NinjaRadio

That’s the question of this blog Stuff White People Like, also reviewed at the L.A.Times. I think the blog is very funny. The writer Christian Lander is Canadian. P.S. Do I smell a book deal?

If you want to go for extra points - white people really love FAIR TRADE coffee, because paying the extra $2 means they are making a difference.

It seems to me that last year I had very little problem ever finding time to get shows together, edit and post. But this year it’s been a challenge. I am just very busy. Yeah, I did get a new and more demanding day job and I have other extra-curricular activities that take up a lot of my time. And I cannot stand it when Special K stands alone on a weekend while yet again I don my headphones and laptop, which I seem perpetually connected to like a cigarette girl or hot dog jockey at half-time. She gets that sad lonely look that for some strange reason transforms into rage after a snowstorm. Why? Just because I am not there to help dig the house out from under? Phhht! She can handle it on her own. Can’t she?

Well show number 131 is finally posted all the same despite the harsh winter:

OsakaBeats

I found an interesting site while looking for temple links for the podcast. Enlightening and entertaining. http://www.do-not-zzz.com/. It’s ZEN for the web. Web Zen.

So far I have really enjoyed podcamp. I cannot actually believe that it is already noon. Only a few more hours to go. I have experimented with blogs using blogger and some local desktop tools which I can talk about at another time, but I have not been so much into the visual word since I began podcasting in August 2005. It’s mostly a time issue. I will use this site as vehicle to keep you informed on where the podcast and my new media skills are going. This weekend I have talked to a great many people who are very friendly and want to share information about what they want to get out of new media. The flavour is much different from last year where there were web media organizations flogging their products or marketing managers wondering how to make money from it. This made a lot of the more geeky participants nervous and anxious I think. This year it is more about what does it mean to each of us and how can we use for our own purposes and goals regardless of whether that goal is money or community.

I am of course using the term new media rather loosely to mean that mythical beast WEB 2.0. An expression I completely loathe. What does new media really mean? I think it means use of technology to solve old problems. Like making money. Like communicating important information in terms of news and health. Like creating community. It is often claimed that technology isolates and alienates people. There is the common picture of a seventeen year old boy sitting in a dark corner of his room with nothing but a keyboard and the glow of the screen to keep him company. But really that is not what is going on at all. He is any age, all genders, all ethnicities using the internet to find and influence his community and is interacting in a new way with that community. He is on facebook, msn messenger, myspace, hi5, twitter and e-mail.

People do want to touch.

Why would I even mention Carlos Castaneda? That obscure writer with a huge cult following who believe that his semi-fictious stories about Don Juan and the indigenous peoples of Mexico hold the keys to power and enlightenment. Ninja is a skeptic. She doesn’t believe in any of that rot - but they are best books being peddled as non-fiction that I have ever read.

Years ago, I caught an edition of “Imprint” on our local public television station TVO. The host, Daniel Richler, was leading a panel discussion about native spirituality and its literature. At one point during the discussion Richler held up a copy of Carlos Castaneda’s first book The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. He said with great confidence and certainty that Castaneda’s works about the Yaqui Indians of Mexico represented the greatest hoax since the Piltdown Man. With that, he seemed to dismiss the book out of hand. I had already, if truth be known, dismissed Castaneda as a new age phony long ago so I too moved right along with Richler to the next item of discussion. I was surprised then when one of the panel members, Medicine Grizzly Bear Adams, brought the discussion back to Castaneda. He said that Castaneda must have really been trained under a traditional man of knowledge, (as Castaneda referred to don Juan). Otherwise,Adams insisted, he must be “one of the greatest philosophers or genius’ of your time…” to be able to synthesize the information he presents in his books from his sources, whatever they may be.

That made me revisit the body of work Castaneda wrote, and since then I have read all the books about his so called tutelage under the nagual, Don Juan. They are most entertaining and thought provoking and many quotes from the book have come down to us into the popular culture. The most well-known of these is has come down as something in the form of following a path with heart.

“…a warrior must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if he feels that he should not follow it, he must not stay with it under any conditions. His decision to keep on that path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. He must look at every path closely and deliberately. There is a question that a warrior has to ask: ‘Does this path have a heart?’”

There are many more gems like this in the books. He was a spiritual genius. Whether or not he made it up, he weaved the work into a self-contained reality in its own right.

If I were Carlos Castaneda I would be don Juan’s successor. I would be the Nagual. I would be with my party of warriors. I would spend my time not-doing. I would practice the magical passes as he taught them to me. I would recapitulate and then I would recapitulate again. I would spend my days and nights in the second attention. I would dream and stalk. I would be making car engines stop dead at my will. I would be weeping with joy every second. I would be awe-struck. I would be a man with no personal history. I would be inaccessible and impeccable. I would be silent.