Shinzen Young
I was a student of Shinzen’s for many years, beginning when he was at the Community Meditation Center (CMC) in LA. I now live in Costa Rica. Meditation is still a big part of my life, but since I am living on Social Security, I don’t have enough money to travel to the US to attend meditation retreats.
When I was working with Shinzen, I was very impressed with his talks, but they have never been placed on the Web, you have to order the cassette tapes. So I have encoded a tape for him, and his Webmaster, to prove that it could be done. This is his talk Overcoming Three Seemingly Impossible Obstacles to Englightenment.
I took the sound from Shinzen’s cassette, digitized it, and then compressed the resulting digits. All you have to do is right-click here, download the file to your computer, listen to it on your computer using Microsoft Media Player—or download it to your portable player, and listen to it wherever you like.
If you want to download it to an iPod, you will have to use iTunes to convert the WMA file to an AAC file (File/Add File to Library).
A word of explanation is in order here. We have learned to trick our ears, just as we learned how to trick our eyes. The act of seeing is very complex—we don’t even understand it—but we know that a series of images will be turned into actions by the eye-brain. This allows anybody with a camcorder to make a video, where real things seem to be going on.
Similarly with hearing; we don’t understand it, but we know how to trick it. The technology is more complex, it’s done with software (called encoders). I don’t know how they work, but I know what encoders are available, and what kinds of portable hardware are available. I have owned six of these, and I know something about their imperfections. Basically, you have to decide who to get in bed with: Apple (AAC format) or Microsoft (WMA format).
I have been in bed with both, and have found, in the audio arena at least, that Microsoft is easier to get along with. The WMA file is 2 Mb, but the AAC file is 27 Mb. If you want to be a purist, you don’t have to get in bed with either Apple or Microsoft and just use MP3. But for Shinzen I wanted to code for speech only (most are for music). And I wanted small file sizes, because they would be downloaded over the Internet.
I am going to strongly suggest to Shinzen and his people that they encode the rest of his tapes, or at least the best of them. This is the Internet age and cassettes are obsolete. We now want instant gratification; we should be able to get it.