Category: Administrative

I don’t know if you are aware, but I’m gathering these pieces on the early Buddhist approach to Death and Dying together, to make a book from them. Thanks for the feedback you’ve given me along the way.

It’s a rewarding project, but it’s reached a point lately where I have to sit down and do a lot of editing work. For instance, I have to go through every piece I’ve written over the last year and a half and see where it fits in the overall scheme. (I’ve got a broad outline, sketched out.) Until I do this, it’s a little confusing how the big picture is unfolding.

This means I’ll undertake, over the coming weeks, a painstaking process involving: reading through of each post, categorising each one, and managing the overall sorting process. I really can’t write any more pieces until I know how the whole thing is going.

I started this process on Subhana and Joyce’s bi-annual Creativity retreat recently, and it was really very helpful. It means a lot of thinking of a different sort than I do in the actual writing, though. Thank the Kosmos (and Literature and Latte) for Scrivener, to achieve this task with the minimum pain!

So, I’m sorry to say that it’s a choice presently between daily writing and this nitty-gritty editing process. Hence, I’ve decided to write to you only once a week, until this is done. Hopefully it won’t take long. Thanks again to you my readers. One reason that the voice has not been hard to find for this writing is because I think of you, and write directly for you.

Dear Friends,

Firstly, apologies for yesterday’s confusing post. I have been ill during this last week, and I was working late. The actual blog entry has been amended, to show what you should have received, if you would like to see it.

In a more general sense, I’m writing, now, to explain what’s happening with this blog, in case I have caused some confusion.

By all appearances, it should have finished. I died, after all, back in February. J On the other hand, on two counts I feel encouraged to write a book on the subject that emerged during those eight or nine months of writing.

Firstly, as I wrote, it became clear to me that there was sufficient value in the approach for me to consider turning it into a book, after I complete the initial task – which was: a blog written over the remaining months of my then current A Year to Live practice.

Secondly, during that time I had a number of suggestions, from readers who found the writing helpful to their path, encouraging me to publish it as a book. It was a joy to hear the particular points that people treasured, and to think that I was in some small way a help to their interior life.

So, I’m now going through the posts – culling, rewriting, and re-ordering them. It’s an interesting and enjoyable process – just as engrossing as the original creation – and it’s a fitting commitment during my current year of A Year to Live (which I began at the end of March); that is, to try and edit a new entry each day. With a chronic illness and my other commitments, it isn’t always possible, but it’s an inspiring commitment, and a labour of love.

I began to write another blog/book, over at thefocusingmandala.com.au, which is much more complex, phenomenologically. Its subject matter which is also something very dear to my heart However, it came to me, as I began editing the death and dying project, that it was going to take a lot more work than I realised – not only because it meant rewriting, but reordering in the light of a very different genre of publishing. So, I couldn’t give both these projects my full attention. I had to choose between them. Having already committed to this one, I realised I would pull back from the other. (Perhaps I’ll live long enough to complete both.)

If you stay, the posts will each be edited, some will be dropped out altogether, and some will be edited and relocated. Hopefully more coherence will emerge in the whole. If you stay, I hope you enjoy and benefit. I’ll try to activate the comments section, so that you can share your responses, if you wish.

You may want to stay with this ‘death and dying’ course, or you may wish to de-register. There’s an unsubscribe link, at the bottom of each post.

Wishing you all, in your path, much joy, and a deep appreciation of the basic beauty of being.

Metta,
Christopher.

If you’d like to join in some conversation about the topics in this blog, or ask some questions, before it closes in a few weeks time, then you can sign up at the forum especially created for this purpose. Here’s how (and please take the time to read this closely. I’ve written it with beginners in mind, so it should make sense. Read it again in a week or so, because it’s got everything you need in it.):

1. Go to: community.cloudrefuge.org

2. Click ‘Register,’ and you’ll get a page to create an account. Choose an easy short username to your liking, and provide your mailing address. (This will only be accessible by myself, Christopher, on the admin side of things.)

3. In response to your registration, you’ll get the sign-in page. You can’t sign yet, though, until you check your email, and retrieve a unique, secure password.

4. Find your email in your mailing address’ inbox. If it’s not there within a couple of minutes, you better check your junk mail.

The email has the user name which you chose; and there will be a password assigned by the forum software. Please save it.

(It’s better not to delete your email, unless you have saved the password. I won’t have access to your password, at all. Though, if you do lose it, there is the ‘Lost Pass’ button on the community.cloudrefuge.org page.)

5. Now you can use these to sign in. Once in, look around. You’ve got three main areas:

A) From the drop-down menu (where it says “G’day”) at the top-right corner, you can change your password after you’ve signed in, if you like. Open the drop down menu, and choose ‘Edit My Profile.’

B) In the middle of the page you’ll see where you can enter the forum.

C: You probably won’t need the Dashboard.

6. When you’re ready, open the link in the middle of the page, which says: Private: Practicing ‘A Year to Live’

7. You can then create a topic; or if there are some topics already posted, you can open the link and write a response.

Create a new topic for each new sharing or question, etc. Or continue with an already-created topic, if you have more to add to it.

In my ‘Today is a good day to die’ post,  I mean to say

“From the way my development has gone so far, I think that my knowledge that I did harm to others will be uncomfortable until I die. That’s just the way the heart is, when it understands.”

Not: “That’s not the way the heart is, when it understands.”

🙂

My software failed me tonight. I wrote for two hours, and closed my editor while I had a break. Then, I opened it up again, to finish, but the former text was not there – it had been wiped out by an older copy automatically copied from another computer. Search as I could, I couldn’t find my two hours work. It was unexpected, and irrevocable.

What I had written about – and contemplate it again, tomorrow – was how karma works. If we are at present afraid to think of death, lest we invite physical death, then by understanding how karma works, we can slowly, gently, release our grip on our prohibitive thoughts, taking steps toward allowing the contemplation. A new freedom can be born through an understanding of karma.

Dear Friends,

I’ve been told, and I’ve verified, that the comments function isn’t working. I’ve not been able to track down what the problem is, and so we don’t have any way of having a conversation at present. I’ll keep looking into it.

Warmly,
Christopher.