Last night I had a dream, where I was in some sort of student-teacher situation with Daniel Ingram, and another fellow.  I don’t remember the content of the dream that well, but when I woke up from the dream, around 5 in the morning, I had a profound recollection.

The recollection had to do with an experience I had while on the 6-week retreat, somewhere around the mid-way point of the retreat.  Without going into the specifics, cause in the end I don’t think they matter that much, when I woke up I suddenly remembered an obscure detail in Daniel’s book, and realized that the experience I’d had correlated exactly what with he’d described.  I’d had the intuition before that this was the case, and had it indirectly confirmed by another teacher, but this morning things suddenly “clicked into place” for me on another level.

The result was that I suddenly knew that given time & patience my path would unfold accordingly, and I would “enter the stream,” as they say in the Therevadin Buddhist tradition.  I suddenly became confident beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I would know the fruit of my practice.  I guess you could call it faith, although in the Therevadin lineage they call this particular kind of faith, “verified faith,” because its faith based on experience, not on belief.

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Well, I’ve never gone quite that far, but Per, on his blog Mystery of Existence, does make the case for movies as practice.  Here’s the corroborating evidence:

Watching movies, I am typically engaged and focused on the unfolding story, I sit still, and I allow whatever comes up - usually strong energies from emotions - to unfold withing space. And the effect is similar to doing a mediation retreat: clarity, receptivity, insights - and even an immediate realization of “no I”.

My own personal experience, has been that I usually leave movies (depending on the movie and the genre) with a greater sense of spiritual clarity. I’ve never really examined why that is, but Per’s experience makes as good of sense as any.

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I was tipped off to a webcast & podcast from the World Economic Forum with our ex-president Bill Clinton. Klaus Schwab, the founder of the WEF, asks Clinton “If you look at the world today, what are the three most important worries which you have?” His second most important concern, right after climate change, is this:

a cluster of issues that essentially relate to the way the global world works to aggravate rather than ameliorate inequality. I don’t think we’ve found a way to promote economic and political integration in a manner that benefits the vast majority of people in all societies…

He goes on to say (and simultaneously plugs KW),

In the end if you want to promote democracy and you believe in it, then you have to understand that voters usually see these grand politic issues through the prism of their own experience, how it impacts themselves, their families, their communities, how they imagine their children will live. … If ordinary people don’t perceive that our grand ideas are working in their lives, then they can’t develop, the higher level of consciousness, if I can use a kind of touchy-feely word, that American philosopher Ken Wilber wrote a whole book about, called A Theory of Everything. He said, you know, the problem is the world needs to be more integrated but it requires a consciousness that’s way up here, and an ability to see beyond the differences among us. So I worry about that.

The conversation is excellent, and I found a lot of what Clinton had to say very interesting (especially given my lack of politic knowledge). Is he expressing one possible permutation of an integral politics? Obviously simply mentioning Wilber, or using the word “integration” doesn’t amount to an integral view, but all the same, it has fluffy potential!

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I just wanted to point out that we have a new author on GenSit, named Per. Per is the same guy who got my vote for having the Best Non-Dual Blog… Mystery of Existence. From his first post on GenSit:

I have a wildly eclectic background and practice, with the only really serious (in terms of studying longish term with a teacher) as a resident at a Zen center for 3-4 years. Other than Zen practices such as shikantaza and koans, I find the following practices interesting and useful: The Big Mind process, Christian heart prayer and Christ meditation, Atma Vichara (who/what am I?), Douglas Harding’s experiments, Byron Katie’s inquiry, Breema bodywork (mindfulness practice in action) and some others as well.

I also find Ken Wilber’s integral framework a great blessing, and have an interest in the Universe Story - as a way to deepen a transdual view, integrate science and spirituality, and facilitating a deep - and needed - culture change.

Maybe my blog award should have been to the best Trans-Dual Blog!?

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I hate to keep changing things up on you, but boy do I love change! As you can see (unless you’re reading this from an RSS Reader, in which case you need to point your trusty browser to VincentHorn.com), I’ve redesigned my site once again…! I’ve also re-named the site, bringing it back to the old school “Numinous Nonsense.” If one were geeky enough, one could call this Numinous Nonsense v2.0. Where the name is concerned, I realized VincentHorn.com (although appropriate) wasn’t all that catchy. So in another attempt at aesthetic & functional blog integration I give you Numinous Non-Sense (again).

The design has changed quite a bit. But before I tell you what has changed (if it isn’t already obvious), I want to talk about my design process. You see, I’ve never considered myself much of an artist or a designer. Images, designs, etc. never come fully formed in my mind’s eye. I know what I like once I see it, but usually tinker with images, colors, layout, etc. until I find something that fits. That and I borrow awesome design elements from sites I digg.

With this particular re-design, I took an existing wordpress template and begin heavily modifying it. I borrowed many of my design ideas from a wonderful zen aggregator site, blangha.com. It’s bizarre how I work. I take elements from other designs that I really like, occasionally add something new, and merge them until a design pops out the other end. It’s probably the most inefficient method of design, but hey, I gotta work with what I’ve got! The header above is the combination of a free brushstroke font I found, mixed with a beautiful zen calligraphy circle. The rest of the site is a mixture of different colors, CSS design elements, and photoshop tweaking. The end result is a blog that I think that is fairly minimalist, clean, and functional. It still runs on WordPress 2.0, and I’ve saved my old design just in case I ever want to revert.

One more bizarre thing I wanted to share about the design process. Especially with web-related projects, when I start a project, and get clear on where I’m heading, it very literally consumes me until I’m finished. I spent all of last evening, and much of this morning working on it, until it was at a finishing point. I’m not entirely sure this is a healthy process, but I’ve heard from other “artists” that a similar process happens “to them.” Anyone have any experience with this?

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Since I’ve got a lot going on in my personal life at the moment, and because I’ve set some pretty cool goals, I’ve been trying to find a way to organize simple to-do lists, various notes, etc. as a practical means of staying organized.  I had been making a daily to-do list on in a notebook, and checking stuff off as I went, which was pretty helpful, but pitifully lacking.

So, a few weeks ago I started using an online program named Backpack (created by the awesome 37 signals).  So, what is Backpack?  Well, it’s a very simple web-based program that allows you to “gather your ideas, to-dos, notes, photos, and files online.”  It’s extraodinarily simple, took me all of 3 minutes to understand, and is powered by the infamous AJAX & Ruby on Rails backend. In geek-speak, that basically means that it’s a cutting-edge web application.

So far, I’ve used the free version of Backpack to organize my daily to-do lists, my weekly school lists (a compilation of all of the assignments i have for the week), have created a ‘page’ for a possible future trip to Southeast Asia (more on this later), and have been collecting notes related to articles I want to write for this blog, and technological changes I want to make both here and on GenSit.org.

All in all, I find this tool to be much more useful than taking notes down on paper, or creating word documents and saving them on my computer.  Why?  Because everything is in one place, is organized beautifully, and is accessible from any computer (the beauty of web applications).  There’s also the future possibility of using this tool for collaborative projects.  Although I’d need to upgrade my account, I could definitely see this tool having potential in my various side-projects.

If you’ve been looking for a way to become more organized, you spend a lot of time online, or are just generally interested in these type of snazzy Web 2.0 tools then I’d highly recommend Backpack.  Otherwise it might be a good idea to stick to your PADs (Personal Analog Devices).  ;-D

Technorati Tags: 37signals, backpack, web2.0, technology

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