Month: February 2004

Human Nature

Many years ago I was involved in left wing politics and I remember having a lot of arguments on street corners with people who used to say that there couldn’t be a society where people shared things because greed was human nature. For some reason this came back to be a couple of days ago, probably because I had been reading some stuff about Buddha (The Marvelous Compainion), and I have recently been to the oral transmission of a prayer called The King of Aspiration Prayer (it has other titles too). A great part of this prayer is saying that one will not stop striving to liberate all sentient beings and all of the usual things a bodhisatva has taken an oath to do.

So what then is human nature? The self sacrificing of the christian saints – is this human nature? Having doctors cut you open to feed demons, like Buddha did, is this human nature?

Yes. There are an infinite number of sides to the coin of human nature, kindness and meanness are both there. You should choose kindness, which comes from the root of kin, where you treat everybody like they were your family. All meanness does is hurt you as much as you hurt others.

Personality types

Just did a survey looking at the different kinds of personality, based on Aristotle’s groupings:

Sanguine : Happy go lucky, fun loving

Phlegmatic : Easy going, takes things as they come

Melancholy : Introverted, detail person

Choleric : Control freak, gets things done.

Guess what? My scores weren’t biassed strongly toward any one but I came out sanguine. This was a surprise to me as I see myself as an introvert. Rosie pointed out that I am the one who is the troll for the Billy Goats Gruff under the bed while she reads the story, or the sea monster at the swimming pool.

Weird.

Illness

Had my first cold in nearly a year and have taken a couple of days off, will drive to Nottingham tonight to avoid getting up early. Still not 100% and I have a phone interview tomorrow. Ho hum.

Love to all.

Another day another duller

Hello, this document is produced by using a my brand-new ViaVoice software; I hope that it makes sense and doesn’t come out complete rubbish.

Today has been a very difficult day: I’m extremely tired and went to some training on a new piece of software called Dimensions which is a source code control system from Merant ( the originators of PVCS). Though, to be honest, I’m completely bored with all this IT nonsense and would rather have been picking my teeth with a pickaxe or maybe cutting my toenails with a sledgehammer. I found the way that this had been implemented to be very interesting and the tool itself so be pretty useful but I’m so bored with software now I can barely bring myself to be even vaguely interested in it. This isn’t true, of course because I still enjoy writing software but I find that my dreams no longer contain it, at least they don’t contain the kind I’m writing for a living.

After work I went for a wander to PC World in Mansfield, (I have to say that I was very surprised there when ViaVoice managed to understand Mansfield and even capitalised it correctly). I was originally tempted by a book on JBOSS, which looked like it might be of some utility in my EJB project. However, I thought the ViaVoice stuff would be much more useful. In fact I’m enjoying myself immensely talking to my computer and watching everything appear. One of the most amusing things was when it scanned my existing base of documents for words it didn’t understand and it came up with all this swear words from my novels and whatnot, so of course I had to add them in, and record them for posterity so that it would know what they sounded like. This very amusing if a little sad.

I’ve just spent probably 40 minutes working training ViaVoice to understand my voice I was reading excerpts from Alice in Wonderland, some quotations from various sources, including some very cynical ones from George Bernard Shaw. The worrying thing was that when I was doing this one of the people in the next room to me was going in and out and probably heard me reading Alice in Wonderland very clearly into the microphone that came with my copy of ViaVoice which might mean that he or she thinks I’m complete fool. This is not unusual in my experience as in fact being a complete fool something I’m very good at. I no longer worry about these things, because I no longer worry about appearances except inasmuch as it may offend or upset people, or perhaps embarrass my family. I also think that perhaps smelling like a goat wouldn’t be very good idea simply because people wouldn’t talk to you.

Another interesting thing I found is that when I sigh a bit it prints h. I’m not sure about this because I sigh a lot, particularly when I’m tired.

Dharma

I spent at least some of last night reading Gampopa’s The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, which kept me awake until quite late. Had also trying to learn classical Tibetan which is a lot more difficult than it might first appear. The alphabet is phonetic and quite a few of the characters appear almost the same to Western eyes, just very subtly different. This is actually quite interesting; and for once I am doing something which feels reasonably intellectually challenging. I’m not sure how far this will go and I have ordered some books on to better and which may help me with this. I mention this in a previous blog so I’m sorry to be a bit boring about it.

I blew up the Tibetan alphabet and some of the exercises from my book on classical Tibetan in order to make them easy for me to see. I’m definitely beginning to need glasses for close work which is a bit annoying. Quite often now I find have to put my glasses on in order to be able to keep concentrating as my eyes start hurting. I’ve had a headache off and on for several days and think it’s got something to do with the fact that I have not been sleeping enough because I keep getting up at 6 am in order to do my meditation practice. Something has to give but it isn’t going to be the meditation practice so I probably need to start getting to bed a bit earlier.

Yesterday I listened to a very interesting CD: The Strangest Secret which is a recording that a man called Earl Nightingale made back in 1956. The interesting thing his I found an awful lot of parallels with what I’ve come to know of Dharma and Buddhist teachings. You are, in fact, a product of your own mind to a large extent, circumstances are a back drop. Basically if you carry on thinking like a failure you will be a failure, if you get into the habit of thinking like a success you’ll be a success. He recommends putting a goal on a card and reminding yourself of that goal every day when you wake up, and when you go to bed, even when you are doing most things. If you start thinking about your goal all the time and not thinking negatively or like someone who was already been defeated then when the opportunities come you will be able to see them and take advantage of them.

Winbiz

I am slowly making progress talking to people about the business, with any luck Rosie and I will be able to start making real progress in the next few weeks. We have managed to organise child care has for the meeting in Bradford, which means that we will both be able to get the full benefit from it. I have done a small PowerPoint presentation in order to explain things to myself as much as anything else. The standard way of doing the explanation is to use a white board because it is less alienating for the people who may not be technologically savvy.

GRTZ

And making some progress with this story, probably try and use the ViaVoice software to make creating it a bit simpler, although I have been struggling to create his document as am still learning how to use it. I sent the first chapter to Roger, we had a little chat about it but he was very busy, I think the main point he made, which I agree with, is that I explain things too much. For example, the corporation that owns our protagonist is called Big Corp and their burgers are called Big C burgers, which I go on to explain is what people used to call cancer. Instead, it is probably better to take the Douglas Adams’ route and leave things unexplained so that the reader can find them out later and let the writing work on many levels. Of course, I would be being extremely arrogant if I thought my writing was anywhere near as good as his.

I have described the story to a number of people who found it very funny so I reckon I need to abbreviate it more and explain less.

Goodbye, and love to all.

11:50 pm: so much for an early night!