Hello!
Mia, feeding the peacock in front of our house.
Weird Words: Zymurgy[image: IPA pronunciation of 'Zymurgy']
1) The chemistry or practice of fermentation processes.
Though a useful term, people's interest in it outside winemaking and brewing
focuses on its supposedly being the literal last word. The phrase *from
aardvark to zymurgy* is sometimes used to mean everything, these supposedly
being the first and last nouns in the dictionary.
However, a check on my big stack of single-volume dictionaries shows that —
apart from the *New Oxford American Dictionary* — *zymurgy* is rarely the
last word. Some have one of related sense, *zythum*, a beer that was made by
the ancient Egyptians; others prefer to end with *Zyrian*, another name for
the language now usually called Komi; the *American Heritage Dictionary*selects
*zyzzyva*, a genus of tropical American weevils, which is also the last word
in *The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary*; you may feel that *The
Bloomsbury English Dictionary* has cheated by including *zzz*, "a
representation of the sound made by somebody sleeping or snoring, often used
in cartoons".
When not the focus of wordsmiths' musings and occasional wordplay,
*zymurgy*is rather rare, though as you would expect it's well known
among brewers and
winemakers. The journal of the American Homebrewers Association has that
title and its readers may be either *zymurgists* or *zymologists*, to taste.
If you need a related adjective, there's *zymurgical*. All these words come
from Greek *zume*, meaning a leaven, typically a yeast, that is added to
make a substance ferment.
Notwithstanding the pronunciation that's given in some word books, the first
vowel is like that in *bite*, not *bit*, so it's roughly "ZAI-mur-jee".
[image: Entry for September 13, 2007 -
MirrorMask]
[image:
magnify]
*What*
*if it WAS the chicken???*
[image: Entry for September 13,
2007]
[image:
magnify]
Now *that* is funny!!!
Issue nº 155
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In this issue
- The good fight
The good fight
"I have fought a good fight, I have kept the faith," says Paul in one of his
Epistles. And it seems appropriate to remember the theme now that a new year
is stretching out before us.
Men can never stop dreaming. Dreams are the food of the soul, just as food
is to the body. In our existence we often see our dreams come undone, yet it
is necessary to go on dreaming, otherwise our soul dies and Agape does not
penetrate it. Agape is universal love, the love which is greater and more
important than "liking" someone. In his famous sermon on dreams, Martin
Luther King reminds us of the fact that Jesus asked us to love our enemies,
not to like them. This greater love is what drives us to go on fighting in
spite of everything, to keep faith and joy, and to fight the Good Fight.
The Good Fight is the one we wage because our heart asks for it. In heroic
times, when the apostles went out into the world to preach the Gospel, or in
the days of the knights errant, things were easier: there was a lot of
territory to travel, and a lot of things to do. Nowadays, however, the world
has changed and the Good Fight has been moved from the battle fields to
within us.
The Good Fight is the one we wage on behalf of our dreams. When they explode
in us with all their might – in our youth – we have a great deal of courage,
but we still have not learned to fight. After much effort we eventually
learn to fight, and then we no longer have the same courage to fight. This
makes us turn against ourselves and we start fighting and becoming our own
worst enemy. We say that our dreams were childish, difficult to make come
true, or the fruit of our ignorance of the realities of life. We kill our
dreams because we are afraid of fighting the Good Fight.
The first symptom that we are killing our dreams is lack of time. The
busiest people I have known in my life had time for everything. Those who
did nothing were always tired and could hardly cope with the little work
they had to do, always complaining that the day was too short. In fact, they
were afraid of fighting the Good Fight.
The second symptom of the death of our dreams are our certainties. Because
we do not want to see life as a great adventure to be lived, we begin to
feel that we are wise, fair and correct in what little we ask of our
existence. We look beyond the walls of our day-to-day life and hear the
noise of spears clashing, feel the smell of sweat and gun-powder, see the
great defeats and the faces of warriors thirsty for victory. But we never
perceive the joy, the immense joy in the heart of those who are fighting,
because for them it does not matter who wins or loses, what matters only is
to fight the Good Fight.
Finally, the third symptom of the death of our dreams is peace. Life becomes
a Sunday afternoon, not asking too much of us and not asking more than what
we want to give. So we feel that we are "mature", leave aside the "fantasies
of childhood" and guarantee our personal and professional success. We are
surprised when someone our age says they still want this or that out of
life. But deep in our heart we know that what has happened is that we gave
up fighting for our dreams, fighting the Good Fight.
When we give up our dreams and find peace, we enjoy a period of tranquility.
But our dead dreams begin to rot inside us and infest the whole atmosphere
we live in. We start acting cruel towards those around us, and eventually
begin to direct this cruelty towards ourselves. Sickness and psychoses
appear. What we wanted to avoid in fighting – disappointment and defeat –
becomes the only legacy of our cowardice. And one fine day the dead and
rotten dreams make the air difficult to breathe and then we want to die, we
want death to free us from our certainties, from our worries, and from that
terrible Sunday-afternoon peace.
So, to avoid all that, let's face 2007 with the reverence of mystery and the
joy of adventure.
Learning from the simple things
In the Bragavad-Gita, Arjuna the warrior asks the Enlightened Lord:
"Who are you?"
Instead of answering "I am this," Krishna## begins to talk of the small and
big things in the world – and to say that he is there. Arjuna begins to see
the face of God in everything around him.
However, although we are created in the image and likeness of the Almighty,
we spend all our life trying to lock ourselves inside a bloc of coherency,
certainty and opinions. We do not understand that we are in the flowers, in
the mountains, in the things that we see on our way to work every day. We
rarely think that we came from a mystery - birth – and are heading towards
another mystery – death.
If we reflect on this, if we realize that the Divine presence and universal
wisdom are in everything that surrounds us, we shall perform each action
with more freedom. What follows are some stories on the matter:
The philosopher and the boatman
Sufi tradition tells the story of a philosopher who was crossing a river in
a boat. During the crossing, he tried to display his wisdom to the boatman.
"Do you know what great contribution Schopenhauer left to humanity?"
"No," replied the boatman. "But I know God, the river, and the simple wisdom
of my people."
"Well, just know that you have lost half of your life!"
In the middle of the river the boat hit a rock and sank. The boatman was
swimming towards one of the banks when he saw the philosopher drowning.
"I don't know how to swim!" he shouted in despair. "I told you that you had
lost half your life by not knowing Schopenhauer, and now I am losing my
whole life for not knowing something so simple!"
*Meanwhile, Schopenhauer...*
The German philosopher Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was walking along a street
in Dresden, seeking answers to the questions that troubled him. All of a
sudden he saw a garden and decided to spend some hours contemplating the
flowers.
One of the neighbors noticed the man's strange behavior and went to look for
a policeman. Some minutes later, a policeman approached him.
"Who are you?" asked the policeman in a rough voice.
Schopenhauer looked at the man from head to toe.
"That is what I want to find out while I look at the flowers. If you can
answer that question, I shall be forever grateful."
And while out walking...
While walking through a field, a man spotted a scarecrow.
"You must be tired standing there in this lonely field with nothing to do,"
he commented.
The scarecrow replied:
"There is great pleasure in driving away danger, and I never grow tired
doing this."
"Yes, I too have acted like that, and with good results," agreed the man.
"But those who are full of straw inside are always chasing things away,"
said the scarecrow.
The man took some years to understand the answer: those with flesh and blood
in their body must accept some unexpected things. But those with nothing
inside them are always driving off everything that comes near them – and not
even the blessings of God can come close to them.
www.warriorofthelight.com Copyright @ 2007 by Paulo
Coelho
"In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities."
Strength Training for the Mind
by
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Source: Transcribed from a file provided by the author.
------------------------------
Copyright (c) 2007 Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Access to Insight edition (c) 2007
For free distribution. This work may be republished, reformatted, reprinted,
and redistributed in any medium. It is the author's wish, however, that any
such republication and redistribution be made available to the public on a
free and unrestricted basis and that translations and other derivative works
be clearly marked as such.
------------------------------
*Strength Training for the Mind*
*by*
*Thanissaro Bhikkhu*
Meditation is the most useful skill you can master. It can bring the mind to
the end of suffering, something no other skill can do. But it's also the
most subtle and demanding skill there is. It requires all the mental
qualities ordinarily involved in mastering a physical skill — mindfulness
and alertness, persistence and patience, discipline and ingenuity — but to
an extraordinary degree. This is why, when you come to meditation, it's good
to reflect on any skills, crafts, or disciplines you've already mastered so
that you can apply the lessons they've taught you to the training of the
mind.
As a meditation teacher, I've often found it helpful to illustrate my points
with analogies drawn from physical skills. And, given the particular range
of skills and disciplines currently popular in America, I've found that one
useful source of analogies is strength training. Meditation is more like a
good workout than you might have thought.
The Buddha himself noticed the parallels here. He defined the practice as a
path of five strengths: conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration,
and discernment. He likened the mind's ability to beat down its most
stubborn thoughts to that of a strong man beating down a weaker man. The
agility of a well-trained mind, he said, is like that of a strong man who
can easily flex his arm when it's extended, or extend it when it's flexed.
And he often compared the higher skills of concentration and discernment to
the skills of archery, which — given the massive bows of ancient India — was
strength training for the noble warriors of his day. These skills included
the ability to shoot great distances, to fire arrows in rapid succession,
and to pierce great masses — the great mass, here, standing for the mass of
ignorance that envelops the untrained mind.
So even if you've been pumping great masses instead of piercing them, you've
been learning some important lessons that will stand you in good stead as a
meditator. A few of the more important lessons are these:
*Read up on anatomy.* If you want to strengthen a muscle, you need to know
where it is and what it moves if you're going to understand the exercises
that target it. Only then can you perform them efficiently. In the same way,
you have to understand the anatomy of the mind's suffering if you want to
understand how meditation is supposed to work. Read up on what the Buddha
had to say on the topic, and don't settle for books that put you at the far
end of a game of telephone. Go straight to the source. You'll find, for
instance, that the Buddha explained how ignorance shapes the way you
breathe, and how that in turn can add to your suffering. This is why most
meditation regimens start with the breath, and why the Buddha's own regimen
takes the breath all the way to nirvana. So read up to understand how and
why.
*Start where you are.* Too many meditators get discouraged at the outset
because their minds won't settle down. But just as you can't wait until
you're big and strong before you start strength training, you can't wait
until your concentration is strong before you start sitting. Only by
exercising what little concentration you have will you make it solid and
steady. So even though you feel scrawny when everyone around you seems big,
or fat when everyone else seems fit, remember that you're not here to
compete with them or with the perfect meditators you see in magazines.
You're here to work on yourself. So establish that as your focus, and keep
it strong.
*Establish a regular routine.* You're in this for the long haul. We all like
the stories of sudden enlightenment, but even the most lightning-like
insights have to be primed by a long, steady discipline of day-to-day
practice. That's because the consistency of your discipline is what allows
you to observe subtle changes, and being observant is what enables insight
to see. So don't get taken in by promises of quick and easy shortcuts. Set
aside a time to meditate every day and then stick to your schedule whether
you feel like meditating or not. The mind grows by overcoming resistance to
repetition, just like a muscle. Sometimes the best insights come on the days
you least feel like meditating. Even when they don't, you're establishing a
strength of discipline, patience, and resilience that will see you through
the even greater difficulties of aging, illness, and death. That's why it's
called practice.
*Aim for balance.* The "muscle groups" of the path are three: virtue,
concentration, and discernment. If any one of these gets overdeveloped at
the expense of the others, it throws you out of alignment, and your extra
strength turns into a liability.
*Set interim goals.* You can't fix a deadline for your enlightenment, but
you can keep aiming for a little more sitting or walking time, a little more
consistency in your mindfulness, a little more speed in recovering from
distraction, a little more understanding of what you're doing. The type of
meditation taught on retreats where they tell you not to have goals is aimed
at (1) people who get neurotic around goals in general and (2) the weekend
warriors who need to be cautioned so that they don't push themselves past
the breaking point. If you're approaching meditation as a lifetime activity,
you've got to have goals. You've got to want results. Otherwise the whole
thing loses focus, and you start wondering why you're sitting here when you
could be sitting out on the beach.
*Focus on proper form.* Get your desire for results to work *for* you and
not against you. Once you've set your goals, focus directly not on the
results but on the means that will get you there. It's like building muscle
mass. You don't blow air or stuff protein into the muscle to make it larger.
You focus on performing your reps properly, and the muscle grows on its own.
If, as you meditate, you want the mind to develop more concentration, don't
focus on the idea of concentration. Focus on allowing this breath to be more
comfortable, and then this breath, this breath, one breath at a time.
Concentration will then grow without your having to think about it.
*Pace yourself.* Learn how to read your pain. When you meditate, some pains
in the body are simply a sign that it's adapting to the meditation posture;
others, that you're pushing yourself too hard. Some pains are telling the
truth, some are lying. Learn how to tell the difference. The same principle
applies to the mind. When the mind can't seem to settle down, sometimes it
needs to be pushed even harder, sometimes you need to pull back. Your
ability to read the difference is what exercises your powers of wisdom and
discernment.
Learn, too, how to read your progress. The meditation won't really be a
skill, won't really be your own, until you learn to judge what works for you
and what doesn't. You may have heard that meditation is non-judgmental, but
that's simply meant to counteract the tendency to prejudge things before
they've had a chance to show their results. Once the results are in, you
need to learn how to gauge them, to see how they connect with their causes,
so that you can adjust the causes in the direction of the outcome you really
want.
*Vary your routine.* Just as a muscle can stop responding to a particular
exercise, your mind can hit a plateau if it's strapped to only one
meditation technique. So don't let your regular routine get into a rut.
Sometimes the only change you need is a different way of breathing, a
different way of visualizing the breath energy in the body. But then there
are days when the mind won't stay with the breath no matter how many
different ways of breathing you try. This is why the Buddha taught
supplemental meditations to deal with specific problems as they arise. For
starters, there's goodwill for when you're feeling down on yourself or the
human race — the people you dislike would be much more tolerable if they
could find genuine happiness inside, so wish them that happiness. There's
contemplation of the parts of the body for when you're overcome with lust —
it's hard to maintain a sexual fantasy when you keep thinking about what
lies just underneath the skin. And there's contemplation of death for when
you're feeling lazy — you don't know how much time you've got left, so you'd
better meditate *now* if you want to be ready when the time comes to go.
When these supplemental contemplations have done their work, you can get
back to the breath, refreshed and revived. So keep expanding your
repertoire. That way your skill becomes all-around.
*Take your ups and downs in stride.* The rhythms of the mind are even more
complex than those of the body, so a few radical ups and downs are par for
the course. Just make sure that they don't knock you off balance. When
things are going so well that the mind grows still without any effort on
your part, don't get careless or overly confident. When your mood is so bad
that even the supplemental meditations don't work, view it as an opportunity
to learn how to be patient and observant of bad moods. Either way, you learn
a valuable lesson: how to keep your inner observer separate from whatever
else is going on. So do your best to maintain proper form regardless, and
you'll come out the other side.
*Watch your eating habits.* As the Buddha once said, we survive both on
mental food and physical food. Mental food consists of the external stimuli
you focus on, as well as the intentions that motivate the mind. If you feed
your mind junk food, it's going to stay weak and sickly no matter how much
you meditate. So show some restraint in your eating. If you know that
looking at things in certain ways, with certain intentions, gives rise to
greed, anger, or delusion, look at them in the opposite way. As Ajaan Lee,
my teacher's teacher, once said, look for the bad side of the things you're
infatuated with, and the good side of the things you hate. The same
principle applies to all your senses. That way you become a discriminating
eater, and the mind gets the healthy, nourishing food it needs to grow
strong.
As for your physical eating habits, this is one of the areas where inner
strength training and outer strength training part ways. As a meditator, you
have to be concerned less with *what* physical food you eat than with
*why*you eat. If you're bulking up for no real purpose, it's actually
harmful for
the mind. You have to realize that in eating — even if it's vegetarian food
— you're placing a burden on the world around you, so you want to give some
thought to the purposes served by the strength you gain from your food.
Don't take more from the world than you're willing to give back. Don't eat
just for the fun of it, because the beings that provided the food didn't
provide it in fun. Make sure the energy gets put to good use.
*Don't leave your strength in the gym.* If you don't use your strength in
other activities, strength training becomes largely an exercise in vanity —
aimed at impressing yourself or others, but the impression is rarely deep or
lasting. The same principle applies to your meditative skills. If you leave
them on the cushion and don't apply them in everyday life, they never make a
deep impression on the mind, and you don't get as much out of them as you
really should. The ability to maintain your center and to breathe
comfortably in any situation can be a genuine lifesaver, keeping the mind in
a position where you can more easily think of the right thing to do, say, or
think when your surroundings get tough. As a result, the people around you
are no longer subjected to your greed, anger, and delusion. And as you
maintain your inner balance in this way, it helps them maintain theirs. So
make the whole world your meditation seat, and you'll find that meditation
both on the big seat and the little seat will get a lot stronger. At the
same time, it'll become a gift both to yourself and to the world around you.
*Never lose sight of your ultimate goal.* Mental strength has at least one
major advantage over physical strength in that it doesn't inevitably decline
with age. It can always keep growing to and through the experience of death.
The Buddha promises that it leads to the Deathless, and he wasn't a man to
make vain, empty promises. So when you establish your priorities, make sure
that you give more time and energy to strengthening your meditation than you
do to strengthening your body. After all, someday you'll be forced to lay
down this body, no matter how fit or strong you've made it, but you'll never
be forced to lay down the strengths you've built into the mind.
My computer is behaving rather eerily today, as if it's possessed by pixies
or imps. The past few days have been fatigued. I get so tired when my back
flares up and it's all I can do to just grind through a day and then drop in
the evenings. Mia, thankfully has found some kids to play with in our
area. For a year we found no one. Lately, it's been a bit easier, although
one of her friends is a virtual tornado and just demolishes anything and
anywhere she goes. It's always four times as stressful whenever this one is
about, so I try to limit their playtimes to weekends when I have more
attention to spare.
I also met my new neighbor yesterday. She's a nice lady going through a
divorce after 27 years of marriage. She's never lived on her own and she
has...(trumpets play) a responsible, creative 16 year old daughter!!!! Can
you say babysitter???? Wow! It's been a while since I've met someone I
would trust with my kid. Then again, I'm neurotic when it comes to that.
Mia goes riding tonight, so I can get a bit ready for her un-birthday party
which is this Saturday. Then I leave on Sunday for San Francisco for some
training for work.
We'll get out new bunny on the 23rd of this month, so that is exciting too.
Oh, the next door neighbor has a house-bunny too!
I'm hoping to be able to take the computer (of which may be on it's last
leg) to a coffee shop on Rosh Hashanah and just allow myself to sink into
the state needed to really crank out some pages. I think I have
*everything* written for the NOX story, but it's not in order. I write
incidents without segues. So now I need to print out *all *those things and
sit down and put them in some sort of order then glue them together. I also
need to know how the Pashua will affect someone...what it will cause, and
how that effect will get one to The Source.
In my astral/magick work, I've been realizing that my evenings are not
sufficient for the ranges I'm trying to span. In my younger years I never
hesitated to allow my projections to go as far as they wanted to. Now,
since becoming a parent, I tent to make sure I'm moored to this plane a
little tighter than before. I need to make sure I don't get "too far
away", which is ironic, since I'm also aware that "here" and "there" are the
same place. All places are this place, and all that. There is *no way* to
get "too far away". Still I'm afraid.
I'm afraid of lots more things since 2003. But I try not to let them hold
me back. But I think over the coming trip I'm going to take my evenings and
do some traveling. See if I can gain some confidence in making my overnight
jaunts to Hell and back without flight delays, so to speak
Arrrrrgh! Stuff like this makes me very, very angry. First of all, let
it be know that I am a firm supporter of the sex industry in general. It
has always existed and it allows many, many women who are heads of their
household to be able to support their families. But, if you work in the sex
industry, especially as a prostitute, there is a noble code of ethics when
you become a "disposable woman for profit." One of those guidelines is that
you NEVER, EVER disclose your clients. Ever. Even when you are old and
gray and on your deathbed...your clients have paid your for your discursion,
and you accepted that gift or offering...therefore that information should
stay locked in your mind. If you must tell, embed it firmly within
fictions. Describe it in detail...with pseudonyms that can't ever be tacked
to the individual.
That is what makes the oldest profession a noble one.
So when someone comes forward and appears to play a client for third-party
gain it not only increases suffering (which is my personal gauge of whether
something is right or wrong) but it disparages the profession and those
within it. It also creates suffering between the client and the service
provider which is the opposite of what the sexual service provider is all
about!
So, in this one action, this provider has caused more damage than a whole
hoard of Baptists on parade!!! On the upside, since we're such a sexually
repressed nation with a short-attention span, the damage will be eroded by
next month and the girls can carry on, as per usual.
As for Wendy Ellis...you are no prostitute...you are wholly a *whore*.
Wednesday, Sep. 12, 2007
Prostitute Claims Link to Senator By AP
(BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.) — A former New Orleans prostitute who will be
featured in Larry Flynt's Hustler magazine appeared at his office Tuesday to
accuse Sen. David Vitter of having a sexual relationship with her in 1999.
Wendy Ellis told reporters that Vitter visited her two to three times a week
for sexual relations between July and November 1999.
Flynt produced parts of an Aug. 22 polygraph test that he said confirmed her
account, but Ellis could provide no financial records, photographs or other
evidence to support her assertion that the Louisiana Republican was a client
during that time.
Vitter has denied those claims.
"I want the truth to be known," Ellis said. "It was a pure sexual
relationship. He would come in and do his business."
Ellis declined to comment when asked if she was being paid or reimbursed for
her statement regarding Vitter, but she later said she would appear in
Hustler magazine in January.
She would not say if she is being paid for the layout.
"She looks ... good," Flynt said.
Vitter, 46, a first-term senator, apologized in July for committing a "very
serious sin" and acknowledged his phone number was among those called
several years ago by a Washington escort service run by Deborah Jeane
Palfrey. Federal prosecutors accused Palfrey of racketeering by running a
prostitution ring that netted more than $2 million over 13 years, but she
claims her escort service was a legitimate business.
Vitter's admission came after Hustler magazine told the senator that his
telephone number was linked to Palfrey's escort service.
The senator was not charged with a crime.
Vitter's office did not immediately return a phone message Tuesday.
On Monday, Vitter spokesman Joel Digrado wouldn't comment on the Flynt press
conference. In an e-mail, Digrado said, "Sen. Vitter and his wife have
addressed all of this very directly. The senator is focused on important
Louisiana priorities like the water resources bill and the Iraq debate."
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