"Police are not my friends" (video)

Wisdom Quarterly interview with "Caroline" (Occupy Cal)


"Police are not my friends."

If police are not your friends, why are you their friend?

"Because I'm a Buddhist, and we don't expect to succeed acting the same way as they do. They drag people to jail by the hair like cavemen. It's sexism. There's racism. It's a police state."

Why are you participating in tomorrow's campus strike and teach out?

"We want student loan gouging to stop, bank greed, police abuse, endless war, fee increases, cut courses... There are so many issues that anyone not participating has to be questioned for apathy or ignorance."

Police drag demonstrators away by the hair
There is a lot of controversy at UC Berkeley after two videos surfaced showing law enforcement officers dragging two "Occupy Cal" demonstrators by their hair. The images triggered outrage among the faculty at Cal. Officers forcefully yanked people from their huddle, eventually forcing them to the ground. At one point in the video, an officer is shown pulling Prof. Celeste Langan by her hair and then arresting her. More

The Buddha on Friendship
Sharon Salzberg (adapted from The Force of Kindness, Sounds True, care2.com)

The Buddha often emphasized the characteristics of a good friend. He spoke about a good friend as one who gives a kind of happiness based on knowing our interconnectedness. Learning to be a good friend to ourselves and being one to others is really the same thing. Here are wise words about friendship from the Buddha as we approach Thanksgiving: He spoke about a good friend, a true friend, as being someone who is a helper, who protects us when we are unprotected, surprised by life in some way. The friend is a refuge when we are afraid. A good friend is constant in our time of happiness and... More

Interfaith Community, which has joined occupations, is being arrested.

• Police to conduct review after "Occupy Cal" arrests
• CHP officer shot near Sac; police execute suspect
• Police (LAPD) shoots man in downtown
• VIDEO: Raided Oakland demonstrators chant
• Occupy Yale, the Ivy League, and New Haven
• Student loans add to angst at Occupy Wall Street
• Brilliant students seek jobs beyond Wall Street

• VIDEO: fully armed SWAT used to evict Occupy Philly
  
• Police investigate officer involved shooting
• Police shoot, kill armed man in Green Bay
• Story, photos: Police shoot, kill man outside tavern‎
• Elkridge man dies after police shoot him 8 times
• Report: Hoboken man almost gets shot over bottle of beer
• Campus police shoot man at Elizabeth City State Univ.
• Police shoot man carrying assault rifle on N.C. campus

VIDEO: Portrait of a protest

• 
  Panorama: 360° view of L.A. City Hall encampment
• 
  Audio slide show: Through the words of an artist
• 
  Audio slide show: Nightfall to daybreak

• SF police shoot, kill man after foot chase
• Police dismantle "Occupy Oakland"
• Cain accuser's lawyer says witness to speak
• Public money expected in 49ers stadium
• AUDIO: Taliban stones, shoots mother/daughter
• OH, AND, BTW: Banks quietly ramping up costs

The Ordinatiion of Theravada Nuns (CA)

Sylvia Boorstein, founding teacher, Spirit Rock Meditation Center (Huffington Post)

It is 6:15 pm on Aug. 29, 2010. The place is a secluded mountaintop hermitage overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Sonoma County, California.

Four women, all long-time dedicated Buddhist practitioners, were declared fully ordained as nuns (bhikkhunis) in the Thai Theravada tradition.

It was the first such ordination ever in the Western hemisphere. And it was epochal because their preceptors were nuns within the same tradition.

Although the Buddha ordained both monks and nuns, the order of nuns disappeared a thousand years later when there were no longer enough nuns available to ordain new nuns. Keeping strictly with tradition (and in keeping with patriarchal pressures) the rule that nuns needed to be ordained by nuns brought the order of nuns to an end.

Women were able to join a community and practice but only at an inferior status. The pressure brought by women with a burning desire practice and have roles and recognition comparable to men has enabled some women, trained in the Theravada Thai tradition, to be ordained by nuns with Sri Lankan ordination.

The nuns ordained in 2009 join the now small group of recognized Theravada Buddhist nuns in the Thai Forest tradition that can now continue to grow. More

Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Marin County, California

• Buddhist eye opening ceremony in Japan
• Ayya Tathaaloka, American Buddhist nun
• Nirvana's secret feminism
  

Absorption Advice (Jhana Meditation)

(jhanasadvice.com)

Pa Auk Sayadaw is a Theravada Buddhist scholar-practitioner. Two of his accomplished Western students are Stephen Snyder and Tina Rasmussen. They are offering retreats, day long meditations, and interviews (advice on practicing to gain profound serenity).



2011 Retreats

3-day meditation retreat at Cloud Mountain, Dec. 9-12, 2011



Dharma Talks, Daylongs, Interviews

• Tina Rasmussen was recently interviewed by Nonduality Magazine, an online magazine featuring interviews with teachers from a wide variety of traditions. Stephen Snyder will be interviewed for the next issue.

Dharma Talks

• Sacramento, CA on April 21 & 22, 2012
• We have posted a Dharma talk recorded in November, 2009 when Ven. Pa Auk Sayadaw invited us to teach at the Theravada Dhamma Society near San Francisco, California.
• We were interviewed in 2010 by Vince Horn at BuddhistGeeks.com. It was a lot of fun talking about the "Jedi Warrior Training" yogis described experiencing at our Dec. 2009- Jan 2010 retreat. Click here for the link, and scroll down to the interviews (in two parts).

Upcoming 2012 and 2013 Retreats

• 25-day Retreat in Washington, 2013: We will also offer our first 25-day retreat, October 13-November 8, 2013, at a private retreat center on Samish Island, near Bellingham, Washington. The estimated cost is $1,350 and all rooms are single cabins. Pre-registration is now open.
• These retreats are in addition to our usual 13-day annual retreat at Cloud Mountain, which next year will be held Sept 8-21, 2012. See Events page for details.
  
  

Spirit Rock Daylong: In Jan. 2011, we held our first daylong at Spirit Rock Meditation Center (near San Francisco). We were delighted that 120 people attended with very positive feedback.

Practicing the Jhanas Book

• Now available for e-readers! The e-reader version of Jhanas Advice is sold at a reduced cost, on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and Google.
• Practicing the Jhanas (Shambhala Publications) is available in major bookstores and most Internet booksellers. Or order from JhanasAdvice.com (Books page).
  
  
• The original Jhanas Advice from Two Spiritual Friends was purchased by more than 550 people in 31 countries on six continents in a two year period. The Shambhala version contains one additional chapter on "First Sit to First Jhana" as well as an expanded section on the Purification of Mind. Several wonderful reviews of our book have been released, including Yoga Journal UK, Wisdom Quarterly: American Buddhist Journal, and Buddhadharma. The latest can be found here.

Knowing and Seeing by Pa Auk Sayadaw

This seminal text is now available at cost for purchase on Amazon.com thanks to two yogis in our sangha -- Ted Weinstein and Michael Nagy. The book is beautiful and much easier to read and use than the downloadable version. It sells for $15.99 (nonprofit) with any small proceeds being donated to Pa Auk Forest Monastery in Burma. Click here to order. For a description visit Books/Dana page.

Bigfoot was here maybe (Giants for certain)

Michele Bigley (Special to the Los Angeles Times, June 26, 2011)

Reports of giant ogres date back thousands of years. Who's hiding the hominid* skeletons and cave evidence? (popfi.com)

HAPPY CAMP, California - I knew that lots of honest folks did believe that Bigfoot (Sasquatch or as crypto-zoologists call him, Gigantopithecus) not only exists but also thrives in Klamath River country between the Humboldt County coast and the Shasta Cascade.

That was enough to pique my curiosity. In Willow Creek, we headed to the China Flat Museum to meet the curator of its Bigfoot exhibit, Al Hodgson.

Now 87, Hodgson carries his adoration for all things Sasquatch on his sleeve, showing me around the vast collection of unreasonably large casts of footprints (one of which Hodgson made in nearby Bluff Creek, site of the only known filmed Bigfoot "sighting"), as well as schooling me on the history of "sightings" in and around Willow Creek and the hoaxes.

Yes, tricksters have strapped on giant wooden feet and traipsed around the mountains in them.

Levelheaded Hodgson explained the main signs of the big guy's existence: a woven nest of sticks and leaves, an amazingly horrid stench, piled rocks, twisted tree limbs, and massive tracks.

Itching to get into nature, we drove along the aptly named Bigfoot Scenic Byway, which meanders along the Trinity and Klamath rivers, sinuously inching past peaks blanketed with verdant trees, yellow fields, and dramatic lupines. For nearly 80 miles this byway took us as far from civilization as you can get in California without hiking into the backcountry.

We continued through the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation, the largest in California, and home to people who believe the high country is sacred and should not be entered by anyone but the most revered [shamanistic California] medicine men. More

• Bigfoot country information
• Walking in the Footsteps of Human Giants!
  
• Otherworldmystery.com
• Giant Archeology: "Lovelock Cave" (UC Berkeley)
• Man-eating giants discovered in Nevada cave
• North American giants
• Analyzing Bigfoot sightings and stories
• Giants described in the Dead Sea Scrolls
  

*The Hominid Red-Haired Giants
Otherworldmystery.com.jpg

HUMBOLDT RIVER, Lovelock, Nevada - The Paiute Indians [who inhabited a range from Yosemite, California to Nevada] have a legend about their ancestors and red-haired giants. These giants, known as Si-Te-Cah, used to kill and eat the Paiute tribes. Though the Si-Te-Cah were small in numbers, they posed a dire threat to the Paiute, who were beginning to settle the area.... [This means they would literally be the yakkhas (rakshasas) of Buddhist lore. Far from animals, these cannibals are sophisticated albeit brutal hominids, like Alavaka. They live and have lived in many mountainous parts of the world, including Afghanistan: Steve Quayle wrote about the American military killing and transporting one enormous specimen in LongWalkers.] Could there really have been a race of Caucasoid giants that inhabited North America before the Native Americans? Are the artifacts discovered in Lovelock Cave proof that history is wrong? More

Giant artifact compared with normal jaw