#Buddhist #Enlightenment Will NOT be Downloaded, Downloadable—OR Televised…
In Spires In Thailand
Author’s note: in the style of Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will not Be Televised,” preferably with some light jazz music in the background…
Enlightenment will not be delivered to your doorstep by drone, from Amazon flown and by PayPal paid, nor Bitcoin bought, but traded in kind and in species of the heartfelt kind, love and forgiveness and kindness and compassion and submission and surrender to that higher power that represents us all in the courtrooms of consciousness, and the guard posts of Godliness, the board rooms of the Bhagwan and the after-death chambers of pure heavenly delight, whipped and battered and dipped in divinity…
But Enlightenment will not be downloaded…
Enlightenment will not be brought to you in a half-time show of the 52nd annual Super Bowl Classic presided over by Beyonce’, Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande in glorious female profusion as they strut their stuff in sequins and fluff, while smoke and mirrors huff and puff in reflections and other assorted shiny stuff all around them…
But Enlightenment will not be downloaded… (More …)
Buddhism is not supposed to be a religion to get all excited about in the first place, if it’s even a religion at all, but just the opposite, regarding the excitement, that is. That’s Christianity, or Hinduism, singing and dancing, playing organ and banging drums, maybe even a guitar or two, if you’re lucky, and a bottle of wine, singing about Adam and Eva, “In a Gadda da Vida”…
and the little voices inside saw me ‘starving hysterical naked’ and said, “get thee to a monastery, young man, before it’s too late, while there’s still time, before you do something you’ll regret, so as to lay down your weary crosses and your over-worked swords, and your virus-ridden little laptop thingie, at once and forthwith, for I sentence you to life without parole, to suffer in silence, and be very glad for it, free of the distractions and defilements that inevitably lead to karmic rebirth…”
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Karma is one of the major tenets of Buddhism, and one of the most misunderstood. The issue of past lives I’ll save for later; first let’s deal with this life. The basic idea is that if you do good things, then good things will happen to you. And if you have to take at least one religious tenet on pure faith to qualify as religious, then I’ll take that one, which I firmly believe, that by doing good, the world is thereby incrementally vaccinated against evil. Thus karma is frequently called the law of ’cause and effect’, BUT…
The Smiling Pilgrim are discussing. 
One of the first glimpses of consciousness—self-consciousness—for any self-respecting member of angst-ridden rebellious existential youth is that, “life has no meaning.” And apparently that is a rite of passage from adolescence into adulthood, as palpable as puberty, as awkward as rolled-up jeans, as unforgiving as suicide–or so I hear…
So now that I’ve self-identified as Buddhist for almost a year, I figure I know pretty well the heart and mind of the Buddha, and so should begin second-guessing him, in order to clarify a few points that remain confusing after 2560 years (cue snickers). Okay, so here goes: everybody knows the Four Noble Truths, right? 1) The prevalence of suffering; 2) the cause of suffering: craving; 3) the cure for suffering: don’t do that, and 4) the way to accomplish that: follow the Middle Path, avoidance of extremes… 
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