Rufus Hummingbird

Here are a few Dharma Podcast links. Some for these have excellent production values and some struggle in this area. My personal favorites so far are the Zencast podcasts.

• Zencast - Great production, weekly or twice weekly, music and dharma talks with questions from the students.
• Dharma Radio - Rev. Heng Sure @ Berkeley Buddhist Monastary- Bilingual (Vietnamese & English), sometimes too formal.
• Dharma Field Zen Center - Steve Hagen, very low-fi recordings but very hi-fi dharma.
• Infinite Smile - Michael McAlister - New to me, some recordings have volume issues.
• Integral Naked - Ken Wilber and friends - Not strickly Zen but worth a listen.

Thanks to Ottmar Liebert and his recording of a mediation bell, I made a mashup recording that can be used as a zazen/zen sitting mediation timer. It has 30 seconds of silence so you can get situated and organized, then 3 strikes on the bell. This is followed by 30 minutes of exquisite, pristine, high quality silence. Monkey mind not included. Don’t blame the recording for any noise you hear. At the end of the silence the bell is struck 3 more times. The silence will continue for an additional 5 minutes to allow you to come out of zazen slowly without worrying about being startled by the next song in your playlist. (Brad Sucks - Makin Me Nervous is the next song on my iPod and while Brads music is great, it is pretty jarring compared to zazen.)

Tomer Butte Sunset

Many better people than I have suggested that we should examine our life and question our focus. Here is a quote from one of my heros, Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller.

“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do … How would I be? What would I do?”

Get yourself over to Chris Marquardt’s “tips from the top floor” and enter Chris’s self protrait contest to win a iPod Mini - contest ends Aug 21, 2005. Here’s my entry. Here’s Chris’s. I’m sure you can do better than either of us!
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