Samma sati is right mindfulness. Sati is also translated as “bare attention”. It contrasts with the familiar mode of consciousness, which uses impressions as inspiration for its experiential confabulations. Those are the papañca elaborations, or embellishments, which are used as springs for the expression of latent defilements. The Buddha described four foundations of sati...
Khan Academy[I] is awesome. Learning maths with Khan Academy is fun and rewarding. Here’s how I started, why I started, my thoughts and experiences. How I started Its been a decade since I last did any mathematics, and whilst I can still remember many general principles and a few rules, the maths part of my brain has certainly grown more than a little rusty. It’s not just forgetting...
This is a diary of a perfect, impossible day. One that epitomises, exemplifies, and trends towards my various goals, values, and desires for expressions. A Morning Wake up and whisper a personal mantra. Paint the constellations. This expresses my hope in transcendental significance, and drive to ascend ever higher, to get to the place to get to the place. Shower and shave and teeth, practising...
Dear stranger, Down the road is a bridge over a cement creek. The waters are always very low, except when it rains, then it stays high for a few days. In the middle of the creek, to the side of the bridge, is a supermarket trolley lying on its side, half submerged. I walk over the bridge most days – to the train station, or the shops, or the library – and sometimes I see two ducks standing next...
The atlas is filled with maps, and the roads twist and turn around short-cuts and panoramic views. Here is the advice of a singular traveller, still a beginner. Where this begins This begins where I did. Knowing about programming, and knowing a little about how to program. About 7 years ago I had self-taught a basic level of HTML, CSS (enough to write a basic website, or more likely, edit the...
Learning to code includes memorizing syntax, comprehending logical flow, and an intuition of design. This includes learning the basic units of code (e.g. if, and, for, def), the behaviour of code components (e.g. loops, generators, functions), and knowing how to combine these into a synergistic whole. Object-oriented program is an advantage which heralds its own recommendations by the...
This is what I’ve worked out. This is the progress I’ve made. This the set-back I’ve experienced. This is my recommendation for the best way forward. It seems like Emotions form a substrate of the conscious entity, that is separate in the same way that the physical body is separate from the mind, but irreducibly connected in the same way that the physical body is. Just because...
Bhikku Nyanaponika Thera wrote a short book entitled The Power of Mindfulness, in which he describes four principles which may assist understanding the benefits, aims, and strategies of meditations. These he lists as: The functions of tidying and naming The non-coercive procedure Stopping and slowing-down Directness of vision Thera describes unofficial four powers for meditation, Regarding...
I may lose myself and be lost in the tangles of associations and prompts and distractions and imaginations and judgements and intuitions of the mindless mind. Sati (bare attention, mindfulness) is an exercise in the moment, and a propensity developed with training. The arising and leaving and intending-towards sati increase and decrease with practice. The Pali texts describe sati as a hot pan...
Last November I started learning to code python[I]. In 5 weeks I hope to have finished creating a card game. Learning python Briefly: codecadamey, Learn Python The Hard Way, The Python Game Book, Foundations in Python Networking, reddit, stackexchange, python standard library documentation, prolog challenges, codewars, checkio. A review of this process needs to wait for another day. What sort of...
