three evenings

Ken has been one great gentleman scholar I respect long before the days he attended the men's group I hosted at my home backyard a decade ago. He has a small group himself that I attended a couple times before and enjoyed the scintillating discussions with an eclectic group of spirited Christians and truth seekers at his home.

For last month's sharing he invited a neighbor of his who has been practicing Buddhism for years on the subject of "mindfulness":

There are 4 stages of mindfulness practice: through body (身),  through feeling (受), through mind (心), through mental objects (法). You start by sensing the world with your bio-receptors (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, touch), then with your non-bio (the 6th) sense, then from the pit of your soul, before the final enlightenment comes. 

One common mistake people make is try to reach the final enlightenment stage without going through the first three, making it almost impossible to achieve, or creating an ephemeral, delusional, false experience of it.

"Teacher Sho-Lee" (秀麗老師) is another long time friend of ours from the days when we were attending a Taiwanese church some 20+ years ago, whose nice ocean view house sits just minutes away from ours but we have rarely seen each other in recent years. She called the other day and invited us to a Sunday evening get-together party at her house that we gladly obliged and went.

There were about 5 or 6 other couples, some of them we knew and some we did not, and a pastor from her church at the party as well. Pastor Hu is a tactful conversationalist and threw a question at us at the dinner table: "Say you had all the freedom of the world, and you could do it with abandon, what would be the one thing you'd do now?" that stirred up some interesting musing and sharing from everyone. 

Some said simple things (watching good movies, helping others), some projected grander goals (teaching the young, spreading new ideas), some were actually doing it already (painting), some were still looking for it, or--my favorite answer from a lady--just doing everyday mundane things, but with spiritual sensitivity and aspiration to becoming a finer person, like a gem being chiseled out from the rough in God's hand.

Then Monday evening I went to the monthly meetup of a "THINK, the Critical Thinking and Discussion Forum" group I joined over a year ago. Our presenter this time was a fellow member Cary, a sharp but at times abrasive logical and lexical purist, on the importance of having clearly defined vocabulary and terms before one can have precise thinking and communication. 

"There may be scale of vagueness in phrases we commonly use," he said... for example, the term "truth seeker." On that I interjected (like we all did from time to time during his presentation): "That sounds like a pretty clear term to me: as long as one is seeking the truth one believes is out there, he/she is a truth seeker." 

Bruce, an atheist who is the organizer of a "Backyard Skeptics" group himself, cautioned that my statement might include people (such as flat-earth believers) who are pursuing false truths, while Phil, a Catholic turned atheist who once did a "believence" presentation for the group and hosted a podcast for a believer-nonbeliever debate series, concurred with me. In response to Bruce's comment, I added that the "truth" in my "truth seeker" definition refers to the one ultimate truth, rather than the many "suit-my-need" "alternative" truths that seem to be floating around abundantly in this post-truth era we live in.

Three consecutive evening events, all happening on a weekend and a Monday when we were supposed to be on a trip to New York City for my wife's best friend Jing-Ping (靜平)'s daughter's wedding that we had to cancel at last minute due to an unexpected eye surgery of my wife.

Congratulations, beautiful Jing-Ping and daughter!!