Classroom Talk
Spring - Summer 2002 Archive
A meeting of the fictitious Board. Posted by John on June 03, 2002 at 20:44:28:
Are you here now for the first meeting of our fictitious Board? Are you present? Are you in there behind those eyes?
First of all, for any who may be interested, I think I may have found the funding for our non-profit corporation.
What a strange day this has been. I woke up this morning in short supply of air—the effects I suppose of having been down-wind of that now 35,000-
acre forest fire for four days—and for the better part of an hour this morning, while I did all the steps that my doctor avails me of for dealing with this
kind of aggravated situation . . . . . well, I just wasn't feeling very good. And then I came out of it, and have been feeling rather better all day,
breathing easier again. It's unnerving that it can sometimes worsen that much when I'm being sound asleep in bed. I felt scared about that. It's events
like this, although rare, that remind me that the gift of life is only a temporary and limited gift for all of us.
I suppose it's a good idea to "make hay while the sun shines." A great Lady I once knew who died of cancer some years ago, advised: "If there are
things you'd really like to do in your life, don't wait," she said. "Do it now."
Well . . . I didn't start out taking that advice today. And anyway, it's my "Monday day off." So I just lay around much of the day watching television.
The news isn't good. The world is in terrible shape. There are so many mistakes being made. The new Bush strategy of "pre-emptive strikes against
terrorism" is not going to work in the long run—no matter what the justifications for it are—if it keeps turning the U.S. into the "bad guys" in the eyes
of different groups of sensitive people around the world.
If the same money it costs for doing that were poured instead into supporting and building the economies of those areas where the people who are
hating us now live . . . . . like "Marshall Plans" after World War II . . . . . . there would be some hope of resolving all these matters. But that would take
great sacrifices by the richest people in the world. The way things sit right now, the shape of the world doesn't look very good.
And the economy of the world, and particularly the U.S. economy doesn't look so good either, it seems to me. I'm not one for watching the Business
and Stock Market news, but I did at some length today. And I watched Maria Bartiromo on CNBC "Market Week" interviewing Sir John Templeton,
89—born American, now English, living in the Bahamas, I believe—who was Knighted by the Queen for his management of money.
He's the Founder of the Templeton Funds, which has apparently done significantly better with investments than competitors over the years, and the
Templeton Foundation, which has been the philanthropical focus of his life.
Sir John referred to the years when the New York Stock Exchange prices were going up and up and up as a "time of insanity." Stocks are greatly
over-priced now. And if anything can save the situation—if I understand him correctly—it can only be a marked lowering of the present values of
stocks, followed by a period of psychological adjustment to that. In other words, the richest people in the world (and other stock holders) are going
to have to lose a lot of money before the Stock Market is in a healthy position again.
I'm less of an expert on money than anything else, probably, yet the things Sir John said to Ms. Bartiromo, who *is* an expert, made sense to me. And,
in watching her very closely, it seemed to me that Sir John's explanation made honest sense to her, as well. And he seemed quite modest in offering
his own guesses and hunches about all this. He seemed quite different in that way, somehow than other voices that speak about business news and
money.
Whew! The financial shape of the world is not very good, either, unless we are planning on hanging on until the end of this century. I think they
seemed to conclude that, after getting worse, things would probably be better in the markets by then. (He put in a good word for the ecomomy of
Australia in the meantime, by the way, among a few countries he mentioned favorably.)
And then Maria Bartiromo took a break for commercials and said they would get into the philanthropical side of Sir John's life when they returned.
Now, I never sit around for that sort of thing, with a clicker in my hand—with lots of news channels to choose from. I avoid the commercials on any
of them like "a sport." But for some reason I did wait this time. I wondered what the philanthropical side of this mild, modest, and apparently
successful old man would be like. When they returned, he explained it's about "a quest towards helping humanity to know more of divine reality than
before." That caught my ear, you might imagine.
I took a few more notes. He's interested in finding new ways of pursuing the knowledge of reality. He said, "It's not about determining which
religion is the most helpful." He implied they were looking for what lies underneath all religions, unifying principles by which religions could be
brought together, rather than fighting with each other. "We are trying to find new discoveries about spiritual information," he said.
Wow! Isn't that exactly what the non-profit Teaching Tools for Mindfulness Training, Inc.—if it existed—if it were funded to exist—would be about?
This is, precisely, a school for learning to use the practice of mindfulness for finding new discoveries of spiritual information. Mindfulness, itself, is not
a new discovery. But because it has been kept so secret over the centuries and millenia in the "inner circles" of monasteries around the world, it would
be a "new discovery" to most of the human race. It would be a "new discovery," for instance, to all of the anchor people at all the the major news
organizations on television. Not to be snide about it, it would even be a "new discovery" to most of the present religious leaders of the world.
Mindfulness *is* the unifying factor that underlies all of the spiritual teachings that have been handed down in "the Many Paths." After all these
millenia, mindfulness is still not widely known about—and even less the means of actually learning *how-to-do-it*!
Sir John gave this view of his own spiritual perspective: "What makes people happy," he said, "is to be spiritually productive." I agree with that.
Absolutely so!
So I bring this up here at our first fictitious Board meeting because it seems to me that if we ever have a Fund Raising Department to go along with our
Design Department, it would seem to make good sense to offer a presentation about funding this project to him, to Sir John. — Fictitious and
hypothetical though this may all be, you've gotta admit, it's an intriguing idea. I guess before doing that, however, there would have to be a Planning
Department, to come up with a plan for what it is that is to be funded, what jobs it would take, what salaries would be paid, what equipment and
supplies would be needed, what legal and accounting services would be necessary, how much it would all cost . . . things like that. — Now . . . don't
look at *me* everybody!!! Heh-heh. If this is *anything*, it's "a *class* project."
Otherwise, it's just a fictitious dream that we can play with in our discussions for whatever it serves to show about real life. Well . . . . . it's highly
unlikely to really happen, anyway, of course. But it *is* neat to see plausible and practical ideas for the funding of it starting to pop up in high relief
already. Yeah, that's really neat! I would have thought the funding of it would have been the hardest thing. Maybe that Sir John would be our man,
if we ever got around to (cf. Hotei, picking up his bag) *actualizing* these ideas.
Next item of business! The logo—on its way from fictitious to real. As you have been gracious enough to say you'd work best on this with input from
me, Douglas, here's what I've come up with so far. The idea I like best so far, is that moebius (sp?) strip twisted so it forms the shape of an octagon.
By the way, I lean against using any words in the logo, for now, at least. In the center of the space within that octagon, I see two people standing
side-by-side, holding hands—seen *from above*. We'd see the tops of their heads, their shoulders, maybe their toes sticking out in front, and their
arms holding hands, all seen from above.
Go back to the Second Semester of Classroom Talk in the Archives, if you will, and click on "Stocking Stuffer One," posted by John and Brent on
December 21, 1998—that was a Holiday gift to the class back then. — That's a drawing looking down on two people from above, who are seen,
respectively, being in ordinary consciousness, or "sleep," and being in awakened consciousness, or mindfulness. Perhaps that could be illustrated with
arrows that very same way with these two figures holding hands in our logo. What d'ya think? Any better ideas? Douglas? Others of you, who'd
like to make input on this? That way of doing the logo would illustrate a mindful person holding hands with a sleeping person standing in a field that
is bounded by an eight-sided moebius strip, representing the dual life challenge of personality (Self) and/or essence (Being), as seen from above. . . . . .
. Anybody like that idea? Naw? Yeah? Naw?
What is "my dream?" you have asked me for Douglas. Either I can give you an intellectual explanation of that—which I will, a bit, here—or I can tell
you of an *actual dream*. And I'll do that tomorrow, maybe, as I had a dream of coaching, Saturday night, where I woke up and wrote down what I
was coaching about. I had an urge to wake up and write it down while in the dream, so I wouldn't forget it and could share it with *you*, Douglas . .
. . . in connection with that play . . . and that was before you had asked me to tell you my dream.
So . . . . for now, in the intellectual view of it, you could say that my dream is of a world where people can get along together in peace. That's about it.
That's what the composing of the awareness game, and the coaching of this class is about for me. I thought it would be cool to create a game with
strategies that are based on mindfully observeable realities where people could wake up and deliberately play for peace and for harmony, on purpose.
I had that dream more than thirty years ago, and I've been working on it ever since. And I guess it would also be okay to say that my dream is to
give back to the world and to a few of you students what I have been lucky enough to find and get out of my own life—not so that people would be
anything like me, of course, mind you, but so that each of you would have a better chance to more fully get to be *You*. So that's "my dream"
intellectually, if you wish—in general terms, so to speak.
But the real dream I actually had on Saturday night, after staying up much too late watching "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" on a cable movie
channel, that dream gets more into the specifics. I think you'll like it, Douglas. You *might* even like to write a classical play about it, even without me.
And maybe not. It doesn't matter.
Next topic I have to bring up for the fictional Board to consider today is improvements in the school website that Rakesh has suggested by way of
doing some maintainance and decoration of the place that we have created here on the Internet. And any of you can have anything to say about any
of these things that you'd like to!
Thanks, Rakesh, for your thoughts about this. You have suggested we have a new background color. This may ring bells immediately for some of
you out there. The background color we have now is called Desert Tan, and it is quite pleasant on the computers that I have had—restful on the eyes
and easy to read. And to me it sybolized our "local home town" in the Arizona desert here. I had simply brushed it from my mind that I have had the
striking experience a few times over the years, when accessing the site from other people's computers or in computer stores, that this background
color *can be* simply awful. I don't know why, but this background color can be simply ugly and distracting on some people's computers. The Desert
Tan you are looking at now may be somewhat different for each one of you.
I don't know the answer to finding a universally suitable background color that won't create this problem for some browsers or classmembers. Maybe
black on white would be the only way to get around the variances that show up in colors. If you are one of the people for whom this so-called Desert
Tan looks gruesome on your screen and you have hung around anyway, I thank you for your patience and forebearance with that. I gather that
Rakesh is one of these.
Rakesh also noticed the absence of art in the hallways and classes of our school. That was done originally for one single purpose, to make it easy and
fast to get around anywhere in the school. In our first years, several people took the trouble to mention to me that they appreciated how quickly they
could get around from one place to another in the Site. It certainly made a big difference to me, since I've been here with smaller, less powerful,
computers from the start. Even the iMac I've got now takes a long time to get around to places in some sites I visit, but not here. So I've always been
proud of the swiftness that is built in to the way we do things around here, by leaving the art features out of it.
Still, for a person who takes an interest in participating in our Classroom Talk class, the need to be going around to different places in the school
doesn't come up that often. Maybe it would be a nice improvement and worth the wait to put some choice and maybe beautiful pieces of art around
the ol' campus, after all. That too is a good idea to reflect about, if this Site is going to go "pro" one of these days, and become formally incorporated.
Perhaps we look kinda "amateur" compared to most other sides now on the Web, for lack of the kinds of groovy art that can be done nowadays on
computers. Any thoughts on this by any of you?
Yet another good idea, along the lines of becoming more "ship-shape" around here—and I *do* like the idea of looking "sharp"—is Rakesh's suggestion
that the Virtual Library on our campus be up-dated. All of the links in the Library were put there a few years ago. Sadly, a lot of those places are no
long functioning. I suppose those links should be deleted if they aren't working. I have to admit that I never go there to the Library any more.
Most of the links there have at least some connection to the teaching of mindfulness. From the start I had wished to show by this that this campus is
not supposed to be a closed-off place, but rather a place that welcomes many diverse approaches to teaching and practicing mindfulness. And the
Library was also designed to show browsers that there *are* a lot of approaches to the teaching and sharing of mindfulness, many associated with the
major religions . . . so that browsers could see that even though teachings on how-to-do-it may be hard to come by in this world (which is the
speciality that our school offers in this field), that the knowledge of mindfulness, although rare, is still to be found around the world of the Internet.
In other words, the Library is there to say, in effect, we aren't the only place in Webland that knows and teaches about mindfulness, even if you
browsers that come along haven't heard about mindfulness before, or haven't found anyplace before this that teaches you, step-by-step, how-to-do-it,
right here on-line . . . and for free!
Yes, Rakesh, a list of the links that aren't working there would be appropriate, if you someday have time to compile that. I'll have to ask Brent to do
those changes as I don't know, technically, how. If we had a School Librarian on the Staff, if someday one would appear, it would be a huge job, but
a worthwhile one, to go through the Archives, as well, and find the many *great websites* that a number of our students, especially Sally, have
referred us all to in the past. The mindfulness training sites that you students here have found have been much better, by and large, than the ones
that I listed there in the Library. You have uncovered sites that *really deserve* to be available in a Library for mindfulness students.
Maybe the easy way to update the Library in this way, would be for each of you students to send a list to our future Librarian (when there is an
applicant) of the other mindfuless sites you have found that would add the most to a fine Library offering rich and wide exposure to experts in this
field for future visitors and future students who might gather around here. (I don't mean to put you on the spot, Rakesh, but were you volunteering
to apply for the Librarian job at TTMT, Inc. . . . or just volunteering for the Planning Department with these ideas?)
Anyway, it's all a fiction up to now, except for any little parts of it that actually do get done—even for the practice of doing such things, the practice of
getting such things done.
So . . . . . unless any others of you here have any other business to bring up at this time, I thank you. And this fictitious Board meeting is adjourned.
Remember you're in there behind those eyes, if you can, as you file on out of this Board Room.
Coach
By the way, would somebody *please* tell me what happened to those two posts of Sally's last Saturday that have since—I don't know how—*
disappeared*. Those postings seemed quite nice and appropriate to me. Why were they deleted . . . and HOW? I'd be grateful if someone would *
please* explain to me what happened there. I'm a little anxious about it, because in fact, I didn't know that could be done.
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Archived 08/26/2002