Kevin's Weblog

I got to spend 6 hours this weekend with two of my favorite people: Noah and Tiffany. I first met Tiffany almost 4 years ago, and was immediately struck by what a joyful person she is, and how it’s nearly impossible not to be happy when you’re around her. Noah has an amazing intensity, which I originally found a little intimidating, but grew to view as an inspiration. In addtional to the physical aspects of yoga, I’ve found them both to be powerful philosophical teachers.

Noah started the workshop with a story from the Mahabharata. For those without the patience for 100,000 lines of Sanskrit, he jumped to the very end of the epic. After the war has ended, it tells of one of the heros ascending to heaven. As he approaches the gates of heaven, he hears voices from the other side. He hears the voices of his family and friends, and of great heros. But, as he continues to listen, he also hears the voices of the great villians of the war, the torturors and genocidal. And there the story ends, without further explanation.

In the tantric philosophy, the answer to the question of why the evildoers are also in heaven is simply, “where else would they go?”. That is, it holds that all souls come from the same place and end up in the same place, regardless of their choices in this world. However, this doesn’t mean that there is no reason to choose to do good in life. On the contrary, our choices can allow us to experience the divine now; or not. What the evil lose is the experiences available to us here in our physical existence.

Regardless of your precise philosophy or religion, I think there’s a powerful lesson here. Every day we make choices, and we are free to choose averageness, mediocrity, or even degradation. Or we can make choices that help us to experience grace, the divine, awesomeness; whatever term you wish to apply.

The big synchronicity of the day came from what I was listening to on the way to the studio. There was a rememberance of John Lennon on the radio, and the last thing I heard before Noah telling this story and sharing this philosophy was a little song, that goes like this:

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No Hell below us
Above us only sky.

Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too

Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say I am a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one.

In previous versions of Firefox, you could Ctrl-Tab to move from one browser tab to another. However, in 1.5 that now seems to do something different. I haven’t figured out exactly what, but it seems pretty similar to what plain old Tab used to do. I’d really like a keyboard shortcut to move between tabs. Anyone know what it is now?

(Out of curiousity, I decided to try a couple other Tab combinations to see if I could figure this out. Unfortunately, the first one I attempted, Shift-Ctrl-Tab, crashed Firefox, taking with it my 8 or so open tabs. Sigh...)