at MorBCN

Mark: Hello there Brad. How are you?
Brad: Just a moment there.
Mark: What are you eating there?
Brad: I am eating this delicious apple.
Mark: Wow!
Brad: Sorry about this.
Mark: That is all right.
Brad: It is a very special apple. It is a …Mosquito Bay apple… Mosquito City apple.
Mark: Right. Ok. How are you today?
Brad: I feel great. How about yourself?
Mark: I feel ok. I had a strange dream last night. I dreamed that Frank… that my boss Frank was my friend Peter…
Brad: That is right. I know who you are talking about.
Mark: And Peter was Frank and Peter’s sister, Stephanie was Peter..was Frank. It was kind of strange.
Brad: What do you mean? What are you talking about? A dream or reality?
Mark: Yeah I had a dream where everybody was everybody else.
Brad: Well that happens to me all the time. I have so many absolutely strange dreams. But the thing is with the strange dreams…how do you feel? How does it make you feel?
Mark: After your dream?
Brad: Yeah. After your dream.
Mark: Right ok.
Brad: How does it make you feel?
Mark: That is the important thing?
Brad: Well for me it is.
Mark: Right Ok.
Brad: And for you if you stay in Mosquito Bay, it will become.
Mark: Calm?
Brad: Become.
Mark: It’ll become?
Brad: It’ll become. Yeah.
Mark: Become? Become calm? Become calm.
Brad: Oh definitely. Calm.
Mark: I want to be calm.
Brad: You will be calm.
Mark: Oh my god! I have got to get to work. It is Monday morning. See you later, Brad.
Brad: Have a nice day.
Mark: You too mate.
Brad: (?)

at MorBCN

Mark: Ok. Well. I have been here for a couple of weeks now. In Mosquito City. And I have got a job and I have made friends with the richest man in town: Peter Bestluck, and I have met his sister and I am making a lot of friends and I am having a great time. This is a really great place. But something is kind of weird…. like…. I just went to work today and I was talking to my boss, Frank, about finding a place to live down in Brooklyn and he started to talk to me and suddenly he shimmered and changed shape and he turned into Peter and he turned back into Frank and he turned into Peter again. Is it you Peter, or is it Frank? What is going on here? Are you Frank or Peter?
Frank: Nh…
Mark: Are you ok? Are you ok?
Frank: Well ahm..
Mark: Are you ok?

(the sound of slapping)

Mark: I am just slapping him here. I am trying to get him to like…wake up.…Are you ok?

(the sound of slapping)

Frank: Well. ham …ah well ahm… ah… Hey Mark! How are you doing?
Mark: I am doing…
Frank: What is the problem?
Mark: No problem. No problem.
Frank: Take a seat. You know? Relax. I will tell you one thing because I am aware of what may be happening. I am aware you are having strange…there is a strange contradiction, isn’t there?
Mark: Something is funny here. Peter? Is it Peter or Frank?
Frank: Well. This is a very strange place. Quite a few, what I would say are magical things, happen here.
Mark: You mean… some people are other people?
Frank: No, it may seem like that but it is not quite…
Mark: Who am I talking to? Are you Peter or Frank?
Stephanie: No, I am Stephanie.
Mark: Stephanie! Stephanie! it is you! Stephanie!
Stephanie: You have just woken up from a very strange dream. If you get out of bed and walk around you might feel better.
Mark: Ok. It is ME! I am the one who is dreaming. That is what it is. I am the one who is dreaming.
Stephanie: If you just take a walk out and see the beautiful sea…
Mark: Now. Ok. Stephanie. Oh Stephanie!

(the sound of an alarm)

Mark: It is you! It is all a dream but I wish it was real. Oh it is Monday morning. I have to go to work!

at denis collette

Mark: Ok so I am sitting in the back of my friend Peter’s limousine and we are driving back from his castle; Mt Sphinx Castle. We are just driving through the streets of the old heritage village; Mt Sphinx Heritage Village. Peter is giving me a lift home. It was really nice to meet your sister today, Peter.
Peter: I have just been on the phone to Stephanie and she thinks you are a very very special guy.
Mark: Really?
Peter: Mm. That’s right.
Mark: I thought she was really nice too.
Peter: Oh fantastic! I am so glad to hear it. I thought there was some sort of chemistry when I watched you talking.
Mark: Yeah. She is a very very nice person. Very calm and gentle. Interesting too.
Peter: She is. She is a great person.
Mark: Everybody is nice here. This is such a great place. I am just so happy to be alive.
Peter: mm.
Mark: I do have a bit of a problem though.
Peter: What is that?
Mark: Well not really a problem but you know how when I came here I got some free accommodation in the hotel? And I have to leave the hotel and get my own place so I need a place to live so I have to think about finding a room or an apartment or a house or somewhere. I have got a pretty good job so I might rent a house. What is Brooklyn like? Is that a nice place to live?
Peter: Brooklyn is pretty good. Yeah.
Mark: Some people live in Mt Sphinx. Some people live in Brooklyn.
Peter: Well look! I tell you what. You see that jungle over there?
Mark: Yeah.
Peter: There is a banana leaf hut. You can rent that.
Mark: I…I…
Peter: I am only joking. Look. I have got another castle very close to mine. You can just use it. It’s empty anyway. I mean there’s servants and there is a swimming pool.
Mark: Oh Peter that is very kind of you but really I have got to get my own place I mean you are very generous.
Peter: Do you like a sauna in the mornings?
Mark: Yes, I do.
Peter: And you like breakfast cooked exactly the way you want it?
Mark: Yes, I do.
Peter: Ok and do you like clean sheets on your bed?
Mark: Yes. Yes I do?
Peter: And do you like the most exquisite garden to walk in in the mornings?
Mark: I do like exquisite gardens.
Peter: And do you like a motor launch to use at any time you want?
Mark: A hydrogen powered motor launch?! A totally clean…?
Peter: Of course. Well think about it anyway. You know? Where are you gonna move now, if you are not gonna…?
Mark: You are too kind. This is too much. I am embarrassed Peter. You have been so kind to me. Everybody has been so good to me since I got here. I…This is just too much. You are so kind. Really. I am overwhelmed.

(crying)

Peter: Come on.
Mark: It is so beautiful.
Peter: Mark, you are such a great guy. You are having a little…it is like almost therapy, isn’t it? You know? Mosquito Bay is like therapy, isn’t it? Just take a seat on the sofa and relax and cry with happiness.
Mark: Everybody has been so kind to me since I came here.
Peter: Cry with happiness! Because you are now…
Mark: Life is so good. Life is so good!

(hysterical laughing)

at MFotinakis

First Man: see…and put it on containers of water; the words “love” and “gratitude”. And “gratitude” seemed to have more effect on the water than the word “love” but they both had a very strong effect on the water and they realised that the simpler the message, the better because when they tried to put more, you know, like longer messages or when they tried to speak in longer sentences to the water saying you know like “I really have a great deal of respect for you”; you know “without you we wouldn’t have”…that didn’t have as much effect as …
Second Man: One word.
First Man: …as just saying “love”, “respect”, “gratitude” and he said…
Second Man: BEAUTY!
First Man: …and he said something that …he said we were constantly struck by things that happened, when we did these experiments, for example and I think I am remembering this correctly when he said that saying the word “gratitude” twice as many times as the word “love” seemed to be the perfect combination almost like H2O.
Second Man: Right.
First Man: And this was a very interesting idea again as well.
Second Man: Love gratitude gratitude. Love gratitude gratitude.
First Man: Before we leave off on Emoto, there were two other things that really struck me in the text. One was in the introduction. It was where he was talking about his despair about society. And I suppose he was meaning mostly Japanese society but more generally modern society and he was saying that …

(the sound of coughing)

….that after he came to understand water better…

(the sound of a coin dropping)

… he became much positive about the future of the world because he realised that all of us everywhere in the world for all of our problems are, you know, for the most part, a bit more for kids and a bit less for old people, about seventy – seventy five per cent water…

(coughing again)

…and this filled him with hope.

Second Man: Yeah.
First Man: … and I thought this was an astonishingly beautiful simple …
Second Man: Mm.
First Man: …naive, if you like, but wonderfully hopeful idea, and a wonderfully expressed simplicity about life, and the other thing was when he was just beginning and he didn’t really know which way to go with this research…

(coughing)

… he was encouraged…he … I forget how he came to know this woman but there was a woman who has an Anglo name … I don’t know if she was American or English or whatever, that was living and working in Switzerland and had been for many many years and she was around retirement age or perhaps had already retired as a university professor; she devoted her life with her team to finding better ways to deliver larger amounts of water…

(coughing)

… to big populations of people in a healthy form and somehow somewhere along the line during his kind of initial attempts to study water, he had come across her… Maybe he had been to one of her conferences or something … but anyway he was in correspondence with her and and she was trying to encourage him in any way she could. When she retired from university she continued her work with a private foundation and again her main function was…focus was trying to deliver good quality water to very large numbers of people in various parts of the world. Right?
Second Man: Mm.
First Man: This was her dream. And a wonderful idea and it was good to hear that there was somebody in the world thinking about that …
Second Guy: Mm.
First Guy: … but again it is not what is normally the idea. You know? When people talk about irrigation schemes or you know providing water, they just think of water as a basic commodity. They don’t think about the quality of that water. Right?
Second Guy: Mm.
First Guy: But she said something to him that really struck me. She said, it will be a great journey and whatever you discover about water, it will be a great journey for you, and the one thing that I always try to keep in mind is that we don’t have to treat water. Everybody always talks about, you know, “water treatment” and “treatment plants” and , you know, what do we do to water… We don’t have to do anything to water. We just have to respect it. This really struck me. You know?
Second Guy: Mm.
First Guy: And even more so as he developed his research…was…you know… It would be very simple to take care of water in the world.
Second Man: Mm.
First Man: We could go out there and sit next to that pool and if there were enough of us and maybe even just two of us, we could improve the quality of that water just by thinking good thoughts for that water.
Second Man: Wow!
First Man: I am convinced of that.
Second Man: Wow!
First Man: On a scale like…you know….It was few years ago, I think when we were both still living in Kyoto, where a whole bunch of Japanese NGOs got together and they circled Biwako and they prayed for its health.
Second Man: Mm.
First Man: And I didn’t know anything about Emoto at the time but I am absolutely sure it was based on his research that those people came up with the idea for doing that.
Child: Where’s my book?
Second Man: Excuse me. Where’s your what?
Child: Where’s my book?
Second Man: Your book? Do you want to draw a picture?
Child: Yes.
Second Man: … Yeah. Go on.
First Man: So rather than putting chemicals in the water to clean it, all that is really required is…
Second Man: … to speak to it.
First Man: Good will.
Second Man: Yeah. Good will. Love it.
First Man: In the same way that the Ganges by all scientific standards is a dead river without oxygen and yet it has freshwater dolphins.
Second Man: Yep.
First Man: …living in it.

at Tambako

Mark: So John..
John: Yeah.
Mark: You are working on a dissertation for a PhD. That is for an American university?
John: Yeah, that is right. It is a university in San Francisco, California
Mark: And what is the area?
John: I am studying..It is philosophy but with an emphasis on Buddhist studies, you know, and Buddhist philosophy.
Mark: In any particular country?
John: Well, yeah, I am mainly interested in Thailand even though I live in Japan, you know. I like Thailand’s version of Buddhism better.
Mark: Is that theravada?
John: Yeah. That is right.
Mark: Ok. So are you studying any particular temple or any particular aspect of Buddhism?
John: Yeah. I am doing research on a couple of temples there in Thailand. One is called Suen Mok, which is pretty famous. It is got a very good program for ten day meditation retreats and they are geared for teaching foreigners meditation; meditation techniques.
Mark: What is the other temple?
John: The other one is north of Bangkok about three hours bus ride and it is called Tam Krabok.
Mark: Uh-huh.
John: And it is… Well it does different things but one thing it does is it helps addicts recover, you know. It has probably cured about one hundred thousand addicts; mostly heroin or opium addicts, you know, and so I am really interested in how meditation can replace an addiction. You know what I mean?
Mark: Wow! So they are like teaching people to meditate and overcome the problems that caused them to become addicted to drugs?
John: Right. Exactly.
Mark: Wow! Isn’t that a wonderful thing. A hundred thousand.
John: Yeah.
Mark: Wow! That is really amazing. You have been to the temple?
John: Yeah and interviewed several of the head monks and some of the other people there and it is just a really really, to me, an effective way of applying Buddhism, you know?
Mark: Right.
John: To eliminate our addictions and work toward something more significant
Mark: Right excellent. That is really…That is great. Like. To use something like that to…That is really good.
John: A real practical form of Buddhism. As I understand it to try to help people live better lives and things like that and this seems to be a real, you know, obvious way to do it.
Mark: Drug addiction is a big problem in a lot of different countries.
John: Yeah.
Mark: And if they are finding something they can do about, it that is really great.
John: Yeah I agree totally there. And it was a big problem in Thailand. You know until 1959 opium was legal in Thailand.
Mark: Really?
John: And suddenly they made it illegal and all these people who would take it as a normal part of their life suddenly were illegal addicts.
Mark: Wow!
John: And so this place has really done something that I think is really important.
suddenly they made it illegal
Mark: What is the name of the temple again?
John: Tam Krabok. It means cave of the “prabok”.  It is kind of like “telling it like it is” or something like that. Originally it was just a group of monks and they lived in caves
Mark: Wow!
John: And then they started making a big temple out of it.
Mark: The caves of truth.
John: Yeah. That would be a good way to translate it. (laughs)

My position is called “motor man”.

My job is called “motorman”.

Notes

Sometimes “position” means “job”.

Examples

Do you have any positions vacant?

Do you have any jobs available?

I am in charge of the electrical systems

I look after the electrical systems.

I take care of the electrical systems.

I am responsible for the electrical systems.

(These expressions are parallel in this situation but not all situations)

Other meanings of “charge” 

1. The bull charged and we had to jump the fence to escape.

2. When was the charge of the light brigade? (talking about history)

3. How much did he charge you? (at the shop)

4. What are the charges and fees? (at the bank)

at irp

(Swami talks for the first 25 seconds of recording. Then transcript begins.)
Mark: So the creation is sustained by prayer?
Swami: It is sustained by divine will. It is sustained by divine will and the divine order; the cosmic order. The cosmic order…In the beginning five basic things were created…
Mark: The relation with us? We are praying…?
Swami: Because we are in error.
Mark: Mm.
Swami: Ignorance means. It is not a…it is not a.. You don’t…If you say someone is ignorant, you are not accusing him. You are not blaming him. You are not scolding him. You are saying that he does not … that you do not know your essence. “Hey you ignorant fool!” If a monk; if a saint out of compassion says to a normal person “Hey you ignorant fools. Foolish children.” They should not get angry. “Hey there I am a big man. I am a big officer. I am so wealthy. This fool; he looks like a fool and he calls me a fool; he should be punished.” The way our foolish kings used to punish saints and they used to bear the consequences later. Ignorance means not knowing your true nature;
Mark: Mm.
Swami: Not knowing the true nature of your self. Who are you in essence? You are alive. You say this is your body. You are not the body. This body is changing all the time. It was in the mother’s womb for nine months and then the boy is born and the body is grown and it grows up. It becomes old. So where is the essence?
Mark: Mm.
Swami: You are not the body. The body is not the essence. You are the speck of consciousness, the speck of the infinite light that shines in the heart.
Mark: Mm.
Swami: You are that piece. You are that fragrance of the infinite light. That is God! So you are but that. But then you think that you are…you are different from the other boy. An Australian is different from an American?
Mark: No, he is not. (laughs)
Swami: He is not?
Mark: No, he is not.
Swami: No he is not! (laughs) The essence is one. The essence is one. The essence is one and to realize that; to realize your true nature as the essence of all, you have to pray. You have to practise. You have to do penance. You have to seek the Vedic gods who are given by the grace of the infinite; by the grace of the infinite Vedas as; it is called; you can say they are like schemes. They are like schemes. The government forms so many schemes for the welfare of so many sections of society.
Mark: Mm.
Swami: This scheme is for the handicapped. This scheme is for the blind. This scheme is for the downtrodden. This scheme is for the tribal people.
Mark: Mm.
Swami: This scheme is for orphaned children. So many schemes are laid. All for the good of them. The government which looks to the welfare of all; it forms specific schemes that they may live happily;
Mark: Mm.
Swami: That their livelihood will be taken care of. So God too; the formless infinite has formed several schemes.
Mark: Mm.
Swami: Ok you worship this god. Your nature will suit this Lord Shiva. Your personal nature; you are too pure; your nature will suit this Lord Vishnu.
Mark: Mm.
Swami: Ok you form this divine mother. You are attuned. You like your mother very much. So nature is about mother; the divine mother. But you you want to see a God every day in the form. So that Lord Surya; the sun god is there. Without him there is no life. He too is my own form. Lord Surya the Sun God is there. You worship him and you will attain the higher truth, the highest truth. So god has formulated all these schemes. So these are the schemes of the infinite to get back to your true nature as the infinite. So that is why you have to pray. You have to meditate on these forms. If those forms are pleased the same inner essence that is there within your heart; that too will get pleased.
Mark: Mm.
Swami: The method of pleasing the inner one is to please the outer ones.
Mark: Mm.
Swami: The formed ones.
Mark: Yesterday I came here and I got lost.
Swami: Ah.
Mark: And…

Use this post to learn English and Afrikaans at the same time.

I speak Afrikaans.

I come from South Africa.

My mother comes from Holland.

I live in Australia.

I work in Singapore.

South Africa was a Dutch colony.

South Africa was an English colony.

I am hungry.

I want to eat.

Do you have any food?

Thank you.

Bread.

Cheese.

Ham.

Chicken.

Milk.

Butter.

Thank you very much.

Good night.

at egg

London Bloke: Personally to myself, Class A drugs are drugs that…Ok I will put it this way…
Australian Bloke: Speed. Co…?
London Bloke: I will put it this way. To me non-Class A drugs are drugs that can be cultivated without any …modern farming techniques … or chemical interference… for example… non-Class A drugs: marijuana, even opium. Yeah? Class A drugs: heroin, cocaine, crack, ice, MDMA: ecstasy, ketamine. That to me is class A drugs.
Australian Bloke: What have they all got in common?
London Bloke: They all eat Mr Jack(?)