Buddhism: 10% Inspiration, 90% Meditation…
Why meditation? Why not? Can nothingness heal? I say ‘nothingness’, though Buddhists generally prefer the term ’emptiness’, and I won’t quibble over syntax nor semantics, as long as no one says the word ‘nihilism’, not to be confused with ‘Nealism’ for all you rock-and-shouters, and holy rollers. But after long riffing on Sartre’s ‘nothingness’, I now prefer the term ’emptiness’, also, as it implies a form, a vessel, though equally accessible with or without content, an important distinction…
Is Meditation a paradigm for life? At first the proposition seems rather preposterous, but that is exactly what many Buddhists, plus Eckhart Tolle and others seem to be suggesting, if they are to be believed, many of them blithely advising that we cease our critical thinking altogether and ‘live in the moment’. Of course without any analytical thinking there would be no Science, no Technology, few arts and even less letters, so I roundly reject the suggestion as misguided fantasy, and merciless fancy… (More …)
“Man is the measure of all things”…and there began our downfall, this from the Greek Sophist Protagoras and his very sophisticated argument that we human beings are the only thing that matters in this world, our silly views and opinions superior to all others, of course, by virtue of our virtue, and in spite of our spite, the pathological needs of humanity, a sort of radical solipsistic relativism…
hardie karges, 
Back in Thailand the king is dead, so all other plans are automatically on hold. The temples are now full of temporary monks, so my own meager plans are secondary. My temple priest once told me it’s up to my own heart, and so it is, I must say, even if I have to pay to play. But if I can meditate in a moving plane and meditate on a moving bus, then I must be moving toward something real and good, is it not? I think it must be: I meditate, therefore I am…
I think it’s a bum rap, the false narrative about smart-phones and other tech, how we never talk to our neighbors any more—we never did! Unless they’re nice. And we still do, if there’s something to discuss. Should we regress to the day when stay-at-home wives have nothing better to do than chew the fat with the housewives’ club all day every day? Yes, I know it’s a real job, but still…
The conundrum of existence is that consciousness inhabits flesh, some how some way, or that flesh possesses consciousness, if viewed from the opposite perspective, inside out upside down, impossible to say which came first, or whether they came simultaneously like all the best sex, though the material paradigm always takes precedence in the material world…
I don’t know who said it first, much less best, whether Nietzsche, Darwin, Elvis Costello or myself (?!), but the fact remains: we proceed by brilliant mistakes, errors in code providing some of the best clues to advancement, thus spectacular screw-ups are the order of the day, if we’re lucky, stumbling ahead on all twos, trying to remember to fall forward, when we inevitably fall…
When I got on the plane a week or so ago in Thailand, bound for Amerika, I had a feeling of impending doom that I couldn’t explain, so I begged my wife Tang not to go, assuming that it was about personal doom, and my instinct was to protect her. Now that I know what that feeling was really all about, at least I can rest easier for those I care about. What I can’t do is rest easier about the fate of the USA… 
streaming consciousness... 
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