December – 2002 – Chris Corrigan

Entropy Gradient Reversals – Faster Horses!

Sigh

Consulting. Man, what a racket. Why didn’t I figure this out years ago? But I almost feel unclean for doing it. I almost feel guilty. Not for taking their money. That’s just manifest destiny. No, sometimes I feel terrible because I think maybe I really am helping these clueless fuckers to rape the rest of us. Giving them some empty-headed motivational excuse to weld all that avarice into an effective weapon that will make us all salivate for spiffier software or snappier net connections or the latest breakfast cereal breakthrough.

But what have I done, really? Tell them that people are confused and lonely, stranded in their lives, burned out and breaking under the strain of an insane commercial culture run utterly amok? This is news?
It’s what I don’t tell them that let’s me sleep at night. Which is that even terminal confusion is a thousand times better than spiritual enslavement, and that I am beginning to see people — some people anyway — waking up from the long bad Night of the Undead Advertisers. No matter how slick the shtick, they wouldn’t buy any of this crap if their lives depended on it, which of course they do not.

The Seven Points of Mind Training

This website contains a database of commentaries on the Seven Points of Mind Training. The core practice involves taking on others’ sorrow and pain and sending them your joy; not as a masochistic practice but with the aim of getting away from the self-centeredness and self-seeking that cause us so much pain. These practices were brought to Tibet in the eleventh century by the Indian Buddhist teacher Atisha.

The Seven Points consist of 57 proverbs divided by subject into seven sections. This site contains commentaries by five teachers. Access commentaries by clicking on the name of one of the sections, then clicking on the initial of the teacher to the left of the proverb. You can compare the commentary of another teacher on the same proverb by clicking on his or her initial at the top of the commentary.