Many people probably know that I have just returned from a 10 day course on the Vipassana meditation technique (and now you do if you didn’t already). How I came about taking this course is a bit of a round about story, but I’ll start there to provide some background.

After I had completed my B.Sc. in Computer Science in 2003 I got a fairly decent job. The pay was satisfactory and the responsibilities where, for the most part, fair as well. I felt I should of been content with my situation at the time; but, as it turned out I was often restless and questioning what my actions where contributing to my community and the world at large. I took up reading and studying a selective set of religions, philosophies and self-help techniques in an attempt to make sense of my purpose. I had over simplified my expectations and as a result was looking for an easy way to accomplish my goal of finding purpose and living a purposeful life. In the process I had made an honest effort to practice Buddhism for about 4 months. Many things failed to reconcile with me at the time and I ultimately blew it off as a idealistic philosophy on life with some disagreeable dogma.

At the end of my explorations I arbitrarily decided that I should teach English overseas. Seemed like everyone was doing it and nearly everyone came back happy and rich. I figured my service to others in this way would both give me purpose and compensation. When the decision was made, I quickly became discontent with my present situation (which was still just fine). Still not experiencing what I thought I craved, I was eager to get this moving and made a few mistakes (burned bridges, etc) as a result of my impatience. Not too surprisingly, I got quickly distracted by a chance opportunity to work in the video game industry. I immediately dropped my previously “noble” plans and jumped shipped to Winnipeg. I was convinced I would derive my noble purpose by doing this.

Not surprisingly, I did not find much purpose in Winnipeg. If anything, things got worse very quickly for me. Ultimately the company couldn’t continue and I was out of the job. Longing for what I had previously, I made post haste back to Saskatoon. I spent 6 months collecting employment insurance and looking for a job. I eventually got one 2 hours south in Regina. This time around, I had resigned myself to just doing the best I can do at what I do. I would let purpose “find me”; and so I had given up. I dabbled and volunteered a bit in teaching English. It was enjoyable and rewarding, but not my “calling”.

I again grew restless and started to make plans to do something extreme. I thought perhaps I had misread/misinterpreted Buddhism and needed a more direct approach. I looked for monasteries that taught in English in Inda/Thailand. Found one and started a dialog with them to arrange my studies. It wasn’t long after I started that process that disaster struck and they were part of the collateral damage of a local terrorist attack. Shaken by this, I dropped the idea of being a monk for a month all together. So I again looked for something slightly less extreme and more “local”. I found a few retreats in North America, but they were often expensive and full. Most also seemed to cater themselves to hipster business people as more of an “experience”. I grew frustrated and stopped looking for nearly two years.

This takes us to about 8 months ago, I was randomly googling for guided meditation audio files and happened to come across the site for Dhamma. I read about it a bit on and off the site; but more importantly noticed they had centres all across North America. This set the gears in motion for me. The hardest hurdle for me to jump was to find 10 (more like 12) consecutive days off to take the new student course. As a partner in a company, I felt I couldn’t take myself out of the operating picture for that long. In retrospect that was a silly notion to have, but it did drive me to do a few exciting things in the mean time.

While on vacation with my fiance and parents in Hawaii, I set in motion (mostly with resolve) three things:

• I would resign as partner at my job.
• I would start my own company, Sliced Projects.
• I would registered for the spring Vipassana course at Sylvan Lake.

All three if these events came to pass around the same time. I had to resign to feel like I could take the 10 days was the biggest part of all this. Again, in retrospect I could of done it without resigning. Starting my own company had motivations of it’s own as well, but ultimately the end result was that I felt I had enough control of my life to take 10 days off. That’s how I ended up going to a Vipassana meditation course.

The Course

My better judgement tells me that the best details of my experience of the course should be told in person. As a new student in the technique I’m not fully able to explain the more subtle aspects that are also the more profound. I should mention my state of mind immediately before entering the course, since I believe it played a very important role in the end results. I consider myself a skeptic about most things I haven’t witnessed first hand, so coming to this course I decided to come with not expectations and an open mind. By open mind I don’t mean willing to listen, but willing to following immerse myself in the instructions of the technique. Turns out in the first discourse video your highly encouraged to do this anyways, but I think I helped set myself up for the best possible experience.

Day 0

Having grossly overestimated the travel time, my ride share companion and I arrived many hours early. Fortunately, there were many people already there. Any interesting tension was in the air, many of us were new students and were not quite sure what to expect. It seemed like all the old students and originally taken the course over seas and had very interesting experiences to share. This fueled the general anxieties, but also removed some of the unknowns for us new students. Once registration was done, diner was served. A pleasant vegetarian meal (all the meals were vegetarian, since you take a precept not to harm another being while taking the course). The course technically starts on day zero, after taking 5 precepts as a group.

Day 1, 2 and 3

I won’t bore you with the details of the schedule, but I will mention that this is no “vacation” or “retreat”. It’s a course and it has long hard hours. You essentially are meditating 10 or more hours a day. The first three days you practice a through the nose breathing meditation that trains your mind to be aware of the subtle sensations you are capable of feeling. This got painfully boring for me by the third day, since I’ve already done this form of meditation for years. I had convinced myself that if something new didn’t present itself on the fourth day I’d leave the course. The evening discourse presented what we would be doing the next day and it was surprisingly not what I expected.

Day 4

During day 0 there was a brief mention of “Sittings of Strong Determination”. Turns out today was the day you start those (actually it could of been day 5, I wasn’t keeping the best track of days). I was once again tested in my resolve to stick with the course. My advice to anyone on their first sitting of this type is to keep your mind busy with the technique as much as possible. Your given just enough instructions up to this point to know what to do, but the evening discourse pulls it all together. Every sitting afterwords was a cakewalk compared to the first and I learned a few interesting things about myself as a result.

Day 5 to 8

Practice, practice, practice. There is a very strong emphasis in this course to practice seriously and diligently. I took it to heart on all but the 8th day (my snow day). As each day progressed your use of the technique is expanded in small ways. The discourses generally pull together the theory of the technique and impart general nuggets of wisdom to you. There was a few Buddhist dogma’s brought up that seemed out of place in a non-cecular course (mostly about reincarnation). The instructor and assistant instructor both urge you to think for yourself and ultimately told me those parts of the discourse were not important to leaning and applying the technique. Generally time went fast with the exception of the 8th day. For whatever reason on the 8th day my mind insisted that I purge all the creative ideas that had accumulated since the start of the course. I basically wrote the first 1/4 of an amusing sci-fi in my head most of the day. I thought of a few interesting products for the iPhone and Wordpress as well during the day. The down side was that my sittings dragged on because of my distraction.

Day 9

Letting myself go on day 8 turned out to be the best thing I could do. With my minds buffer emptied I found a new found resolve to concentrated and apply the technique. The day literally flew by and I meditated for about 13 hours this day alone. I experienced the more advanced stages of the technique multiple times and came out of meditations with swells of emotion and tears. It was this day that many insights about life came to me. It was also the day I acknowledged the value in practicing Vipassana, even if I don’t currently agree with all of the topics brought up in the discourses.

Day 10

After mid morning meditation we are released of our vow of noble silence. It’s somewhat ironic that after 9 days of not talking you have nothing particularly insightful to say. The men exited the hall and kinda cheered (one of those lame half hearted ones). The ladies had a much more emotional exit from the hall with hugs and tears. It didn’t take long for everyone to do introductions again (how do you remember the names of people you can’t talk to for 9 days?). During rest periods everyone would form large groups and talk about their experiences so far in the course and the usual mixer conversations. We were warned meditation would be hard now that our minds had this extra source of distraction, but I actually found my meditations where a nice break from all the chit-chat. We learned the last and final step of the Vipassana technique that day, which is a little hokey to be honest; but at this point I couldn’t say it wasn’t worth doing based on my experiences so far.

Day 11

This day starts like all the others, but they throw in an audio discourse in the middle of morning meditation. At 7:15 or so we were “free”. Breakfast was served and volunteers had started to tear down the site and pack things up. I left with great feeling of rest, joy and general balance.

If you are interested in more details about the course or my experience, just ask me in person. So far I’ve been a very passionate about in sharing my experience to the people I’ve seen. Jolene has noticed a “glow of joy” about me. I generally feel “better” both physically and mentally. Most importantly, I don’t have this yearning for something more or feeling that I have no noble purpose.

I often feel like my relationships move too fast. This stems from the fact that I see a relationship as something that takes time to build. Now this isn’t always bad that it’s fast, it just means that my expectation are always kinda out of kilter. I don’t always expect the same things from relationships over the same amounts of time. It’s all subjective and with the flow for the most part. I usually just always get this feeling that I’m moving things along faster than I should. Well, perhaps that’s no longer a problem…
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I often consume my idle brain cycles with random thought streams and paths. I can stare blankly for nearly any amount of time really… just thinking. Often this happens when I’m “engaged” in a conversation with someone who is talking about something I’m not interested in. Don’t be fooled thou, I’m also easily distracted at times. Often in mid conversation a thought path will be trigger and you’ll loose me. This is just one of those quirks about me. I often wander off in my head for whatever reason. Now, this has very little to do directly with what I want to write about. It’s more of a introduction to “why” I’m writing about it. Which basically means, I’m writing about it because it’s been on my mind.
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This is just an excited note about an up coming event. May 18th to 21st I’ll be in Winnipeg visiting with a very good friend of mine. She traveled all the way to Saskatoon last year to see me, so now it’s my turn to return the favor. That should be enough for people in the “know” to know what’s going down. Haha!

Many moons ago I wrote this: My Guidelines for My Future Mate At the time, and since then I’ve consciously and unconsciously “graded” the girl I meet on those guidelines. Looking back, perhaps this was a bit of a mistake on my part. I guess to my logical mind it made sense to set criteria and seek someone who fit them all. Of course, if you read those guidelines you’ll notice that I’ve set myself up for a nearly impossible find.
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I am broken. I’ve been this way for many years now. At my best guess two years and a bit. That may no seem like a long time, but to someone stuck in a self-inflicted cycle of broken… it’s a long time. It all started with a girl and an online dating site. It was… pure chance and dumb luck that brought her and myself together. To this day it amazes me how well I remember our first “contact”.

Wow – totally cool. A guy who is willing to write to me before seeing my picture!
I love the concept of geloscopy – predicting someone’s future based on their laughter. There are so many different types of laughs, the nervous laughter, the uninhibited laughter, the slightly evil laugh, the extremely evil laugh – they say so much about a person. I’ve never studied it, I don’t know where I would go. But I do pay attention to what makes people laugh and the way that they laugh, I think it says so much about a person. I’m extremely attracted to people who laugh a lot.

The entire idea of geloscopy not only amazed me, but showed me a new aspect of self and others I had never seen before. While I’m sure she didn’t invent this mysterious field of study, it was the start of my interest in a girl I would never meet.
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Right, much time has passed since my last post. Here’s a summery of the exciting stuff that’s happened since… well… since I can remember it.
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I’m often one for expressing my idea’s in such a way as to piss the most number of people off. Would it be… incorrect for me to say that chivalry is dieing or possibly dead? Yet, some things remain that could be… considered a part of chivalry. Obviously, one of these is the opening of doors. Now, I used to get kinda cranky when a lady friend would expect that sort of treatment. Now, I’ve changed my mind.

First of all, it reduces the number of decisions that have to be made. When a woman is with a man, there is no question that the man should open that door. Thus avoiding awkward moments where both try to open the door, or they both stand their with dumb looks on their faces waiting for the other to open the door. Really, this is just a subtle optimisation of how society works.

Second reason, is that if the door is booby trapped; or, the room contains some sort of… dangerous situation… Well, it’s best to send the bravest in first and let them deal with it. After all, we’re just lowly men who can’t really do anything for ourselves but eat and fart (and scratch our balls).

Now I realize there is a flaw to this system. What happens when, by chance, two men approach a door at the same time. Who should open the door? I often find that eye contact proceeds these sorts of encounters and our animal instincts kick in. We race for the door like it’s a prize to open; but, instead of opening the door and letting the other through… we quickly race through and let go of the door. Making the slower animal… er… man have to work harder to catch the door before it closes and open it again.

Now, I haven’t studied what happens when two women get to the door. Being more passive in their ways I can imagine one of two things would happen. The both strike up a conversation at the door waiting for a man to open it for them. Or, if they happen to be a a place were no man would enter/exit (lets say… a store that only sells tampons), then the following would likely happen: Lady A offers to open door. Lady B declines and offers to open door for Lady A. Lady A notices that lady B is slightly more overweight than herself, and offers again (politely) to open the door for lady B. Lady B notices that lady A is wearing high heels (and it must be killing her feet), so offers to open door for lady A. This process can probably last several hours on the worst of days.

In case you didn’t realize it, this is supposed to be funny. Don’t bother ranting at me or posting something mean in reply to it… I’ll just moderate it out (I’m the dictator of my own website, imagine that).

So I’ve been using all sorts of online dating sites for more than a year now. I’ll refrain from being bitter, but I’ve yet to find true love. I have, however, found some patterns that emerge from profiles. While my research is purely observational, and could admittiantly be biased by the searches I do… here is a list of things I’ve noticed:
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Went on a date last night. The date part itself was alright, but the environment was not what I consider conducive to dating. The venue was a paddle boat. An alternative music radio station was putting it on and playing some tunes for most of the night. Of course there was much consumption in alcohol by the guests. Ages varied from two young to drink to too old to be there. As some of you know, I’m not really into the “bar” type of hangouts. They typically frustrate me, since I have a hard time hearing and talking to people in them. That would basically describe this boat. It was loud almost everywhere except outside. Which is kinda funny, cuz outside is where all those drunk people would smoke. Anyways, it was worth enduring cause I was talking to my date majority of the time. Anything is worth enduring when you have someone to endure it with. Lol. (Except maybe Chinese finger nail tourure…) Anyways, I took two really crappy pictures with my photo. Dark and moving are two things camera phones do not deal well with. Both pictures are blurry and slightly under exposed. I guess that’s what you get for having a 4.8mm lens right?