Shopping is an obsession and addiction that has become so out of hand that people are willing to risk their health and well-being just to own more.
But where did this trend start-buying things that one does not really need? Each week landfills are packed with more and more rubbish that use to be some one’s joy and pleasure (for a moment). How much time and money do we spend purchasing goods and in a second when we get tired of them or want something new we toss them into the bin. It took hours to choose and buy and one-second to discard.
Is this why we all want to live longer so we can spend out time buying things we don’t need and then throwing them out. Is this not how we also treat our health?
Here is a documentary about the beginning of this mass mind manipulation which is called public relations and how the public where sold on the idea of shopping as a way of spending time and effort to get pleasure and entertainment.
It is an example of how we should wait a little before jumping into what seems the latest trend and to distinguish between want and need. More shopping means more denser weight to our being then we will attract more heavy thoughts, food and people into our lives. Be careful what you wish for!
Yogi Cameron
on May 3rd, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Hi my sweet milk,honey&rose Cameron darling!I adore you.A lovely article.Good always to keep this in mind as it provides for awareness of our being.I’m getting ready for bed now.Will write tomorrow.I love you.Goodnight darling Cameron.Be one with Source.Sparkling crystal good night kisses to you honey Cameron.(((Huggies)))
on May 3rd, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Hi my pink Roses, Yogi Cameron, Love, Ray, Mich and all.
It like you know i’m going to shop today for us sweetie :p The lists are..
Spinach Plus Vitamin, toothpaste,Color care Shampoo, L.O.C. muli-purpose cleanser, Bottle of Brazil Coffee and G&Honey Soap Bar for my client and merit beautiful friend :p
The package are all recyclable :p
All the time i felt like every cent should go to make merit but i do need the quality life to live long and healthy, happily with my shampoo bubbles and you :p :p :p
Mich, what you wrote is exciting at the beginning , glad you gave us acceptance, com - passion and P E A C EEEE….:P
Yesterday, i mediatate reallyy well, i told my brother that money cant buy happiness at centre where the in-breath ends, actually it can buy time :p lol :p
Early morning is beautiful here, birds singing in all surrounding of Mum’s house. There is no where like home? Where your heart are warm, well loved…
The two monks just left, i gave them the yellow star flowers too, they just blooms :p and share merit to all of you.
How many people know that Behind happiness and success, there is the short and easy word called ” Merit”
Yogi Cameron, my weakness of shopping used to be clothes :p but i do not for sometimes :p and donated two suitcases last week :p :p
Monks used only 3 pieces of robe wear :p We really do not need much :p
“Be careful what we wish for” What would be my value when i was 74 years age??? Define forgiveness :p What kind of knowledge we shop from? i shop from my centre and great friends i trust here, Thank You…:p Y Y Y..
Why did the Lord Buddha specially emphasize about Gift of Dhamma by saying “Sabbha Danang Dhamma Danang Jinati” which meant The gift of Dhamma was better than other kinds of donations?
Think about our ancestors’ worldly saying that if we give a person a bucket or a sack of rice, it will last for only a few days; but if we teach him how to grow rice, he will not be lacking of rice in his whole life—not only one day, one month or one year, but through his whole life.
To say easily, knowledge is useful all year long and when we teach somebody something, that knowledge will not be gone.
Human problems are not only about hunger, but there are 3 main problems, i.e.
1. Inability to understand the world; for example, the phenomenon in this world like thunder, lightning, landslide, etc. This is the worldly knowledge and experience.
2. Inability in sensing others’ wishes that causes us to be cheated and persecuted.
3. Inability to understand defilements
Inability to understand the world was not really emphasized by the Lord Buddha, and presently, there are a lot of educational media about it; especially, books. Also the inability in sensing others’ wishes is published in books, for example, the books about cheating or other things.
Anyway, both of them are not as important as being born with ignorance which is the most important thing in human lives. Since the day we are begotten in our mothers’ wombs, defilements are already in our minds.
Therefore, when defilements force us, it can harm us in many ways like giving us greediness, anger and delusion. When we have bad thoughts, we will give bad speech and perform bad actions.
The secret to get rid of these defilements were not found by anybody else in the world but our Lord Buddha. He knew that humans were born with defilements.
The main thing he taught was the knowledge and the way to conquer defilements in our minds which was called “Dhamma Dana” (The Gift of Dhamma). If we could conquer defilements, to understand the world and people was easy.
Because if defilements are all gone, we can see the whole world as clearly as seeing an orange in our palm, i.e. we can see the whole orange clearly and even can split it to see the inside.
The people who study well about the Lord Buddha’s teachings and train themselves real well by the teachings from wise people will soon understand the world and see the world as a toy or an orange in their hand.
The more defilements we get rid of, the more clearly we can see that all ruffians would actually like to be good, but the defilements in their minds are forcing them to act so badly that we cannot catch up on them.
But now we understand our own defilements, so we can also understand others’ and can understand what people think, but this thing is not as important as that we understand the teachings of the Lord Buddha through the gift of Dhamma that brighten our minds and can understand and conquer the defilements in our minds which are our minds’ diseases.
It can be compared to viruses in computers. Understanding about Dhamma, we can conquer defilements. When we understand about our own defilements, we surely can understand other people since they are forced by defilements just like how we are.
If we understand our own defilements, it’s not difficult for us to understand the defilements of others and we can understand other people too, and then everything and every phenomenon in the world will not be difficult for us to see. That’s why the Lord Buddha said “The gift of Dhamma beat all other donations.”
In Thailand, British monk brings Buddhism to Westerners
BY MICHAEL Mathes, Lanka Daily News (AFP), Aug 3, 2005
Bangkok, Thailand — THEY begin the morning at dawn clothed in white, but by mid-day the 25 Western men gathered at Thailand’s largest temple wear the saffron robes of the Buddhist monk.
With their heads shaved and concentration on their faces, they kneel in front of the abbot and other senior monks of Wat Dhammakaya to recite in ancient Pali some of the 227 precepts that will guide them through the next several weeks.
The ceremony in a traditional Thai temple is closely watched here; elderly Thai women in white robes sit on the matted floor with their backs to the temple walls, palms together in prayer, offering support to the novices about to embark on a religious journey to seek, in part, the meaning of mindfulness.
Most are undergoing a temporary, one-month ordination, but for some, the ritualistic donning of the orange robes represents a spiritual renewal that could last a lifetime.
“It is impossible to make progress without faith,” an English voice tells them, translating the abbot’s words moments before their ordination. “The first thing is to be able to overcome our bad habits, the character traits which we may have from the past.”
The voice belongs to 40-year-old Nicholas Thanissaro, one of Thailand’s best known “farang” (Western) monks and the temple’s primary interlocutor for American and European Buddhist novices.
The only visible traces of his English identity are his light skin and the soft fullness of his facial features. With his head shaved and bearing the temperament of a senior religious figure, there is little to identify him as a foreigner.
Yet Phra (monk) Nicholas is among a growing number of Westerners putting on the robes in Thailand, keen on exploring the wisdom of Buddhist doctrine but also on embracing a deeper Eastern spirituality and meditation that they see is lacking back home.
“The general image of religion is getting worse in Western eyes,” Phra Nicholas tells AFP, as he expounds on the hits organized faith has taken in recent years, particularly with the emotional touchstone that the US-led war in Iraq has become. Religion, he argues, frames a clash of civilizations.
“Religion is seen as a source of conflict, a source of wars, a source of people who don’t have reasons for doing things. They follow blind faith.
“But Buddhism is seen as different,” he continues. “It is a religion of wisdom, which encourages people to think, encourages people to believe in cause and effect.”
‘Religion turned me off’
Here in the serene 325-hectare (800-acre) temple complex outside Bangkok which is home to some 1,000 monks and a rapidly expanding and controversial Buddhist movement, Westerners have been encouraged to explore the dharma, re-evaluate priorities, question their role in life.
The ceremony is the third annual ordination of foreign monks at Wat Dhammakaya. In addition to the 25 Westerners, there are another 25 mainland Chinese and Taiwanese participating.
“In Thailand we have the tradition of temporary ordination. So people ordain, and they can draw on their purity of practice when they go back to their everyday life and use what they’ve learned.”
Today’s newest monks are the latest foreign men to be ordained in a kingdom that already has an estimated 300,000 local monks, about one for every 215 Thai citizens.
Like their Thai counterparts, most of the new recruits will join the monkhood for a month, then return to their lives as lawyers, stock analysts or engineers. Others, like Phra Nicholas, opt to stay for good.
“My aim was to ordain for life,” Phra Nicholas says. “But for that you have to be fairly sure in your mind what you are doing.”
Phra Nicholas was born Nicholas Woods and raised in Manchester, England, where he attended church schools as a boy. He read the bible “cover to cover” yet it failed to make an impression.
“The whole subject of religion turned me off, even as I had a whole lot of questions about spiritual issues,” he says. “I had a fairly negative view of organized religion.”
As a university student he began exploring religious and psychological issues more deeply, and he was routinely drawn to an overlapping element of both: meditation.
Woods studied and practiced meditation at a Buddhist society in Manchester in the 1980s, learning of Sri Lankan, Japanese, Vietnamese and Myanmar strains of Buddhism.
The Theravada school most common in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka originated with the monastic community that first followed the Buddha. It tends towards conservative and cautious interpretation of its canon of scripture, which is considered Bhuddism’s oldest surviving texts.
Phra Nicholas says: “What I liked about the Thai approach was that the teachings were very much based in daily life - they were speaking in practice and not just in theory,” he explains. But many of his instructors were Westerners. He was seeking the source itself.
Completely different from my own culture
“I needed to get the feel of something completely different from my own culture.”
Eventually Woods made his way to Thailand in 1988 to learn more. He taught English at a local school, but after visiting Wat Dhammakaya with some friends he experienced an ephiphany.
What he discovered at Wat Dhammakaya was a very active spiritual community that wasn’t afraid to press its founder’s guiding philosophy on outsiders, including foreigners.
Over the space of nine years he prepared for the monkhood by learning Thai and studying the precepts. He changed his last name when he became a monk eight years ago, and has worn the robes ever since.
‘They need this in New York’
Today Phra Nicholas splits his time between Bangkok and Manchester, where he has set up educational courses and teaches meditation. He also arranged to teach a meditation class to Thais and foreigners at a fitness center in downtown Bangkok.
Hope Weiner, a 37-year-old American who works in Bangkok for the Red Cross, emerges from the class elated.
“It reminded me of Russian dolls, with all these little yous inside!” she tells the monk. “Damn, they need this in New York.”
They have it in New York, or at least in the neighbouring state of New Jersey. Phra Nicholas has gradually become involved in the temple’s international movement, and it now has more than two dozen chapters around the world, including in the United States, Britain, Belgium, and Japan.
Buddhism has thrived in the United States, where there are now over one million known Buddhists. It is particularly embraced today among white, upper-class Americans keen on exploring their own internal spirituality in a fast-paced world.
Many remain faithful to their Christian or Jewish faiths but adapt several elements of Buddhism, which is itself less a religion as a doctrine of principles by which to live one’s life. Millions have taken up meditation and yoga.
“But I find it a little bit vain in the West,” Weiner says. “I think they are looking for forgiveness in a way, from themselves.
“People take a pounding - ‘you’re not pretty enough, you’re not good enough at work.’ But when you come to (studies such as meditation and yoga), there is a beautiful sense of forgiveness, that you’re all right the way you are.”
Several farang monks being ordained at Wat Dhammakaya express similar ideas.
“I think some people have got to a point where they are saying, ‘Well, we have a lot of the creature comforts here but something is missing’,” says Aaron Stern, a Jewish American studying for a doctorate in political science but who is ordaining for a month at Wat Dhammakaya.
Like many of his fellow farang monks, Stern says Phra Nicholas has been the link between their Western mindset and the Buddhist principles.
“I think he’s been fantastic. He puts things into terms much more familiar to those of us not raised in Thailand,” Stern adds. “In that sense he’s a great bridge.”
‘By giving to others, it comes back to them’
Wat Dhammakaya, considered by some to be a breakaway Buddhist order, has aroused suspicion ever since its following began to swell some 30 years ago.
The temple’s founder, Luang Pu Wat Paknam, proclaimed he had re-discovered a lost path to enlightenment through intense meditation. The prospect of reaching nirvana proved a huge draw for thousands.
“All the knowledge that Buddha has, even that which is written in books, it comes from a very tiny spot within oneself, right about here,” says one devout Thai follower, pushing an elegant finger into her torso just above her belly button.
Contributing to Dhammakaya’s otherworldly aura, its logo - and indeed the temples themselves - are unnervingly similar in shape to a UFO. At lunchtime, hundreds of monks appear to be eating under a giant flying saucer some 100 metres (yards) in diameter.
Several temples dot the massive complex, including the Dhammakaya Hall, covering 16 hectares (40 acres) and which can hold services for nearly a quarter million people. Temple staff describe it as the largest public building in the world. Often it is nearly full, they say.
Critics say Dhammakaya is a huge money-spinner, with followers strongly encouraged to donate vast sums, including their homes or land, to the temple in order to accrue merit.
Six years ago the temple’s abbot, Dhamachatyo, was accused of amassing a billion-dollar fortune and was charged with embezzlement.
An Englishman who now teaches at Dhammakaya says much of the temple’s work has been misunderstood, with several other temples around the country expressing “jealousy” at its runaway success.
“They do a lot of good but never tell anyone,” he says.
Phra Nicholas admits the earlier scandal’s reverberations are still felt.
“As organizations grow, it’s as if you come across a ceiling where, if you hit it, you’re seen as a threat on a political level. In Thailand and perhaps in other countries, once you exceed that threshold you’re put under a lot of scrutiny.”
With most of the charges against the abbot now dropped, Dhammakaya can go about promoting its brand of Buddhism here and abroad, embracing modern technology to push its message through the Internet, its own satellite television station and multi-media.
“Dhammakaya is on the leading edge of Theravada Buddhism in that we aren’t afraid of using modern technology. It’s necessary if Buddhism is to remain relevant in the modern world.”
He insists the temple is not proselytizing, but merely spreading its message of peace through meditation.
When asked directly if the temple solicits excessive donations from the faithful who may be eager to cast off their material excesses to gain merit, the farang monk turns philosophical.
“There are those who have become wealthy since” becoming Dhammakaya followers, Phra Nicholas says. “What goes around comes around. By giving to others, it comes back to them. This is a lot of the driving force for people to be generous.”
10/8/2005 20:09
Yogi Cameron and all, do you feel what i feel? I’m feeling lucky,turned on in Nirvana Bliss in middle path, can i be happier? :p :p :p :p :p
Watermelon at our centre turns to crystal ball and i’m there with youuuuuuuu :p :p :p
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfxHwPCrcso&feature=PlayList&p=7F95C20D47D70DE4&index=0
on May 4th, 2009 at 7:37 am
Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) in Rheumatic Diseases :p from
http://www.rehabmed.or.th/assoc/as_eng/index.html
http://www.worldmedic.com/
Thai Rehabilitation Medicine Association
Traditional Chinese Medicine
Ayurvedic Medicine
Aromatherapy
Sigmund Freud - mind system diseases curing :p
rheumatology patient
Cameron and Ray, i come to understand more what you are doing and treating your clients :p Sorry take me long time :p i do need to learn more :p
Because i mediate well so i’m happy and come to watch some of Vid ,found new knowledge and write to you :p
I’m fighting not to go to Bangkok and need your support and my disiplines!!!! :p
Watermelon come to me today,amazing :p
So Guava at centre, i put crystal ball in front of crystal Buddha , flashlight under :p
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Rto_drJlNE&feature=PlayList&p=703DC46A837EBC5A&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=8
I wish that i’m single forever and i try not to think anything. Centre is safest place where Mara cant get me. I’m free beautiful mind and body :p
I love you my sweet soya milk, i drink you all and some left on my lip :p ha ha ha :p
on May 4th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Darling Cameron I chilled myself a bit yesterday & had chill symptoms today.I’ve balanced myself with my food today & did yoga too.I do feel much better now & will go to bed soon.I want to be frefreshed and revitalised tomorrow.Good night my dearest darling peaceful and blissfull tiger Cameron.Hugs&kisses
on May 4th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
When you realize it doesn’t satisfy what you truly want to fulfill, shopping will become a bore. Are you trying to win other’s approval? impress someone? fill a void in your life? or buy in to a life story?
I’m trying to alter old clothes because re-designing can be creative and a way to recycle. If I do buy something, it must be eco-friendly so that I don’t contribute the the consumption of “toxic” products.
hi Bon, how did you become so knowledgable in Buddhism?
Thnks Cameron!