New New Zealand

 

Buddhism, your body post death

There’s no specific advice around burials in Buddhism. Buddhism does acknowledge that our bodies, the one we loved an cherished for many years, will ultimately return to the earth, to the worms and the beetles, and yes to the birds. Buddhism and Buddhists adapt to each culture. The central teachings remain the same, but day-to-day conventions around ways of living can vary. There’s nothing in the teaching of the Buddha that would forbid a sky burial. So whenever a group meets a culture with sky burial, it does not stop it, the practice carries on.

There is some benefit to seeing bodies decay. The Buddha would sometimes suggest a meditator go practice on the “charnel grounds”, these are cemeteries, but I think bodies were placed atop the earth. The flies and the worms would come. A stench would develop. After months, the skin and muscles would rot away the bones would start to become visible. The monks he recommended this to were typically troubled by lust. They were asked to reflect upon the fact that their own bodies and the bodies of the ladies they lusted for, all these were subject to the same decay. They had not got beyond the state of rot and stench.

As meditators, we are asked to make much of the death around us. Relatives who die. Squirrels lying dead on the side of the road. Insects and pets. Whatever. We don’t have much time as humans. It’s best to stop ignoring this fundamental truth and attend to the task at hand without delay.

- Jim, who was a monk with Aukana Trust

Two Kinds of Success

"There are two kinds of success, or rather two kinds of ability displayed in the achievement of success. There is, first, the success either in big things or small things which comes to the man who has in him the natural power to do what no one else can do, and what no amount of training, no perseverance or will power, will enable any ordinary man to do. This success, of course, like every other kind of success, may be on a very big scale or on a small scale. The quality which the man possesses may be that which enables him to run a hundred yards in nine and three-fifths seconds, or to play ten separate games of chess at the same time blindfolded, or to add five columns of figures at once without effort, or to write the "Ode to a Grecian Urn," or to deliver the Gettysburg speech, or to show the ability of Frederick at Leuthen or Nelson at Trafalgar. No amount of training of body or mind would enable any good ordinary man to perform any one of these feats. Of course the proper performance of each implies much previous study or training, but in no one of them is success to be attained save by the altogether exceptional man who has in him the something additional which the ordinary man does not have. This is the most striking kind of success, and it can be attained only by the man who has in him the quality which separates him in kind no less than in degree from his fellows. But much the commoner type of success in every walk of life and in every species of effort is that which comes to the man who differs from his fellows not by the kind of quality which he possesses but by the degree of development which he has given that quality. This kind of success is open to a large number of persons, if only they seriously determine to achieve it. It is the kind of success which is open to the average man of sound body and fair mind, who has no remarkable mental or physical attributes, but who gets just as much as possible in the way of work out of the aptitudes that he does possess. It is the only kind of success that is open to most of us. Yet some of the greatest successes in history have been those of this second class--when I call it second class I am not running it down in the least, I am merely pointing out that it differs in kind from the first class. To the average man it is probably more useful to study this second type of success than to study the first. From the study of the first he can learn inspiration, he can get uplift and lofty enthusiasm. From the study of the second he can, if he chooses, find out how to win a similar success himself."

- Theodore Roosevelt [1858-1919]

hoopy

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
– Douglas Adams [1952-2001]

buff

"I studied history. I wrote history. I make history."
- JFK [1917-1963]

touching

What Shakespeare could have done with this.

first modernist

"Caravaggio [1571-1610] is the first artist in history whose paintings seem directly concerned with his own life. Ten years before Shakespeare invented Hamlet, Caravaggio painted Saint Francis in solitary dialogue with a skull. Caravaggio introduced soliloquy into painting at the same time that Shakespeare perfected it in drama."
- John T. Spike

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letting go of god

Black Swan

  

“Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.”

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb [born 1960]