Practice Map

A personal selection, overview, and reference of some (life) practice material by Ken McLeod (and maybe related teachings by other teachers as well):

2012-06-17

Purpose, Method, Effects, and Results

Why People Practice
Progression

How to simplify your life

Willingness, Know-How, Capacity [2012-08-21]

Attention
- Breath
- Power, Ecstasy, Insight, Compassion

Working with Pain and Difficult Emotions
- Five Step Practice [2012-08-11]

Mind Training

Death and Impermanence


Reactive Emotions and Patterns

Six Realms
- Hell
- Hungry Ghost
- Animal
- Human
- Titan
- God
. Real Life Examples (from Monsters Under the Bed Retreat) [2012-07-22]

Five Elements / Five Dakinis
- Earth
- Fire
- Water
- Air
- Void

The Four Immeasurables
   Verses and Exercise
   Transcript and Podcast [2012-06-23]
- Equanimity
   . What is Equanimity? by Shenzen Young [2012-06-23]
- Loving Kindness
- Compassion
- Joy

Taking and Sending

Relationships
Conflict
Grief
Depression
PTSD
Emotions
Happiness

Materializing Things
Making Things Happen

What Do I Do Now?
Who Am I?

Scale of Universe

The Scale of the Universe

Pointer via George Draffan.

Minolta MD 100-300mm f/5.6

2012-04-22

Saw similar pictures taken with this legacy lens on Flickr on Micro Four Third cameras and liked them very much. Now got a nice examplar of it for myself:). On a Micro Four Third system this lens has an effective focal length of an equivalent 200-600mm lens on a 35mm camera.

Back when I was 14 and got into photography with a Minolta X-700, MD 50mm 1.7, MD 28mm 2.8, and some no name 70-210mm (Soligor? thought I also liked it), a Minolta MD 70-210mm was kind of a dream, did not even dare to think much about this one. However the 100-300mm is quite bulky and with 700 g and without a collar doesn't really hold very well on a tripod attached the comparatively small Panasonic G2. For nice weather walkabouts, so to speak.

Zurich Lunch Break and Afterwork Party

Zurich Lunch Break and Afterwork Party

Ant Bots

Google Artificial Intelligence Challenge Competition



A 21 year old German student has programmed the best fighting ant colony bot, here is the German Spiegel article about him:

Der Spiegel: Der Ameisenkönig

Final Rankings

[Update 2012-03-04: The winner gives a detailed run down of his thought process and algorithms. Available is also the source code (less then 2000 lines of code for the main strategy class.]

Following is a list of different interesting games you can replay online...

Different styles, a bit chaotic

Smaller map, but very impressive fighting taktic by Xathis.

Very interesting, without the Xathis favorite, but GreanTea takes the win.

Xathis turns it around. Smaller map.

Big map, big fight

My favorite, thought Komaki makes a big mistake in the end leaving the flank to Xathis wide open...

Small game, GreanTea wins against Xathis

Ants, ants, ants (Xathis loses)

medusa vs Xathis. Xathis loses a hill early on, still wins in the end.

Tight fight, Xathis wins, but not clearly.

Interesting water structures, GreanThea.

Xathis, GreanThea, almost 1on1. The Final? Interesting retreating/frontier pattern.

protocolon beats Xathis and GreanTea. GreanTea makes a big mistake in the beginning. Also Xathis loses the home base early on to carlos.guia, but then protocolon has already grown very much.

Big armies, fun to watch

Winter Lake

Zurich, 2012-02-06


Zug, 2012-02-18


Zurich, 2012-02-23


Zurich, 2012-02-23

Loss and Longing

Or life, love, loss.

Father and Daughter HD


Better to directly watch on the YouTube site for bigger video resolution - and make sure to turn the sound on...

Thanks to Youyou.

Brazil 1982

and then there was the French midfield in 1982 with Platini, Girese, Tigana... Germany also had a good team (Breitner, Magath, Littbarski, Matthäus, Müller - Schuster had resigned), of course Italy. Still today IMHO the best midfield ever (individually and as a team) is the present Barca squad: Xavi, Iniesta, Fabregas, plus if you consider them midfielders, Messi+Sanchez...

A memory to Socrates and Co.

Brazil 1982 - A tribute to the art of football


Brasil 1982 - The 11 Greatest Goals

Wake Up To Your Life Audio Book

The book Wake Up To Your Life by Ken McLeod explains the meditation techniques developed over hundreds of years by Tibetian Buddhist's. More over it is a practice guideline, a program, a roadmap, or a How To document. The book format is also very good to quickly skim through, to get an overview, and to look things up (and btw, for the recent paperback price at Amazon for USD 11.43 it is a real bargain for what you get!).

However there is also an audio version available, the whole book is red page by page by Ken McLeod himself.

It gives the content a whole new dimension. While I can read much faster than listening to the audio, it is much more emotional, personal, intense - overall a deeper experience, to listen to the text, content, speach. After all, text is just a codification to what we normally would hear. Actually it is images that we put into words, that we put onto paper. Each time we add a very complex layer to communicate in order to overcome time and distance. So if you like the book, you might give the audio book a chance as well. I am sure you will like it. Last not least, you might also like his podcasts. They are also qualitatively different from the audio book. The podcasts are interactive, more spontaneous, natural, and like a conversation, while the audio book is actually red from a fixed text, it is more structured, prepared, and concentrated. Both forms have their advantages and place.

cdbaby
Amazon.com

BTW, I hope there will be an ebook version out at some point in time. It would be nice to carry the book around easily at most times.

Here is a review of the book by one of his students, George Draffan.

Review of Ken McLeod's "Wake Up To Your Life", March 21, 2001

By George L. Draffan

Originally published in the Northwest Dharma News www.nwdharma.org

Hundreds of books on Buddhism have been published in recent years, but Wake Up To Your Life, a new book by Ken McLeod, is one of the first systematic curricula written by a Westerner thoroughly trained in traditional Tibetan ways. With deep insight, clear instructions, and entertaining stories, McLeod has given us a comprehensive manual for a lifetime of spiritual work.

Wake Up To Your Life begins as many books do, introducing the context and motivations for practicing meditation, and covering basic topics such as the four noble truths, the three disciplines of morality, meditation, and understanding, and the cultivation of mindfulness. It continues with contemplations on death and impermanence, karma, reactive emotions, and the four immeasurables, and ends with difficult practices for mind training, insight, and direct awareness.

McLeod breaks new ground from beginning to end. For example, the differences and synergies between mindfulness, awareness, and attention are clearly delineated, and active attention ("volitional, stable, and inclusive") is the central principle. That has practical implications, one of which is that ethical behavior becomes primarily a natural expression of attention, rather than a set of rules dictated by an authority or tradition.

Wake Up To Your Life is especially valuable in making explicit what has been hidden from or confusing to many practitioners. Those who have struggled to practice with insufficient instruction will benefit from McLeod's pragmatic approach. For example, he makes clear the important differences between the purpose, methods, effects, and results of meditation practice. Thus the meditator who has been instructed to "open your mind" or "be centered" will learn that being open and feeling centered (as well as distraction, clarity, sleepiness, and euphoria) are effects of meditation, and not methods. The book is packed with tools for choosing and working with a teacher, for cutting through confusion and self-deception, and for discriminating between genuine insight and passing mental states and energy surges.

Those who have been bewildered by Tibetan visualization and contemplative practices will see how they are rooted in basic Buddhist principles, and those who have been confused or put off by cosmology and deity practices will find clear explanations and a sensible approach. We see how the six realms are the worlds projected by our reactive emotions, and how an understanding of the five elements and five dakinis can help us transform the energies of our reactive emotions into pristine awareness.

The chapter on karma is a significant contribution to our understanding of meditation and of psychology. Detailed analysis of how our beliefs, reactive emotions, and habituated behaviors create and perpetuate the suffering in our lives is integrated with practical exercises for dismantling the components of those beliefs and behavioral patterns. McLeod has formulated the practices in terms directly relevant to modern audiences, and encourages the reader to rely on experience rather than belief. Waking up to your life does not depend on exchanging Western assumptions for Eastern ones; it depends on direct experience.

In the debate over whether teachers should transmit the Dharma just as it was received, or whether each culture and each generation must make the Dharma their own, McLeod is squarely in the second camp. He integrates age-old Buddhist methods with modern psychological sensibilities, and uses science and Sufi teaching stories to make his points, but the result is no sweet New Age concoction. Confusion is cut at every juncture, and no slack is given for wishful thinking. "You would probably prefer not to look at some parts of your life, but to ignore the areas of life that are uncomfortable to look at is not a good idea. If we protect any aspect of our life from the practice of attention, the habituated patterns connected with that part of our life absorb the energy of practice and gradually take over our lives. We become what we don't dismantle."

While Wake Up To Your Life is intellectually challenging and satisfying, it is ultimately a manual for spiritual practice, and not an exercise in cultural reeducation, religious history, or philosophical doctrine. Its only purpose is to provide a set of tools to deal with the challenges we encounter while engaging the work of "waking up from the sleep in which we dream that we are separate from what we experience."

Both beginning and experienced students and teachers of Buddhist meditation will benefit from using the methods in Wake Up To Your Life, but McLeod's pragmatic and integrated approach applies the power of attention to social, work, and personal relationships as well as to formal meditation practice. The book will be valuable to psychologists, mediators, managers, parents, and anyone else who deals with people and their reactive emotions. It's for anyone who has felt the suffering and confinement caused by their habitual patterns, and is serious about cultivating presence and freedom.

Uni Zurich

Zurich University and Lichthof, 2011-10-28

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Tripod

Zurich main station, Switzerland, 2011-10-01

Instead of getting a new bigger sensor camera, decided to take out the old cheap hand tripod I once had gotten along with a former camera (the good old Kodak wide angle) and see what can be done at night with the Panasonic compact. Thought will be getting a new mini tripod with a level gauge soon.

Decisions

If you happen to be on a Mac, there is simple and cheap decision support tool ala Benjamin Franklin's Pro/Con list made by Jonathan Clark.

Mac App Store: Decisions

Here is the original letter from Benjamin Franklin describing the process, thanks to Aaron Stannard's further elaborations:

To Joseph Priestley

London, September 19, 1772

Dear Sir,

In the Affair of so much Importance to you, wherein you ask my Advice, I cannot for want of sufficient Premises, advise you what to determine, but if you please I will tell you how.

When these difficult Cases occur, they are difficult chiefly because while we have them under Consideration all the Reasons pro and con are not present to the Mind at the same time; but sometimes one Set present themselves, and at other times another, the first being out of Sight. Hence the various Purposes or Inclinations that alternately prevail, and the Uncertainty that perplexes us.

To get over this, my Way is, to divide half a Sheet of Paper by a Line into two Columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con. Then during three or four Days Consideration I put down under the different Heads short Hints of the different Motives that at different Times occur to me for or against the Measure. When I have thus got them all together in one View, I endeavour to estimate their respective Weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out: If I find a Reason pro equal to some two Reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two Reasons con equal to some three Reasons pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the Ballance lies; and if after a Day or two of farther Consideration nothing new that is of Importance occurs on either side, I come to a Determination accordingly.

And tho' the Weight of Reasons cannot be taken with the Precision of Algebraic Quantities, yet when each is thus considered separately and comparatively, and the whole lies before me, I think I can judge better, and am less likely to take a rash Step; and in fact I have found great Advantage from this kind of Equation, in what may be called Moral or Prudential Algebra.

Wishing sincerely that you may determine for the best, I am ever, my dear Friend,

Yours most affectionately

B. Franklin

Political Message

Fribourg, Switzerland, 2011-08-06

Natural Awareness

George Draffan's Natural Awareness Blog with wonderful buddhist wisdom.

Cheers!