collection an English from Ajarn Will's facebook.

Ajahn William ‘s messages :

Oh-oh, rain coming on 3rd day of 4-day holiday. Good thing we have a cozy room.

Nan and I are eating dinner on the beach under the half moon.

Nice storm tonight with all the trimmings but visibility remains limited.

We had our first 70 degree evening of the year. We love the heat. Can't wait. Good for dem bones.

 You call that heat? When the rain came the temperature dropped down into the high 80s.

lol. it's 85 here right now. In another 60 days we'll have probably 120 days in a row of 100+ temps.

"In my experience, the nones are not rejecting God. They are rejecting doctrinal requirements that they no longer find believable, along with the rigid structures of many organized religions. For that reason, the rise of the nones may well be a new kind of spiritual awakening, one in which doubters are welcome.

"The female teachers who have always been part of the history of transmission of the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha have seldom been recognized, or included, in written history."

Stuck in traffic on a bus in Bangkok. How not exotic!

I used to live not far away on the mountain side of La Canada and I'm happy to see that the native fauna are returning. Will wolves be next?

A wonderful interview with the irrepressible Yoko. "You can see a thousand thoughts flicking through her brain at once." She's one of my models for aging well.

The return of Top 40, the digital mechanics of contemporary song writing, and why I can no longer listen to modern music.

My students, who will graduate after this term, have made this slide show to remember their days at university. I wish them all the best in the future.

The problem is not religion but Western Religion. There is no heresy in Asian religions, probably because of no central authority, even though authoritarianism abounds in the cultures. Christianity and Islam are particularly hard on non-believers.

The institution in Thailand is the Sangha, a rigid hierarchy ruled by the Vinaya, which is important for monks but not the laity who make merit at whatever temple is close at hand. Despite attempts at centralized control, Thai Buddhism is very dispersed, localized. Buddhists seem to me much more tolerant of religious differences than the other groups.

Raining all morning at school, electricity out for an hour, projector broken: one of those days!

the projector in my classrooms for the past two weeks have NOT been operational!

Phra Terry Magness, Surattano Bhikkhu. My teacher in Chiang Mai- passed away at age 84. He had advanced Parkinsons. A lifelong jhana meditator he should have no problem with a good rebirth.

dont start going against the new religion.....jobs is a magnificant wonderful genius creative soul who changed the world and saved us from a horrible life of contemplation and actual human interaction.

By the way, Littlebang.org is officially down and out. The webhoster has some error. Should have a temporary solution up today or Wednesday.

I spent 5 classes teaching how to write an assignment, and still half the students copy something off the internet as their ONLY 'work'

there are 12 separate categories for scoring marks

I credit them for what they do right also. Can't be too harsh, as for most of the students this is the first time EVER that a teacher has read their writing.

Jildi Mohamad Sjah your isp is who sends you the internet bill. If you don't know who that is (because you might be using university or business internet) there's no easy way to find out.Patricia Barber there have been no announcements via the website for 6 months. If you signed up, the automatic email announcing will recommence when I get the group up and running full time again, maybe at the end of the year.

End of next month : We'll be talking about modern revisionist religion - whether Buddhism/religion leads modern spirituality, or follows it.

The Audience in Singapore, 2012

The group really welcomed me, and I have been trying to shed the 3 kilos in weight I added.

Worse yet, more water is coming in from the north. The Yom river has overflowed in many places in Sukhothai province and elsewhere.

a sentence from my student's paper: "So health is very important benefit for our life, even though health is a function different from body, brain and mind in face it they are the same they are great deal together for working, if which one stop action it will has affected to other bodies, they will do suffering to us, they make us unhappy in the object as sick, illness, especially, is mental illne

ss, because mental illness come from our of state unhappy, it make our mind thinking delirious until having danger to our life, and not only having danger by own oneself but the other will almost certainly also be affected, furthermore mental illness is thought of as an illness associated with severe behavioral disturbances such as violence, agitation and being sexually inappropriate."

"Bangkok residents should be worried about rainfall rather than the run-off water," he said. Royol sits on a sub-panel of the Water and Flood Management Commission (WFMC).

Run-off water from upstream zones will raise the level of the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok by just 3-4 centimetres, a prominent water expert working for the government said yesterday.

To Royol Chitdon, director of the Hydro and Agro Infomatics Institute, continued downpours over Bangkok are clearly more of a threat than the run-off. 

The Meteorological Department forecast rain and downpours for many areas of the country, including the Central region, from yesterday through next Tuesday. 

Bangkok Governor MR Sukhumbhand Paribatra said separately that the capital's drainage system was capable of dealing with heavy downpours and river overflow.

Sukhumbhand said the city administration would not object to a plan by WFMC chairman Plodprasob Surassawadee, who is also the science minister, to direct a certain amount of water to the sea via Bangkok. 

"But please don't use Bangkok as a floodway. The available system can't deal with run-off water," he said.

It's coming down hard and steady. I'm guess it's flooding somewhere, not like last year but from too much water out of the sky. with lots of lightning and thunder!

Bangkok Post Learning Manyou: Thanks for asking. SE-ED will be the main distributor but they will put the book in most local stores. It should be a week before the first books are actually sold. They aren't in stores yet.

 He was born into a very rich family, and was extremely intelligent and kindhearted. He even knew the languages of animals 

Dhanapala to answer three questions: “ Where is the person’s glow in the morning ? Where is it at midday ? Where is it in the evening ? ”

Kapila would offer his own head to him

Dhanapala accepted the challenge and promised to find the answers in seven days. Six days passed by and Dhanapala could find on answers, but he was helped by some sympathetic deities, who transformed themselves into eagles and discussed the answers to the riddles within earshot of Dhanapala. By listening to their conversation, Dhanapala discovered the answers to Kapila’s riddles. The answer is that in the morning a person’s glow is in the face, because people always wash their faces in the morning to greet a day. During the day, when the weather is hot, people bathe themselves, splashing water over the chest, so at midday the glow is in the chest. In the evening, coming home from work, the wash their feet before going up into the house. Thus in the evening the glow is in the feet. 

Prisoners began appearing on the streets of Bangkok today and people welcomed them. Their job was to clean the drains to help get the floodwater off the streets more quickly. Everyone owes them a big thank you, I think. Photo by Surapol Promsaka Na Sakolnakorn.

Here's another photo by Surapol today. It shows a very dry Don Mueang airport. Let's hope it stays that way. I wonder what it looks like now after the evening rain.