamoring for a piece of him. Tell us how to do it, they exclaimed!

Smiling and signing autographs, Kram promised more in his second book, which was an even bigger smash hit followed by two more bestsellers. By now he had millions of dollars and had just opened his spiritual study center.

“Tell us how to do it,” they begged. “You’ve experienced the inner secrets. Unbelievable!”

Kram referred them to the sprawling study center, with its wide variety of courses and seminars. He had over fifty people on staff. They flocked there by the hundreds, every weekend, with some staying for months at the newly opened meditation cabins. Money breeds success, or so the saying goes. Kram’s spiritual center was soon hosting other world famous spiritual teachers and speakers. He was hot, still sizzling.

It wasn’t long before no one was really asking Kram to teach them how to do it. He was too busy, and it was nearly impossible to get even a few minutes of his time.

His center continued to grow in popularity, and plans were drawn up to expand the concept around the world. And so it went. All very successful.

Yes, Kram was hot. He was sizzling. Best selling author. World wide acclaim. Spiritual centers all around the world. A great spiritual leader. And every night, even in his dreams, he would hear the old master laughing, and see eyes looking everywhere but into his.

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I try to study sincerely, although sometimes I’m so “full of it” I can’t see in front of my face because of all the stinking fumes. In the process, though, I’ve sometimes found in my studies deep experiences, deeper than I think are out there… anywhere.

I don’t know how it is with you, but one of the things that can happen to me after such experiences is a subtle feeling of superiorit. But… then something happens: I go in and study with my teacher and find out (again) that I’m not really deep at all. I just sit there and shake my head and go, “Man, I don’t even have a clue.”

Now, maybe I’m just a little more than being totally clueless, because the fact is I have gone deep, so deep in fact that I didn’t even think I had enough air to get back up to the surface. I have had experiences that sometimes completely overwhelmed me. And when I (finally) did get back up to the surface, my teacher just laughed and said, “Why didn’t you stay down longer? Tell me, what did you do when you were down there, just look around? Is that all you did? Didn’t you do anything?”

Or, he’ll look at me when I am down there, in the deepest depths, and say, “Why do you have a mask and breathing apparatus on? Take it off! What are you afraid of? Drowning? Come on, stretch yourself!”

I see that the instruction on the inner path always, always goes deeper. And every time I think I am really getting it, every time I start thinking I am a real patriot on the path of inner experiences, I find out that I am just a smidge of oil floating on water so deep that sonar can’t find the bottom.

It’s actually pretty funny, even though its also pretty sad.

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