10.09.06
Posted in Spirituality, Philosophy at 5:02 am by Tristan
I’ve just finsihed my second, slower read of Lau Tzu’s Tao Te Ching as translated by Stephen Mitchell. While pondering this short but rich (as in cheesecake) book, I thought of many things that would make great blog entries. I couldn’t decide on just one, so here is a preview of blog posts to come regarding and/or inspired by this ancient writing:
- The Tao Te Ching for programmers (Not to be confused with the Tao of Programming)
- A time for this and a time for that – One stanza of the Tao Te Ching that seems strangely similar to a book of the bible (and, by proxy a classic rock song)
- Is there a role for the “enlightend” in Politics?
- Lao Tzu – Adam Smith from 500 BC?
- A Quick Summary of the Tao – Not what you expect.
Meanwhile, I’ll be starting on my next book. It’s back to the western world for a while with Holy Silence: The Gift Of Quaker Spirituality
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10.08.06
Posted in Philosophy, Sunday Quote of Wisdom at 3:45 pm by Tristan
On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow. – Nietzsche
Whether in science or in spirit, this rings ture. So long as we keep an open mind and keep pressing forward, we come closer to truth.
This weeks image is an artists rendering of the mountains of Saturn’s moon, Titan.
Note that the Sunday Quote of Wisdom is a shameless ripoff of my sister’s Friday Fractal at her blog, Chaotic Utopia.
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10.06.06
Posted in Programming, Spirituality at 2:15 am by Tristan
If anyone happens to look at my “Currently reading” list on the left, you’ll see I’m reading the “Tao Te Ching”. If you are are programmer, you can get a shorter, and more specialized work based on it, The Tao of Programming
It’s hilarious in that “funny because its true” way.
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Posted in Spirituality at 12:30 am by Tristan
Last week, I attended the rehearsal dinner for the wedding of some friends of ours. We ended up sitting with our friend’s priest and his wife. At first, my mind was a little conflicted with the prospect of spending a meal talking to a Christian Priest. On the one hand, I had had some bad experiences with Christianity as a child, and it had turned me away from the Chruch and spirituality in general for many years. On the other hand, I’d been doing a lot of Spiritual Reading of late and was eagar to get an enlightened Christian perspective. I set my prejudices aside and greeted the priest with an open mind.
Father Stace turned out to be quite wise and charismatic. We discussed his life as a Priest in training, my dabbling in Buddhism, Hinduism and “New Age” readings, his blog, movies and more. I mentioned that I had attempted to read the Bible a few times and struggled with its immense length. He recommend I start with a few books of the New Testament first, which I plan to do. He could somehow tell that I was interested in the more spiritual side of Christianity and recommended I read, The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality. I wasn’t really enjoying the other book I was reading at the time, so the next day I went out and bought it. I’m quite glad I did.
In some of my other studies I had heard about Christian Mysticism and that it had some similarities with East Asian spiritual paths, but when I researched it online everything was a bit over my head from a theological perspective. The Mountain of Silence was a great change. Written from the perspective of a western academic who had studied other spiritual ideas than Christianity, it was a great change of pace. I won’t try to summarize the book, as I’m sure you can get an idea from Amazon, but here are some ideas that seemed to strike a chord with me:
- The Athonite monks recommend a practice of “Ceaseless Prayer” in which a novice monk will repeat the Jesus Prayer (something like “Lord Jesus Christ, Have Mercy on me, a sinner”) until it persisted constantly in the background behind the thought of worldly concerns. This reminded me of the Buddhist/New Age concepts of meditation involving stopping thought. I imagine that while repeating the prayer, one does not have the time for worldly thoughts, and enters a very meditative-like state. It reminds me of Tolle’s idea that useful thoughts will emerge “from the stillness” in a person who focuses solely on the present moment. The Greek Orthodox concept of Logosimoi also rang of this.
- The concept of Hell outlined by Maximos and the other monks from the Mountain seems much plausible than the fire and brimstone picture we get from Christian Fundamentalism and Dante. First, it is not simply unending torture. The monk tells several stories of sinful folk ascending to heaven after death, due to the prayer’s of monks and others on the worldly plane. He also explains that the real suffering in Hell comes from being cut off from God, not neccessarily physical pain know here on earth.
- Suffering as a doorway to God. This reminded me so much of Tich Naht Hanh, the Buddhist monk and author, that several times I had to check the title of the book just to be sure of what I was reading.
- Spiritual insight as a “Scientific” practice. Although any practicing scientist would scoff, Father Maximos proposed that spiritual growth is a somewhat scientific process. He said that for spiritual pursuits we must use the proper tools to investigate: Prayer, studying the scriptures, Fasting etc. I would add Meditation and perhaps even rational reductionism ala Hobbes and Descartes to this list. Now, before any of you scientists jump down my throat, I am aware that most things of the spiritual world won’t hold up to a strictly objective scientific method, but taking a more personal/subjective perspective it makes sense.
Through reading The Mountain of Silence, I’ve gained a new respect for the Jewish/Christian tradition. Although I don’t plan on rushing out to attend church every Sunday, Christianity will no longer be absent from my reading lists.
The wider my breadth of spiritual knowledge and wisdom becomes, the more I realize that all truly enlightened people are all talking about the same things. Terrorism, War and Famine might be all things of the past if people learned from their truly enlightened spiritual guides rather than blindly following interpretations of “Holy” texts that happen to meet their worldly wishes at the moment.
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10.05.06
Posted in Programming at 10:22 pm by Tristan
I’m new to WordPress, and I happened upon Ali Hassan’s Wordpress Widget for AllConsuming.net. Its a great little widget, but I found that you had to modify the source to show completed items, and there wasn’t a good way to show both completed and incomplete items. So, I decided to add ‘Completed’ as an option in the widget. You can download the plugin here. For those that haven’t used it before, here is how to install it:
(1) Dowload and install the sidebar widgets plugin from Automattic. *
(2) Download and install Ali’s AllConsuming widget.*
* To install these widgets, just upload the contents of each zip to your /plugins/ folder
(3) Activate both plugins
(4) You can configure the plugins under the new ‘Sidebar’ tab under ‘Presentation’
To upgrade, simply copy the php file in the zip over your existing one. The new option will appear.
That’s it! Let me know if you have any problems, and I’ll do my best to help if I have time.
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