Dolenni Diddorol / Interesting Links: December 13, 2008

2008-12-13

"When I am reading and come across a word that is unfamiliar (or one that I really want to commit to memory), I'll add it to one of my flash card pages. I add words to the page until I have 100 entries to work with and then start another page."

http://www.oseda.missouri.edu/~diana/fflach.shtml

An English and Welsh Dictionary, 1828

"An English and Welsh Dictionary: Wherein, Not Only the Words, But Also, the Idioms and Phraseology of the English Language, are Carefully Translated Into Welsh, by Proper and Equivalent Words and Phrases: with a Regular Interspersion of the English Proverbs and Proverbial Expressions, Rendered ...
By John Walters
Published by Clwydian Press, 1828
Original from Oxford University
Digitized 15 Jan 2007
581 pages"

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fAMGAAAAQAAJ

Kintner's footage of Nepal, 1957 CE

"The home movies of Watson Kintner (1890–1979), shot on 16mm film over several decades, were archived at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and have now made their way to archive.org. Kintner's engineering-related globetrotting brought him to Nepal just a few years after its doors opened to the outside world. It was a place which had barely changed since Lévi, Sāṅkṛtyāyana and Tucci first set foot there earlier in the 20th century (Tucci continued to visit throughout the 1950s); and which even then was much as Hodgson, Oldfield and Bendall had known it. When these films were taken, Nepal was still relatively isolated, and had only recently begun to build an electricity and telecommunications infrastructure. David Snellgrove — who also shot movies during his visit (archived at the Institute for Buddhist Studies, Tring) — wrote in his book, published in the same year, that key trade routes in Nepal would "never" be resurfaced as "motorable roads". (A few years later, they were.)"

http://jinajik.blogspot.com/2008/12/kintners-footage-of-nepal-1957-ce.html

Drala

"Overcoming the need for an enemy provides access to a deeper source of energy and power in our lives. The Tibetans have a word for this larger energy — drala — which literally means “beyond the enemy”. Chogyam Trungpa describes drala as “the magical quality of existence” that arises out of “connecting the wisdom of your own being with the power of things as they are”. We can perceive the power inherent in things as they are — the radiance of fire, the solidity of earth, the expansiveness of joy, the tenderness of sorrow — only when we drop our struggle with ourselves and our experience — – John Welwood, “Love and Awakening”"

http://www.woodka.com/2008/01/02/drala/

The Drala Principle

"Drala is the elemental presence of the world that is available to us through sense perceptions. When we open to trees, flowers, a creek or clouds we encounter an actual wisdom, though one that is not separate from our own. Beholding a river is much more than merely looking at a river; potentially, we are meeting the dralas. A friend of mine was once with her family in upstate New York. It was winter and they had hiked into a forest. The landscape was one of cold and snow, whiteness and silence, birch trees. Astonished by the pristine beauty, my friend realized it was her duty - not just to notice this beauty - but to stop and linger with it. To let it penetrate her. To listen. We have failed to see our first responsibility to the world is an aesthetic one."

http://westernmountain.org/drala.html

"The intriguing quote, "Luxury is experiencing reality" is another phrase Chögyam Trungpa used which goes to the heart of the drala principle. In our modern world of technology and consumerism we live tremendously and unnecessarily shielded from the elements; as Trungpa taught, "so many devices are presented to us...

ten thousand types of gloves and a hundred thousand types of shoes and millions of masks to ward off animals in the real world... Just in case you smell a cow, you have an aerosol. "

Buddhism & Health

"Meditation ‘as effective as medication’ in treating depression"

http://preciousmetal.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/meditation-as-effective-as-medication-in-treating-depression/

"Chanting could help us all live longer, says medic"

http://preciousmetal.wordpress.com/2008/12/01/chanting-could-help-us-all-live-longer-says-medic/

"Mindfulness therapy alleviates depression"

http://triplegem.terapad.com/index.cfm?fa=contentNews.newsDetails&newsID=76790

there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance

"To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out -- there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377751

The Tingri Hundred - The Last Will and Testament of Padampa Sanggyé

"The root of both sangsara and nirvana goes directly back to your aware mind.

In the mind there is no thingness"

https://sites.google.com/site/tibetological/Home/the-tingri-hundred

Nature Unfolding

"Decades before most Westerners had heard of feng shui, it described how the built world shapes human interaction. It recommended windows on two sides of every room, for instance, because this “creates less glare around people and objects. . . . It allows us to read in detail the minute expressions that flash across people’s faces . . . to understand each other.”"

http://www.tricycle.com/interview/nature-unfolding

Exploring Vajrayana Buddhism

""What the warrior renounces is anything in his experience that is a barrier between himself and others. In other words, renunciation is making yourself more available, more gentle and open to others." - Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Shambhala, The Sacred Path of the Warrior"

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/tantra/quotes_and_images

Dzogchen Practice in Everyday Life by HH Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

"When engaging in meditation practice, we should feel it to be as natural as eating, breathing and defecating. It should not become a specialised or formal event, bloated with seriousness and solemnity. We should realise that meditation transcends effort, practice, aims, goals and the duality of liberation and non-liberation. Meditation is always ideal; there is no need to correct anything. Since everything that arises is simply the play of mind as such, there is no unsatisfactory meditation and no need to judge thoughts as good or bad."

http://www.nyingma.com/dzogchen1.htm

Unseen Dharamsala

"Dharamsala is a small town in north India, nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas. In 1960, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, offered upper Dharamsala to the Tibetan refugees. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, fleeing persecution in Tibet, made it his home in exile as well as the home of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. Today streams of Tibetan refugees flock to Dharamsala to receive blessings and teachings from His Holiness the Dalai Lama."

http://unseendharamsala.blogspot.com/

Long-Term Personal Data Storage

"There is absolutely nothing that you can put away for decades and expect to be useful. Your requirements are not simple - they'll actually very, very hard to meet, even if you want to throw a lot of money at the problem.

You don't know that a jpeg, for example, will be readable in 30 years. The format may be so deprecated that there might not even be a viewer available. Like my old Microsoft Works 4.0 documents - although I have the data, I have nothing that can read them unless I want to spin up an old Windows image, assuming that I can generate a virtualized environment that can support an old Windows (Windows XP probably won't even boot on any PC being produced 30 years from now). And some of that data is only a few years old, not decades old.

You should store not only the data, but also the applications that created the data. And the computer you need to run those applications. And backups of those. And then every few years, pull it all back and validate it and update as required."

[...]

"Forget media integrity. The problem is technology drift. Everyone thinks "ubiquitous" (as in every computer has a USB port) is the same as "eternal," and it isn't. Twenty years from now, your USB thumb drives and CD-R's may have their data physically intact, but only museums will have equipment that can read them.

It is a fantasy to suppose that you can successfully perform Sisyphus-like task of systematically recopying your data to new media and formats. The proof of this is the innumerable stories of big, well-funded organizations that have neglected to do this. If the NASAs of the world keep finding reels of tape with important data on it that can't be read due to technology skew, what makes you think that you can do much better?

(What makes me bitter is failure of vendors to give adequate warning when software updates remove the capabilities of reading file formats that were formerly supported. I once verified that my new Mac could read my old MFS diskettes, and did not notice when a software update to the OS removed that capability. Microsoft was less than forthcoming when they removed the built-in ability of Excel to read Multiplan files)."

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F13%2F1434216

The Mabinogion Dances - Moving Being

"The Mabinogi are four books of ancient welsh celtic fable and tradition. This vid shows dance and magic."

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=zCK8cwRIl6k

See also

http://www.theatre-wales.co.uk/companies/company_details.asp?ID=65

http://www.dirtylinen.com/feature/33williamson.html

Bran & Branwen - The Mabinogion

"The chopping story of King Bran and Branwen."

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=5rOm95WT4aU

Bute Park: Council faces criticism over debate ‘snub’

"It’s important to have the facts in the public domain because, in the new year, Bute Park has the potential to become one of the most divisive and controversial ‘regeneration’ projects in Cardiff since the barrage."

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2008/12/12/council-faces-criticism-over-debate-snub-91466-22459652/

"The council is hard up. There’s no money to maintain the park. It appears to be the proposal is by senior council officers, driven by personal aggrandizement and kudos.

... the original boundary of Bute Park was being chipped away at for development and must be stopped.

There’s an element of death by a thousand cuts. Bute Park is the most significant open space in Cardiff and fundamental to the character of the city"

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2008/12/13/furry-over-lorry-bridge-planned-for-bute-park-as-council-fails-to-meet-with-protesters-91466-22467261/

Dzogchen Monastery

"Dzogchen Monastery, located in Eastern Tibet in the Rudam Valley, was founded at the end of the seventeenth century by Dzogchen Pema Rigzin, the first Dzogchen Rinpoche, and Ponlop Namkha Ösel, the first Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche."

(Picture: A view of Rudam Valley, with Dzogchen Monastery in the distance (picture by Sangye Trinley))

http://www.dzogchenmonastery.org/what_is_dzogchen_.html

Various Welsh Dictionaries

* Welsh-English Dictionary
* A Pocket Dictionary of English-Welsh William Richards 1861
* English-Welsh-English Searchable Lexicon
* Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru
* History and Status of the Welsh Language
* Place Name Index of Wales National Gazetteer of Wales
* Welsh-Frisian Dictionary (text file)
* Welsh-Russian, English, Breton, Irish Dictionary

http://www.alphadictionary.com/directory/Languages/Celtic/Welsh/

Lleucu Llwyd - Sing4Wales

http://www.sing4wales.com/saesneg/?page_id=18

http://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lleucu_Llwyd

Dzogchen - Dr. Alexander Berzin

"Moments of conceptual thinking (rnam-rtog), specifically moments of verbal thinking, simultaneously arise, abide, and disappear, as does writing on water. No effort is required to dissolve them, which is the meaning of the term automatic liberation (rang-grol, self-liberation). Thoughts automatically free themselves, in the sense of disappearing simultaneously with arising. When we abide in this state of simultaneous arising, abiding, and disappearing, we abide in the “natural state of the mind.” It is sometimes described as the space in between milliseconds of thought or as the open space underlying thoughts."

http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/x/nav/n.html_1870389411.html

History and Status of the Welsh Language

"Welsh is one of the Celtic languages still spoken, perhaps that with the greatest number of speakers. The only natural communities of speakers are in that part of Britain which is called Wales, and a small colony in Patagonia (in the Chubut province of Argentina), although there are many speakers of Welsh elsewhere, particularly in England and Australia and the United States of America. ..."

http://users.comlab.ox.ac.uk/geraint.jones/about.welsh/

Meinir Gwilym - Erwan

"Meinir Gwilym sings the haunting Meic Stevens song 'Erwan'"

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=3U2U7TBxm4w

Dzongsar Khyentse on Dzogchen

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=-7BP-RDJspM

"Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche talks a little about dzogchen and meditation practice. "

Sara Mai a'r Moniars - Harbwr Diogel

"A brilliant song written by Arfon Wyn & Richard Synnott and sung by Anglesey group Sara Mai a'r Moniars. Singers Sara Mai & Arfon Wyn with Richard Synnott on sax. Won 2002 Song of Wales contest on S4C. Written in aftermath of 9/11."

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=sgskZTu9vQQ

Dzogchen - Keith Dowman

'No-one going no-where'

http://www.keithdowman.net/dzogchen/

Keith Dowman's writings on Dzogchen

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