Me Documented!

Kabira man nirmal bhaya, jaise Ganga neer
Pachhe laga hari phire, kehat “Kabir, Kabir”

The great saint Kabir has given some profound wisdom through his Dohe. Kabir says that when he purified his mind (from all defilements like greed, anger, lust, hate, etc) as pure as the Holy Ganges (Ganga is considered holy water), the lord (Hari) himself came asking for him.

What Kabir is trying to tell us is that all our prayers towards any God/religion/Guru is all external but the true path is 100 percent internal. The internal journey is about identifying our defilements and eliminating them. Once we are free from these defilements all the lords will automatically be with us all the time. Each one of us have the potential to purify ourselves.

Sabbe sankhara anicca'ti;
yada pannaya passati,
atha nibbindati dukkhe,
esa maggo vissuddhiya.

- Dhammapada - 277.

Impermanent are all compounded things. (conditionings)
When one perceives this with true insight,
one becomes detached from suffering;
this is the path of purification.

I have often found the need to remove space or any special characters from files/dirs present in a bunch of directories and its sub directories. Here is how I do it

First cd to the base folder and then

e='s/[ #,]/-/g'; find . | while read f;do c=`basename "$f"`; b=`echo ${f%$c} | sed "$e"`; rename -v "$e" "$b`basename "$f"`"; done

Whats happening here ? Lets look at it step by step

e='s/[ #,]/-/g';

How should one pray? What is the right kind of prayer? These are very interesting questions.

Well, whom do we pray to is a question I would not delve into. You may call it god or creator or nature or earth or whatever you like. By nature's law, it becomes clearer that each one of us are in the situation we are due to our own deeds. Which means that the creation is perfect. Its flawless! One might ask how can this creation be perfect when there is war, hunger, killing, poverty and a whole list of unfortunate things happening around the world? The answer still lies in Nature's law. The situation anyone is in or gets in is due to his/her past actions. The discomfort we may have caused someone is the same discomfort coming back to us in some other form. Ok, but what relation does this have with prayer ? Yes, its related which we will get to shortly.

I think the majority of people pray for well being. Well being may be material, physical or mental or all the 3. In all these forms of prayer all we are doing is just asking. The sole purpose is to gain something. Its like saying "I will pray to you everyday but you gimme good health". The relationship is purely give-and-take which is no different than doing business. "You gimme money, I will give you this". Notice that the prayer is just business.

I hold and protect 3 treasures:
Benevolence
Frugality
Never trying to be number one

-Lao Tzu

We are in the process of shifting our servers which meant setting up of all needed services on the new server. One of the services was email. Qmail has always been my choice for a mail server. I have never really got to the details of qmail installation as most of the work was handled by a script written by Vamsy which was based on QMR. I am a big fan of Qmail-SPP as it provides a plugin interface to qmail-smtpd. This makes it possible to extend qmail-smtpd's functionality by scripts, programs etc without much knowledge of qmail intricacies.

I used qmail-spp to do a variety of things like greylisting, valid recipient check, RBL checks, user wise outgoing mail restriction etc. Not that they cant be done otherwise, but most required patching qmail. So this time around, vamsy found a fantastic combined patch by John simpson which is a one stop patch for qmail. But after this patch the qmail-spp patch would not work. Though John's patches and scripts do almost everything I need (except for a couple), I would feel comfortable only when I know that qmail-spp is available. Hence, here is my attempt to create a qmail-spp patch which can be applied after the jms patch.

Sila means Morality. The 8 precepts of Sila are

• to abstain from killing any being
• to abstain from stealing
• to abstain from all sexual activity
• to abstain from telling lies
• to abstain from all intoxicants
• to abstain from eating after midday
• to abstain from sensual entertainment and bodily decorations
• to abstain from using high or luxurious beds

Of late, I have been having strong feelings which I thought I should write. This whole cycle of existence is just the law of nature in motion. So what is this law of nature?
What you sow is what you reap
Ok, so how does that become the law of nature? Well, because we are seeing it happen all the time. For eg, if I plant a seed of mango, I can stay assured that the fruits coming from that seed will definitely be a mango. Going a little further, if the fruit is bitter and the seed from such a bitter fruit is sown then the fruits from the fully developed tree will also be bitter. This is not a philosophy but a truth whose manifestations we see all the time. In case one does not believe it, one can confirm it by actually sowing a seed and wait for it to fully grow and develop into a tree and then check the fruits.

So we see that bitter input produces bitter output, sweet input produces sweet output, mangoes will always produce mangoes and not oranges and so on. Applying the same principle to our existence, a good deed will produce a good deed, a bad deed will produce a bad one. Now, I dont want to get into whats good and what bad, as its very subjective and no one has a right to judge good and bad. We can rather look at it as something that will help you and something that will cause you discomfort. So now, if we look at it from the perspective of nature's law, if we help someone, someone else will help us. Similarly, if we cause pain to someone, someone else will cause pain to us.

Gasan instructed his adherents one day: "Those who speak against killing and who desire to spare the lives of all conscious beings are right. It is good to protect even animals and insects. But what about those persons who kill time, what about those who are destroying wealth, and those who destroy political economy? We should not overlook them. Furthermore, what of the one who preaches without enlightenment? He is killing Buddhism."

I have come to realize that Satipatthana is something special and I consider myself very fortunate to have done this course. In terms of practice, it is no different from the regular Vippassana course, but my regular sadhana post Satipatthana seems to have become so much deeper and intense as compared to earlier. Well strictly speaking, it should not matter as we should observe it as just another sensation and continue being equanimous. True, no doubt about that, but this whole change is such a pleasant experience that I cant help but mention it.

Earlier, the 1 hour Adhithana sittings itself was quite a task to accomplish, now with the help of Bunty and Abu, we have been successfully sitting for 2 hour Adhithanas on weekends. If you are getting used to the 1 hour sittings and are able to experience anichya, its time to push your limits by sitting for 2 hours and break loads of karma. Not only will the wisdom of anichya get permanently established into your psyche, your will power too will increase many fold. Also, one will find that quite naturally the equanimity which was earlier restricted to just sadhana periods will start manifesting into your daily life almost unknowingly :).

Atapi Sampejano Satima
Thats the goal!