I have officially moved to WordPress. Please update your links and feeds to the new location.

This site will stay here for quite a while. Posts here at Blogger have been replicated at the new site, including comments

Pictures all made it too, but they continue to be hosted by Blogspot which makes them either very slow to upload or they don't upload at all. To fix that I am individually uploading all pictures from my computer to WordPress. I am also applying tags to all posts as I go along. It's very time consuming, but it will be well worth it when it's finished. So don't hesitate to come on over, if you don't mind a little mess here and there.

Oh, house-warming gifts aren't necessary. :)

http://eternalawareness.wordpress.com/

Talk about getting upset with myself. I detest my behavior when I hear the drone of my voice lecturing to others about their faults. But it is far easier to stop the slobbering of superiority when it is obvious. When ‘corrections’ are performed in a soft or subtle manner like thinking, or through a more distant medium like writing, it is much harder to capture and correct.

There is another aspect to the experience of struggling with smugness and superiority: I become reluctant to speak out, to be who I am. It gets even more subtle, however. That's because reticence to take a stand - due to humility - is often a smokescreen. There is a difference between humility, and using humility to avoid taking responsibility.

How many people are planning for their next life?

The superior perspective is to think in terms of our next incarnation, but we are poor planners when you get right down to it. Most people, if they think about this, usually ponder in terms of life after death, leaving their physical body behind and going to "heaven".

Do monks consider their next life more than the rest of us? Perhaps they only think of it when their teacher lectures about it, or when it comes up in rote meditations and prayers. This seems likely.

I recall two past lives when my teacher said, “You need to understand that it doesn’t stop with this one life, that we’ll be back.” I may have mulled that over a bit in one of those lives.

In another life, I recall someone saying, “You think this is the end? You actually believe that? Well, you’ll see, and you’ll see me too! I’ll look you right in the eyes.”

I find myself thinking more and more about my next life. Is that because I am getting closer to death? Perhaps I am simply using sound project management planning skills.