MOVING

Zen Unbound AND Blogmandu are moving.

NEW ADDRESS zenunbound.blogspot.com
AND blogmandu8.blogspot.com

SEE YOU SOON.

Blogmandu will be moving ...

I am terminating the zenunbound.com website to save funds and moving the hub of the "magazine", now blog, to zenunbound.blogspot.com

Please change your links to that, though Blogmandu is likely to be a blog within that blog when it re-emerges.

Thanks.

The Five Favorite Dharma Books Meme

I've been tagged by TMcG of TMcG to name five favorite dharma books on my reading list. The last two items top my reading list, since I haven't read them yet -- but are both in transit to me.

• Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism by Chang Chung Yuan
• Tao te Ching translation & commentary by Ellen M. Chen
• Buddha Heart, Buddha Mind: Living the Four Noble Truths by the Dalai Lama
• Against the Stream: a Buddhism manual for spiritual revolutionaries by Noah Levine
• One city: a declaration of interdependence by Ethan Nichtern

I'll tag three people: Justin, Justin & Danny

I've been tagged ...

... to share seven "random or weird things" about myself [by Michael, indirectly].

So, for me:

1. In a crowded auditorium at Ft. Mason in 1983, with a dozen competitors, a heckling MC, and local-celebrity judges, I won a stand-up comedy competition at the San Francisco county fair [due solely, I can assure you, to the fact the material I wrote was far the best, not that I was comfortable in front of people].
2. When I was 25 I was hospitalized for a week when at work, suddenly, I couldn’t move one side of my body. [Today, I can’t tell you which side it was.]
3. I am an astronaut, not a Statey -- if the same reason applies to me that Mark Wahlberg’s character said applied to Leo’s character in The Departed.
4. I can’t tell left from right. It is, I understand, a not uncommon but rather weird problem. It is easy to compensate for -- when I tell myself ‘snap your fingers’ my reflex is to snap the fingers on my left hand -- but it is annoying. If you ask me directions on how to get somewhere, I will tell you while snapping my fingers a bunch of times. It’s not a problem driving because I know that the driver’s side of the car should be nearer the middle of the road than the frontseat-passenger’s side.
5. I have all the problems of a perfectionist, but I wish I was much more perfectionistic -- since my life’s a shambles and I make a lot of mistakes -- but it is just like a perfectionist to feel this way. Indeed, I realize my perfectionism hobbles my life much more than I realize. Still, I wish I was much more of a perfectionist so that things in my life would be closer to being perfect, even as I realize and dismiss the idea that getting over my perfectionism would be what’s best for me. [Well, really, I don’t at all believe that. Indeed, I don't believe I am a perfectionist and think that I should become one -- which God knows, and wholly coincidentally, is just like something a perfectionist would think.]
6. I am a stigmatic: A big flat round brown mole is at the top of one of my feet. [I can't tell you which one without taking my socks off.] It looks like the head of a rusty ancient nail. There is no bleeding around it or anything.
7. Having been raised while my age was in single digits in Oklahoma where they talk funny, I thought for a long, long time that people were also known as “human beans.”

FlailingFruit: Falling Fruit, the new podcast website, launches into a sea of green.

Two-thirds of the Buddhist Geeks have teamed with eight others to form the webspace Falling Fruit, which is the new home for the "Buddhist Geeks" podcast series and a second, new podcast show -- as they‘re calling it -- "Conscious Business."

The digs at the new space are very nice, but the rollout, otherwise, is disappointing and, even, ominous. Buddhist Geeks, as a cottage business, had promise to extend its reach as the three Geeks ripened their skills as interviewers. It’s early, yet, of course, but this new enlarged enterprise is, maybe, a sharp turn downward, with indicators it embraces gobbledygook, and has become inveigling, and consciously rigidly politically correct.

With the launch of the new webspace comes the first Conscious Business episode and a new Geeks podcast that is really an abridgement of an interview conducted earlier for The TechSattva [which is yet another pod casting series that isn’t (yet?) on the “fruit” menu].

The idea of “Conscious Business” is not new. It is another in a long series of liberal management theories that have foundered in the past, all seeming to suffer from the same flaw: they attach heavy-duty philosophical underpinnings to a business enterprise that distracts it from the effort to focus, be efficient, and provide quality, appropriate goods/services. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for truth, justice and Superman being involved in the American Way. It is just that succeeding at business is a hard slog, and the competition is tough, often run by snakes in suits. I just think it’s been proved that a department of Feel Good just doesn’t help. Employees have enough problems without a supercilious management horning in on their off-hours lives. And a new flood of meetings keeping them from being productive.

Still, the pod show Conscious Business might be good, except it all seems narrowly conceived and rigged to ballyhoo and push the hosts’ fixed conceptions and aid their careers. An objective interview show CB isn’t. Hosts Theo Horesh and Duff McDuffee are leadership and life coaches [which I think we can take to mean “consultants”] involved in liberal-sounding enterprises in the Boulder, Colorado, area. They keep the banter humming in their first podcast [Or, if not they, the audio editor], and are colorful, interesting characters, but the show has the fatiguing drone of an aggressive sales pitch.

The website [“network” in hyped conscious-speak] is a “conscious media for people who care” and the show “explore[s] how consciousness emerges out of the sea of our own enterprises.” And, somehow, passively listening to the show is “joining the dialogue” while we must “prepare to be transformed.”

The ideas and show springs from Fred Kofman’s book from a year ago, called Conscious Business. In the middle of the podcast, the hosts, and their special guest Mark Wilding, delve into the word conscious as if doing so informs them of the management model. It all makes as much sense as trying to understanding baseball’s American League by discussing the word American. Thus the podcast discussion about intense awareness is ironically unaware.

At one point, the special guest cites Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception and interprets it as “the idea of really getting clear about what I’m really seeing and recognizing that I can project on the world and I can sort of override what’s actually going on with what I want to be going on. So, to be aware of that and to be conscious of that and be careful to really try to see what’s actually going on and be clear about that.” The poor special guest had spiraled into a fit of gobbledygook, but that is perhaps appropriate, since, unmentioned is the fact that Huxley’s book is all about his clarifying and confusing 1953 trip on 4/10th of a gram of mescaline.

The show is worth a listen as a stark instance of Boomeritis Buddhism on display. It is classic green vmeme, the hosts unwilling to look beyond their own POV while demanding that others be open to, and embrace, their perspective.