Category: Misc

Some Buddhist valentines:

• Your absence is the cause of my suffering
• Let’s be impermanent together
• You turn the wheel of my heart
• I’d like to enter your stream sometime
• You make cessation less appealing
• Let’s add “Right Lovin'” to the Noble Path

On a side note, it seems like a LOT of the women in Buddhist groups have (or have had) some serious addiction problems. Kind of like women in general.

 

Standing Buddha, ca. 3rd–4th century Pakistan (ancient region of Gandhara) at the Metropolitan Museum, assumed allowed under Fair Use.

I used to know someone who traded on the floor of the NYSE. Here is something they told me about options. I wrote it on a piece of paper years ago that I just found recently.

call (right to buy) – in the money when market above strike price

put (right to sell) – in the money when market below strike price

Type	Buy (long underlying)	Sell (short underlying)
Call	limited risk, unlimited gain	limited gain, unlimited risk
Put	limited risk, unlimited gain	limited gain, unlimited risk

 

If selling has limited gain and unlimited risk, why do it? From what I wrote: “Premium upfront ( most options expire worthless); Higher chance of making money; may sell near maturity”.

From another sheet:

Options – downside – limited to price

short option – limited gain, unlimited loss. Cash upfront. Margin required.

Covered call – write call/put -> selling that option

Self portrait of  Zinaida Serebriakova (1884-1967), assumed allowed under Fair Use.

I have started making daily lists of ten ideas a day per James Altucher‘s suggestion. I got Claudia’s book and I am reading it using the online Kindle reader. Hopefully it will lead to something better. (Claudia is James’ ex-wife.)

It sounds almost too good to be true. Just

1. write down ten ideas,
2. *** magic happens ***,
3. profit.

I listed a few people who wrote about it in a previous post, and I have found a few more since then. Many people report the same effect. I think that perhaps helping develop and/or reinforce consistency might also be a factor.

A couple of things made me stop in the past. One is that I kept coming with idea lists about idea lists. It was getting too meta for me. I don’t want to make idea lists about making idea lists (process, results, lists of ideas for future lists), but it might not be a bad thing to do every once in a while to have a backlog of possible topics, like agile teams keeping a backlog.

Another is that since then I have gotten more serious about meditation. Wouldn’t quieting the mind and accelerating it be at odds with each other? Meditation seems to stop unnecessary thought. Becoming an idea machine seems to be about spawning thoughts. Is it possible to do this and meditation? According to Claudia, it is. Plus, some advanced meditators say that with meditation you can change the speed/volume of your thoughts. Granted, it takes a while to get to that point.

There were a few other reasons I kind of hesitated attempting the idea list practice and were arguments against. One is: Wouldn’t freelance writers be more successful than they are, or at least more quickly? Don’t they deal in ideas all the time?

Another is that James wrote his daily practice helped him turn his life around. But now he is divorced from Claudia. I guess I assumed he would stay together with her. It seemed like a sign of his success after a divorce and multiple bankruptcies. Making the same mistake AFTER you are doing the right thing is kind of an argument against what you are doing. But according to his blog, he seems to be bouncing back. (I still have not gotten to his podcasts; it’s on my to-do list.) It looks like Claudia is taking longer to bounce back. Or she just might be keeping a low profile. She want about a year without any blog posts or tweets, but it looks like she is starting to post more consistently.

One inspiration for starting is that James wrote a post in July about how he has lived off of his ideas for 20 years. He mentions that he might give an online/email course about becoming an idea machine. The outline looks pretty interesting. The response was overwhelmingly positive, but so far I do not think there are any updates. His big thing now is doing standup. He hints that one thing he would cover in this course is how he got started writing down 10 ideas a day. On one of his pages he implies he got it from somewhere else. In another post he implies he did it to get interviews.

Another inspiration to get started again is a story that I saw on Hacker News in August linking to a site called “Random Ideas“:  “The point is to get the brain thinking, to exercise the brain muscle.”  That sounds like James Altucher. A few commenters also said they had started doing the same thing, or that the site inspired them. One commenter pointed out that coming up with 3650 ideas in a year would “be an amazing accomplischment [sic] of endurance”, although the guy stopped after a month. Random Ideas are usually lists with items that are not related, generally ten business ideas. I know Altucher says you should do ten ideas on a topic, and there is something to be said for being creative within contraints, but I had a hard time coming up with topics. To follow Altucher’s method, you really need eleven ideas: the first being the topic, then ten more for your list. Perhaps it might be okay to just make random lists to keep the momentum. (See Note 1 below.)

Another inspiration is that the project I am on at work is reducing staff in a couple of months. I work for a big, multinational consulting firm. I am on a team that makes an app for a state government, and while they are happy with us, the department is having to cut their budget. So I kind of need something that will make me a wild success. I asked about some training, but I was told that company policy states that the project would have to pay for it. The problem is that they are rolling a bunch of us off because they have no money. So there goes that idea. On the other hand, my manager is an Indian guy who not only has a thick accent, but also mumbles. It’s possible I completely misunderstood what he said.

I have no desire to be a manager. Right now I have to put up with decisions I do not like. If I were a manager, I would have to justify other peoples’ bad decisions to still more people. I have no desire to do that at all. So I need to change how I think and I need to change my life. For reasons I will not go into, getting on a project in Austin is highly unlikely.

So I am working through Claudia’s book. I started on October 1. So far it is okay. I might have stopped at nine once or twice, and sometimes my understanding of the question changed while I was coming up with my ten answers but I just kept going. One guy wrote somewhere that he did not like some of Claudia’s topics. One of them is to come up with ten yoga poses. It is a bit hard when you know nothing about yoga.

One thing I have found is there are more people than I thought who are doing this, in addition to the people I found online the last time I posted about this.

One is a site called idealist.today that sent out idea list topics for about a year. They recently stopped. I subscribed, so I have a backlog to use if I need it. They have a facebook group. I am not into facebook, but I might log on to see if there are any success stories.

Another site is 10 Ideas A Day which will give you themes, lets you submit themes, and has a few links to other sites. Some of the links are out of date. Here is one of Claudia on a podcast talking about becoming an idea machine, one of someone on Claudia’s podcast, and someone sharing their lists as they go through Claudia’s book.

A guy named D.R. Fideler who moved to Sarejevo got the idea bug from James. He has a post and a PDF about it. It sounds like this guy goes into some detail with his lists. Some are “complete business plans”. Maybe I am not putting enough into my answers. Or maybe the magic will just take longer. Looking at James’ post “How To Have GREAT Ideas” my one-sentence ideas might be too short. Maybe each of the ideas should be lists themselves, like SMART goals.

Chris Remus wrote about it here,  which I think is a copy of this article. He gives you a list of ideas.

Let’s not forget this one and this one and this one.

I plan on emailing some of these people to get a bit more info on their daily idea list practice.

• How long have you been doing this?
• Do you still do it?
• Was there a gap?
• When did you start seeing results?
• What results have you seen?
• How long does it take to come up with ten ideas?
• How long/many sentences is each idea?
• Where do you get your topics from?
• Do you ever share your ideas? If so, how?

 

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Note 1: He spelled dubious as “dubias” in a post bad-mouthing educators. The one time in life you want to have perfect spelling is when you are saying you are smarter than someone else. (“Dubias” is a species of cockroach; I am assuming he misspelled “dubious”.)

In all seriousness, I would love to know if this guy has read James’ blog and/or Claudia’s book. I looked up his domain on whois, but after a few steps his registrar uses a registrar that uses itself as its own registrar. Using the “Yo Dawg” trick to hide in plain sight.

---

Here are a couple of more posts from James Altucher’s website:

• Two Steps To Make Good Ideas Happen –
• What Are the Habits Of Wealthy People –

 

Fragment of a manuscript by Wang Zhideng (1535–1612) available at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, assumed allowed under Fair Use.

There was an article on Bloomberg the day he died (but presumably before he actually did) that reports of his death were false. (I cannot find the article on the Bloomberg site.) Like Jackie Chan. Then a week later, I saw a cartoon about it on Bradblog.com which inspired me to do some more searching.

So it was more Abe Vigoda than Jackie Chan.

I was a fan back in high school and into college. I had all the Heartbreakers records up through “Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough)”, and his first solo record. But eventually I got out of the loop. When I was younger, I did not want to become one of those older people who just listened to the same stuff from their youth. But that is kind what happened to me.

I used to listen to WXRT a lot in my car. But then I moved closer to the lake, and I took the CTA to work, so I spent a LOT less time driving. In addition, at some point I lost the antenna on my car. I think a car wash tore it off. I tried a few times to use a radio in my apartment to get WXRT, but for some reason the reception was terrible. I have fallen behind on Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan as well. And I have no idea who the new bands are in rock and roll. I will try to pick some of it up again. I was so out the loop on Tom Petty that I did not find out about the death of Howie Epstein and the departure of Stan Lynch until several years after both events happened.

One thing I did find odd about Tom Petty is: Why did he do solo records? He was the leader of the Heartbreakers, he sang, he wrote the songs. I don’t see what he was not getting from that arrangement. On the other hand, you could argue he never really did a solo record. Mike Campbell was on all his records (except the Traveling Wilburys, which obviously is not a solo project). I always felt that unless Petty worked on his own without Campbell, he wasn’t really going solo. Granted, Mike Campbell is an amazing guitar player, so I can see why Petty wanted him around. I guess I am using a pretty strict definition of “solo” here.

I know there is a documentary out about him, and an authorized biography of him by Warren Zanes. Apparently Petty felt he made some mistakes in his life there were not in the film, but were discussed in the book.

I did see them live with Bob Dylan on their “True Confessions” tour (June 29, 1986, to be precise).

I also had their live album “Pack Up The Plantation” and the concert film of the same name for their “Southern Accents” tour. I think I taped off of MTV. I think I watched that at least two dozen times. A couple of things that I remember from that is being impressed by both Mike Campbell and the drummer Stan Lynch. I was surprised to later learn that Stan Lynch was not confident in his drumming, but this may have been earlier than the “Southern Accents” tour. But on “Pack Up The Plantation”, he was pretty awesome. And the coolest Heartbreaker ever.

So in addition to looking into what Springsteen and Pearl Jam have been up to, and finding some bands that are more contemporary, I have to catch up on what Tom Petty with and without the Heartbreakers had been up to for more than a decade. Going forward, there may not be any more Tom Petty music that will be new to the world, but there is still some out there that will be new to me.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on their final tour (but NOT the final show), available at Wikipedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use.

It is time for another meditation update.

For a while I kind of fell off the wagon.

I was counting my breaths, but I realized my mind was wandering in between counts. My attention would go back to my breath at the end of the exhale, and I would count the next number, but sometimes in the middle my mind would wander off. Then I would end the exhale and tick off the next number. My mind was kind of in a sine wave pattern. Sometimes I did get really distracted and forget where I was. Maybe I never paid close enough attention to the instructions.

So I tried meditating without counting, and I did not last too long. But I am getting better.

Sometimes I meditate in a chair. I like that since my leg does not fall asleep. My leg falling asleep while meditating has been an issue for a long time. I think it is the rotation that causes it. I also sit on some cushions, and I arrange a few so my hips are higher than my shins, sort of like stadium seating.

One issue is that I do a lot of my meditating late at night. Sometimes I have to cut it short because I start falling asleep. I think I would make more progress if I did it earlier, or maybe when I wake up. And I should probably start waking up earlier. I am also starting to transition to a low-carb diet, and I plan on cutting out soda as soon as I get through the cases I have left.

I do mostly insight meditation and mantra meditation. I tried metta, and it was okay. I tried Mahasi-style noting, and it was exhausting. I might try that again later. I also do some Taoist meditation where I control the breath. A lot of people try to control the breath when they meditate, so why not just go with it?

Glenn Morris mentions Taoist meditation in “Path Notes of an American Ninja Master”. He wrote he attended an event with a bunch of Chinese people who practiced qigong. He said many of them were in their 60s and 70s, but none of the men looked older than 50 and none of the women looked older than 40. Women who never look older than 40 is very appealing. I first read that book in my 20s, and the point about eternally-40 Chinese women did not really register. I re-read the book a year ago, and it stuck.

I also started attending weekly sittings with Mariposa Sangha here in Austin. They meet in Trinity United Methodist Church, like CFI. They/we meet every Thursday at 7. There is 30 minutes of sitting meditation, 15 minutes of walking meditation, then 15 minutes of sitting. The walking is optional, which I like. I stay sitting the whole time.

When I was living in Chicago, I would sometimes attend the Chicago Weekly Sitting Meditation Group which usually met every Monday at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on Addison; sometimes they meet at Montrose Beach. They did 30 minutes of sitting, and then 10 minutes of walking. Everybody sat in a circle on the floor (there are chairs at Trinity), and the walking was around the circle. It would have been kind of awkward to not engage in walking meditation. Every time I do walking meditation, I either want to say something in a low, slooooow voice, act like a Tai Chi mime behind an invisble wall, or I hear the theme from “Chariots of Fire” in my head.

I have never liked walking meditation, and never really saw the point. If I am not developing concentration doing sitting meditation, what will walking meditation do for me? Besides, I walk around all the time anyway. If that was the path to enlightenment, why would anyone need a sangha?

At Mariposa, there is a “dharma talk” after the meditation for about 15 minutes, then 15 minutes of discussion. Sometimes the speaker will mention the Pali suttas, which I like. One thing that always seemed strange about Zen is that they claimed to be Buddhists, yet mostly ignored the Buddha. The Austin Zen Center had a guy giving lectures on the Pali suttas for a while. But most Zen groups talk about the Chinese and Japanese roots of Zen and ignore the Indian.

One change at Mariposa that I think I helped bring about is they ring a bell at the beginning of the meditation period. When I first went, at some undefined point people would start meditating on their own. At the Chicago Weekly Sitting Meditation Group, the organizer would formally start the group, and give basic instructions at the beginning. The first time I went to Mariposa, I started talking to the guy next to me, and after a few minutes I noticed everybody else had stopped talking and had started meditating.

Someone told me they did it that way because in monasteries the monks would go in and out of the meditation hall when they wanted. Which is fine because they live there. Plus, at the end of the dharma talk at Mariposa, everybody bows to the group. If you end the meeting, why not start it?

Also: I just realized that while  they use the word “sutta” and not “sutra” at Mariposa, they say “dharma” and not “dhamma”.

“The Butterfly” by Childe Hassam (1859-1935), assumed allowed under Fair Use.

I may have to buy a new car. At least, new for me.

My “Check Engine” light came on. I got it fixed about a month ago. I had to wait around three hours for it to get done, since I do not have a Hot Asian Wife to cart me around.

Then it came back on again a day later. The next weekend, I took it in, waited, they fixed it. The guy said the wire connecting a part to the sensor came out.

Then a few days later it came on again. Same thing. This time he used a twist tie to keep in it.

A few days later, it came on again. Same code. Yesterday I made an appointment, and I waited two hours just to be told they would not be able to get to it that day. I really do not like my free time being eaten up waiting for my car to get fixed. Or not get fixed.

I would hate to get a new car just because of a small part, but maybe it is time. It is a 1997 Nissan Sentra with around 175K miles on it.

The issue has to do with the exhaust. I think I can get by for a few more weeks. The nice thing is that I got my state inspection done right before this all started.

My mom get her latest car at CarMax, and just raved about them. For the first time in 25 years, she is not driving a Honda. (If you felt a disturbance in the force recently, this might be why.)

When I was in Boise, I rented Prii (the official plural form of Prius) and I liked them. I might get one now.

I am not too happy about blowing a big hole in my savings. I think one of the reasons I have been able to save is because I have not had to make any car payments. Granted, I could pay it off at once. But still, that is a lot of money out of pocket. Enough to live off of for six months.

I really hate spending a lot of money.

Image from Bing Search, assumed allowed under Fair Use.

I am starting to get back into meditation. I used to meditate somewhat consistently, until about ten years ago. Recently I decided to restart.

My income has been pretty static for the past decade. Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe there is a connection. I know a lot of people say you shouldn’t meditate for some material goal, but I am tired of feeling like I have hit a ceiling. I am a software developer, and over the past decade I have been at a few jobs, and each time I reach a point where I think there has got to be a better way to do things. I am told by the higher-ups to just keep doing things the same old way. A lot of times I am told I have great ideas, right before I am told why they cannot be implemented.

I know that is a bit of a word-salad. I want more control over my life. I felt more in control when I meditated regularly a long time ago.

I look at the Meditation subreddit on a regular basis. There is some good stuff there. The Zen subreddit is a waste of time. I know the original point of koans a thousand years ago was to get people to think about things in a different way. A lot of people in the Zen subreddit seem to think that non-sequiturs make them sound enlightened. Usually, it just makes you sound like a jerk.

I have been meditating almost every day for about a month. Honestly, not a lot of progress so far. I tried doing qigong while watching educational videos on YouTube or listening to a podcast, but I have had to face the fact that doing so is not conducive to positive change in my life.

I might look for a meditation teacher. I have heard good things about Ron Crouch, but on his site he says he is not taking on any new students at this time. I have heard good things about The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa (also see Dharma Treasure site). I will also get to some Buddhist podcasts in the near future.

I tried the whole “idea machine” idea, but I was not too consistent with it. I was coming up with a lot of lists about making idea lists. I might try again, but I have been interested in meditation a lot longer, so I think this might work out better. Hopefully it will improve all aspects of my life. Perhaps I will find a Zen woman. A Theravada mama. Frankly, it seems like most women have two stages in their life: Drinking and shopping; and having babies. At least, that is what I have inferred. It’s hard to know something about a group of people when they don’t want you to know anything about them. Anyway, I would like to meet someone with whom I can do some buddha-buddha and bunga-bunga. I getting to an age where a lot of the single women frankly don’t look too good. They say at 20 you have the face you are born with, and at 50 you have the face you deserve. One way to not looking like ten miles of bad road: Do not drink alcohol. (Notice I did not write “drink less.”) But nobody ever likes that answer. Perhaps crediting not looking like a hobo to meditation will shut people up.

One thing I have realized is I need to lose weight. I have gone to a few Zen places in Chicago and here in Austin, and the basic instructions are to follow the breath by focusing on the hara, or dantian in Chinese. It is a couple of inches below your navel, and is close to most peoples’ center of gravity. Perhaps my dantian has just gotten bigger in the past decade. Yeah, that’s it.

Image from Wikipedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use.  It is the Flag of the Kingdom of Sikkim, which was annexed by India in 1975. The circle in the middle is the dhammacakka, the Wheel Of Dharma that Gautama set into motion upon his enlightenment.

Much of this post was originally posted as a comment on the Meditation subreddit.