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In addition to keeping a meditation / spiritual practice journal, use a blog to establish good social credit history

 

I've found that most of my favorite Dhamma teachers all required their students to keep a daily journal.

In addition to keeping a meditation / spiritual practice journal...

This is something I recommend you guys all start doing. Start your own blogs and save links to articles and excerpts that are useful and that you (or your friends and colleagues)  are likely to look up in the future. Great reasons for doing this:

1. You ever get tired of repeating yourself with the same answers in discussion forums? Write your answer just once, and periodically polish and update with revisions as needed. Then it doesn't matter which forum software platforms come and go into existence, you have a record of your valuable contributions for life that you can reuse as needed. Never waste time again reinventing the wheel or trying to remember your detailed answers from years before. Use the free time you save for more productive purposes.  Simply post a link to your blog, or cut and paste from your blog and you never have to repeat the same story or detailed answer to the same FAQ types of questions again.

2. Title your blog posts with many descriptive keywords that you would be likely to use when you want to search for an old blog post of yours.

3. Building up an excellent social credit history: Just as having a good financial credit history makes it easy for you to navigate worldly life, having a good social credit history from your public forum activities will be similarly useful and advantageous. When you have years and decades of public record detailing exactly what you said, then it's easy for people to make informed opinions about your credibility, character, motivations, etc.

4. I recommend making your main account semi-anonymous, instead of using your real name. This is so criminals can't easily steal your digital  identity or otherwise exploit your online activity for their financial gain or criminal motives.

5. I haven't found a need personally for a completely anonymous account, but there is one legitimate reason for people to have one or more anonymous accounts. A fully anonymous account allows you to:
a) participate in forums and give intimate valuable personal (but anonymous) details about your meditation practice that you otherwise wouldn't want to share under your real name, so your teacher or friends can give more useful advice.
b) expose crimes committed in a cult or religious sect for example that would benefit society by preventing other innocents from being harmed by the same crimes.

Everyone with gmail has free blogger accounts. It takes just minutes to set up, and you can set up multiple blogs with different topics, like what I've done on mine for example:

First, note that I don't work for google or blogger, I'm just a happy customer who likes their free product, compared to wordpress which is the most popular blog platform. reasons:

1. blogger has no annoying ads like the free version of wordpress, which floods your blog with various related and unrelated products to sell. Blogger just has a tiny footer that says "powered by blogger".

2. You can cut and paste html (windows control-c and control-v) and drop that richly formatted html directly  into into a blog post with formatting preserved. For example, if I quote an sutta passage with pali + english in a table lined up side by side, it keeps the table intact. And if you use google's chrome browser, it even preserves some or most of the css stylesheet settings like background color, font type, etc. Example: say I see a great sutta passage from lucid24.org I want to share:

The raft ☸🚣 simile comes from SN 35.238

SN 35.238 poisonous viper simile

Kullanti kho, bhikkhave,
“‘(The) raft ***, *********’:
ariyass-etaṃ aṭṭh-aṅgikassa maggassa adhi-vacanaṃ,
[represents] (The) Noble Eight-fold Path, (as a) figure-of-speech.
seyyathidaṃ— ...
(it is) as-follows - ...
Tassa hatthehi ca pādehi ca vāyāmoti kho, bhikkhave,
“‘(with)-hands and feet **, Making-effort ***, ********* ’:
vīriy-ārambhass-etaṃ adhi-vacanaṃ.
[represents] vigor & vitality's-arousal, (as a) figure-of-speech.

Color, side by side, font background color is preserved.


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