Become a practicing Buddhist

I'd like to share with some of you a funny story from my recent trip to Hong Kong. It's related to more than one of my changes here (the other being promoting harmony within my family) , and while my experience of it is fairly heavy on personal backstory, I think some of you here might enjoy it just for what it is.

Some friends have recommended classes at the Shambhala Centre, which apparently offers both religious and secular versions of an intro to Buddhism program. Has anyone else taken them? What's the review?

I realized upon waking yesterday morning that I have been caught up lately in what Buddhism would call the world of Hunger.

What is a Buddhist world? I hesitate to say I have any definitive grasp on it, but my basic understanding is that it is essentially a breakdown of the states of mind in experience. In the Buddhist construct, there are ten:

My brother and I, for one reason or another (probably some combination of our upbringing and the environmentally conscious teachers we had at our elementary school) are both resource conservation hippies, so we both fixate sometimes on questions like, "Why don't people give up their SUVs?" or "Why do people insist on consuming so much energy and resources?" In line with the fields of questioning we each entered (his as an Electrical Engineer, my own as a major in Communication focusing on Information Technology), he sees it as a question of convincing people.

My perspective differs a bit.

On July 8th, 2006, at 4:50pm, I narrowly missed being able to change my life. It's the little things like this that make you wonder about coincidence, and just what it really means when one's life is indiscernible from many delicately-strung coincidences.