Well, I’ve got a little work done over the last week or two and I’ve just update my SitQuietly web-based meditation timer to version 1.3.  I’m still working on getting it going on tablets and phones, but my spare time is quite limited so this may take a while.

Changes are:

• Added tool tips to sidebar items.
• Centre the timer window.
• Highlight the Acknowledgements section.
• Slight wording change to the meditation instructions. Added two more resources to the resources section and amended the format.
• Number input boxes allow multiple lines, fixed this issue.

As ever, I hope you find it a useful tool and should you find a bug or have any suggestions please let me know!

I’ve revisited the idea of slowness recently and touched again on Wu-Wei when I thought about accepting our limitations. I saw this article in the New York Times a week or two ago and remembered it as tying in with the things I was talking about quite nicely. The article makes the case very well that Yoga is not as safe as we’d all like to believe. My opinion is that this is true of anything; which is why, in my SitQuietly instructions, I give a warning to consult your medical practitioner before taking up a meditation practise. But this article makes specific mention of people who seem to be treating Yoga as if it were a performance sport, specifically one man who threw himself into a spine twist and had three ribs give way.

The article says a lot of things that ring true for me, that echo my own gym and Tai Chi experiences. I realised a long time ago that it was up to me to make things easy on myself, that I had to do this by realising and respecting my limits. Apply Wu-Wei, don’t do things at an inappropriate speed, don’t force yourself into exercises that are inappropriate for your body type or mental state. When growth in our abilities occurs it should be unforced and as a result of the “70 percent rule”, which I’ve talked about before. This says that you work to 70 percent of your potential, with the other 30 percent held back for growth and improvement. Eventually, your 70 percent is equal to what used to be your 100 percent, and you’re still only giving 70 percent!

My other observation is that practises like Yoga, meditation and Tai Chi are not performance sports. The wisdom of Wu-Wei and the Slow Movement comes back again to the fore, these things are healing arts without a doubt; but only when used appropriately and at the right pace! They can heal your body and mind, but will do so in their own time, to try to hurry things seems to me to be a mistake. One that can only end badly as well. We in the West seem to be bringing our own neurotic hurried flavour to these things, but in doing so I worry that we lose a lot of their essence and bring ourselves further pain.

I’ve been a busy bee over the last couple of weeks in my spare time.  The result of my work was uploaded just a few minutes ago and I hope you’ll like it.

After a long hiatus for various reasons, the web browser based SitQuietly meditation timer has received an update.  This new version removes the dependency on Adobe Flash, replacing that code with HTML 5 sound code instead.  I added a short section on meditation, with basic instructions and the site also sports a new format and has a few fixed bugs.

I’ve tested it in Firefox, Chromium, Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari and Konqueror.  I also know it renders fine on IOS and Android but the sound is not yet working on those platforms.  I have a handle on what needs to be done, but I had no way of finishing the work before my deadline of 1st Jan.

Anyway, you can find it here, please let me know what you think!

Well, it’s been an interesting week.  We’ve had the ongoing story of the occupy protests, which are being very well covered in alternative media.  I recommend monitoring Twitter for this sort of news, you tend to get things that the mainstream media either omit or are simply slow with.

In addition to this we’ve had the drama in Greece and Italy, it could be said that both countries have had their democratic governments undermined by EU interference and I can’t see that ending well.  President Sarkozky was challenged on this by a reporter from the BBC and didn’t give anything like a satisfactory answer.  I think that there is a definite moral hazard involved here, never mind the fact that the Euro is probably beyond saving in its current form.  It’s taken the political class till now to realise what the markets have known all along, as Mark Twain famously said “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt”.

So in light of all of the above it’s easy to get very bearish in sentiment.  The easiest way to counter this sentiment is not to take it too seriously, I have a running joke with a friend that I’m “putting on my bear suit” whenever I read that sort of content.  But too much of it really does taint the mind and as a Buddhist I have to be mindful and observe my own thought processes.

This is where our mindfulness meditation comes in, I’ve found that the effect of this practise spills over into everyday life.  You become more able to observe your thought processes and to catch yourself thinking things, or taking a partial view.  Through this, I’ve come to realise that things aren’t as bad as they might seem at first glance.

Yes, we face challenges, but there are no doubt opportunities in these times.  I hold the hope that the coming threats to the banking system will see the rise of a new culture of mutuals and credit unions, something to return some of the financial power to our communities.  I see the threats to the notion of globalism as an opportunity to localise, to use our local shops and services.  So this isn’t a disaster, just another chapter in our story, and depending on your point of view it might not be that much of a disaster after all.

I may even have to pack away my bear suit!

I invested in an Amazon Kindle a few weeks ago, it’s certainly been a good choice and I have rediscovered the pleasure of reading through it.  It allows me to carry a large library of books with me, and the screen is every bit as good as they claim it to be.  I can recommend the Free Software ebook manager called “Calibre” for use with it, as it allows easy conversion of ebooks between all sorts of formats.  It also allows the downloading of RSS feeds and will collate these feeds into a book for you.  I consider this to be a killer feature, absolutely brilliant!

I’ve started reading my feeds on the Kindle and have discovered that it makes reading them much easier than on a computer screen.  I pondered why, aside from the better Kindle screen, this should be.  Then I realised that it’s the fact that the Kindle does one thing, and one thing only, it reads books.  As someone who owns a smartphone with various communications options on it and has numerous little programs that can chime in and demand attention on his PC, I have been finding it very difficult to focus.  Not only to read but to write and to create.

This chimed in with something that the tutor said at the Buddhist Vihara last week; the necessity of withdrawal, of shutting out the world and getting some time and space to focus.  We withdraw to create a place that is sacred and spiritual and that is peaceful, that is not of the everyday world.  Yet, what is the place we go when we read; when we really engage with a good book, is that place entirely of this world?  I realised that this is why Kindle makes it easier to read, there are no interruptions and no possibility of such things.  If I read on my phone, I can be texted, IMed, Facebook messaged, emailed, or (looks shocked) …. phoned!  Throw in all the little toy apps that you can get and what chance is there of any peace?

It seems to me that these things take the control of our time away from us, it seems that we are interrupted at a whim and a response is demanded there and then.  But where is the control in that?  There are our devices, our tools, yet we seem to jump to their tune.  This makes time away even more vital than it ever has been and it it makes me question whether all of the advances in our communications abilities are necessarily for the better.

As a self confessed geek, this is a strange place to be it seems.  Am I taking an anti technology stance here?  No.  I am advocating a measure of moderation and also a realization that we don’t need to be plugged in all the time.  I started reading my news and my blogs on a daily ebook rather than as they come in, and if anything it improved matters.  By taking these things and making a specific time and place for them, it seems to unchoke everything else.

I heard this remark tonight from my instructor regarding the practise of mindfulness, the class was talking about it in relation to Taijiquan.

“We’re Human Beings, not Human Doings”

This is actually a very good quote, and I’d like to say a little more about this subject.  I’ve said before and I will always maintain, that it’s very difficult to penetrate Taoist philosophy deeply without at least some Tai Chi practise.  The (often) not so simple act of playing with the principles physically enables an intuitive view, not an intellectual one, that is a great help.  This also helps a lot with Buddhism.

As we attempted to move each other around, it became more apparent that the act of attempting to do something blocks mindfulness.  In fact in attempting to influence, force, or otherwise get at a result from our actions, we can lose our grasp on the thread of things and we fail.  Even the intent seemed to cause me to lose the thread of what I was doing, all very strange and quite unnerving.

It became clear to me tonight that a large part of mindfulness involves getting your mind out of the way.  So, mindlessness?  No…

The trick seemed to be to be present, but unattached to an outcome in a relaxed way, don’t try to force it.  It reminded me of some of my best meditation sittings, I didn’t focus, I just got out of my own way and let it happen.

There, I can’t explain it very well.  But hey I’ll let it be, and who knows, maybe this can be used as a start?

When the Pope left the UK yesterday, our Prime Minister said that he’d given us something to think about.  I agree, for me, the visit has caused me to reflect on my Buddhist flavoured Agnosticism.  I’ve spent quite some time and word count exploring why I’m not a Theist.  But, why am I not an Atheist, why Agnostic?

I have read the various arguments to and fro between Theists and Atheists, Evolutionists and Creationists.  I’ve seen seen lots of pointless name calling, misquoting and other tactics and I’ve started to think it all reeks a little of the school playground.  Everyone is so sure that they know for sure what’s right, so willing to shout about it, so unwilling to accept that they might be wrong. But once you dig into that conceptual certainty, it runs out pretty quickly.

How do I know this?  For my answer, I invite you to try this meditation I learned in Second Life, this is something you probably think you know pretty well.  You might need a mirror for this.

Sit, relax. Look at your face in the mirror, or visualise it.  Ask the question “Who is this?”  Once you answer, keep the answer in mind and, of that answer, ask again “Who is this?”  Usually the answers run out fairly quickly, in the meditation group I was part of, we either went in circles or ran out of answers quickly.  Don’t question aggressively, be gentle.  This is an enquiry, not an interrogation.

In Buddhism, this meditation reminds us of the fiction of the self.  As soon as you try to grasp it, it slips away.  But you could just as easily hold a concept or object in your mind.

This would bring you to the chief reason for my agnosticism, the limits of the human knowledge.  We like to ignore this and pretend anything is knowable, but that just isn’t the case, we are limited beings.  Frankly, there is enough written in the Tao Te Ching to suggest Agnosticism and I have touched on the Buddhist case for this previously.

I’m not the only one to accept this, and I’ll finish my thoughts so far on this with a quote from Thomas Henry Huxley, the man who coined the term “Agnostic”.

“I neither affirm nor deny the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it. I have no a priori objections to the doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble himself about a priori  difficulties. Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing in anything else, and I will believe that. Why should I not? It is not half so wonderful as the conservation of force or the indestructibility of matter…

It is no use to talk to me of analogies and probabilities. I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions…

That my personality is the surest thing I know may be true. But the attempt to conceive what it is leads me into mere verbal subtleties. I have champed up all that chaff about the ego and the non-ego, noumena and phenomena, and all the rest of it, too often not to know that in attempting even to think of these questions, the human intellect flounders at once out of its depth.”

I’ll revisit a couple of things I said here in more detail another time.

Well, I couldn’t let this ArsTechnica article on meditation go unshared.  In short, it seems certain types of meditation could help to a degree with ADD, addiction and dementia.

I’ve long held that meditation has many positive benefits and now it seems that Science is starting to provide more supporting evidence to those of us who advocate regular meditation.  This is a short article, but I and many others know that meditation has a very great deal to offer.

I’m looking forward to seeing more studies!

On a footnote, I haven’t forgotten the upgrades to my Sitquietly meditation timer, I’m busily putting the finishing touches to a Secondlife product, but some tidying up on the web timer is due.  I’m also toying with reimplementing the Linux timer in C as I need a project to get back into that language.

Well, it took me a while, but I finally got a new release of my web based meditation timer out of the door.  This has taken a while, but with one thing and another I’ve been a little preoccupied.

This release adds a choice of 4 backgrounds and fixes a CSS bug in the page.  My next release is intened to have a little love given to the design of the form and some more sounds.

On the subject of sound.  I’ve been asked for a version of this timer for folks on smart phones and other devices that don’t have Flashplayer.  I am looking into it, but sound in browsers is unreliable and nonstandard, to put it nicely.  It seems that HTML 5 will solve this problem quite finally and I will be able to lose the dependency on Flashplayer.

HTML 5 is due towards the end of 2010, if my informration in correct, if I can get it going earlier than that I will try to  do so.

You can find Sitquietly on this page.

I’ve been taking notice of the feedback I’ve received on the online version of my meditation timer. I’d like to thank everyone who’s given me feedback and I’ve made a few changes to it.

This is what I’ve changed:

• Added details to instructions to clarify what to expect when running the timer.
• Changed wording and meta tags to use the phrase online timer.
• changed header when inside the timer to be a lot smaller, this should be better for smaller screens.
• Added a changelog that incorporates the pre-existing desktop changelog.

You can find my online medition timer here.