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  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 5:53 am on October 26, 2025 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Alpha male, arhat, , , , , , , , ,   

    Buddhism In an Imperfect World. The world outside… 

    The world outside may be cruel and cold, but the world inside can be perfect. This is implicit in the Buddhist teachings, Theravada especially, before the Mahayana emphasis on the Bohisattva’s sacrifice of enlightenment until all sentient beings can join in the awakening. And, if that seems selfish of the Theravadins, then it’s not, not really. It’s simply a recognition that the challenges are many and the awakenings are few, in an imperfect world, with few Bodhisattvas available, so maybe being a satisfied arhat might be better.

    Because, even if the world were infinite, with no need for competition, there would still be the challenges of hate, anger and greed. Those are the kileshas that haunt all of us, rich or poor, no matter our status or our position in life. And competition is a function of greed, no matter that there might be an infinite abundance, somehow somewhere. No alpha male is worried about getting his share of the offerings. He wants them all, or at least a controlling interest, no matter that there is plenty to go around.

    That is the difference between us and the animal kingdom, the ability to reason and ration any scarcity of resources fairly amongst all interested parties. That is why the alpha male is an anachronism in the world of humans, strutting his stuff as if he were king of the jungle. For the human race to advance, we must leave the jungle behind, and any notion of a warrior ethos that defines us. It doesn’t. It only divides us.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 2:31 am on September 28, 2025 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Alpha male, , , , , , , , , , ,   

    Buddhism 102: Cooling the fires of Kilesha… 

    When everything is burning, cool the fires inside with the water of empathy and the chemistry of compassion. There are always at least two different ways to kill a wildfire, of course, as every firefighter knows. You can kill it with water, or you can kill it with fire itself. But which method causes more damage? That’s why water is always preferable, when possible. Because to kill a fire with a rival fire is to destroy everything in the path, ‘scorched earth’, so to speak. It ain’t pretty.

    But drenched earth can be quite pretty, especially after a nasty fire. And if those fires are inside, such as with hatred, greed, and anger, then the improved results are notable. Two foes can fight to the death, of course, but neither one could truly be considered a winner in that case. So, peaceful solutions are always preferable. Both parties will live to play another day, and with all faculties intact, both might even succeed.

    But that is the hardest thing to accomplish, of course, what with alpha males hogging the harem and acting like DNA whose only goal is to climb the ladder of succession to another day and another successful matchup in the breeding room and the board room, where the winner takes all and the losers take nothing. That’s the world of Nature, sometimes cruel and forbidding. But we can do better than that. Because we have the world of consciousness and mind, hopefully even some measure of mindfulness. Be kind.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 4:47 am on March 9, 2025 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Alpha male, , , ,   

    Buddhism in the Material World 

    Fire can extinguish fire, but water is usually more effective and less destructive. Still, we almost never learn that lesson, do we? So, when there’s a battle over turf between two Alpha males of almost any species, the only solution is to thump our chests and prepare to do battle, winner take all, mostly bragging rights and reproductive rights. That’s the way it’s always been and the way it is today—often. But what if the females were to simply say ‘no’? there’s food for thought.

    After all, it only takes one male to impregnate a hundred females. They would just have to decide and let the blokes know the new rules of the game. Sound unrealistic? But that’s how horses were tamed, albeit selected by humans overseeing the process. The one horse that left his genes for the next 5000 years was the tame one, not the Alpha male beating his chest. And many tribal humans preferred lofty reaches, safe and secure, over green valleys that they would have to fight for—forever, something Homer gave the Persians credit for, deserved or not, if I remember correctly.

    Buddhists simply declared the right to renounce right here right now, no apologies, this after generations of rishis showed how it could be done individually, with quite favorable consequences. So, the same might work for a group, united and vocal, about their intents and purposes, if not much volume in their voices. Sure, a heartless despot could slaughter them mercilessly, and they have. Tibetan monks self-immolate to this day. But the despot is the one who lives in fear—and hatred. The victim is usually free to live another day, or millennium. The choice is ours.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 8:00 am on March 17, 2024 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Alpha male, , , , , , , , , , turn the other cheek   

    Buddhism in a Christian World, Fighting Aggression with Non-Aggression… 

    The great Buddhist dilemma, or tetralemma, is how to deal with aggression. Do you turn the other cheek? But no Christian really did that, did they? Still, the goal is the goal, the difficulty of accomplishing it notwithstanding. And surely some Christians did just that, though Buddhists are probably better at it, given their cultural conditioning, just as some Buddhists are aggressive bullies, in some emulation of the Alpha Male Syndrome, if nothing else. Boys will be boys, and many of those are aggressive by nature. 

    But is there a better way? Aren’t we guilty of another form of spiritual bypassing, if we avoid difficult social and political situations by simply retreating into our spiritual comfort zones and letting the world degenerate into madness? After all, is that any different from using our spirituality to avoid confronting our own emotions and unresolved existential crises? In fact it might be worse, much worse. So, yes, there is an opportunity here for someone to learn a lesson if only he or she wants to put the time and effort into it. 

    But we can’t lose ourselves in the affairs of others. We can only teach what we ourselves know above and beyond question and learn from everything else. The important thing is not to react, or at least not overreact. We are all baited everyday with statements designed to inflame or instill anger when we ourselves intended no such thing at all initially and desire no such thing as result. But such is the nature of aggressive modern culture. And we are in it, regardless of whether we are truly of it or not. If turning the other cheek is to invite further abuse, then nothing has been accomplished. To simply walk away and limit future involvement with the aggressor might be a better solution. 

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 1:00 pm on December 6, 2020 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Alpha male, , , Marija Gimbutas, matriarchy, Old Europe, ,   

    Buddhism in a World at War with Itself… 

    Fight the war within your heart, and so leave the world at peace. That largely summarizes the Buddhist philosophy in a nutshell, with regard to the world at large, at least. And that was always a source of some consternation for me, at first, I coming from a Western country with a strong sense of action, freedom, and individualism. So to simply turn the eyes downward, or turn one’s head aside, hardly seems to be the correct way to deal with problems.

    But it works, at least to a certain extent, by forgoing the bluff and bluster, and most of all the violence, and simply walking away calmly. In fact, that’s the first thing I learned in my Kung Fu class, for all the fancy moves and sleights of hand: just walk away; and 90% of the time it will work. The problem arises when there is no place to walk to, whether for lack of space or circumstances.

    But this is a problem that the ‘minority’ groups of the world have encountered since Day One. As long as they have some place to escape to, then problems do not have to ‘come to a head,’ so to speak, and everybody is happy, more or less, and the world’s largest ‘races’ occupy the choicest valleys and prime sea coasts, and the most valuable trade routes between them.

    And this is largely tolerable until the world’s population starts to surpass a billion or two, and then quadruples in population over the next hundred years. Welcome to 2020, and lots of hindsight. Now there is no place left to hide, and that didn’t always work so well, anyway. As hard as it is for us moderns to believe, there was a time not so long ago when young men were anxious to go to war, for reasons that I’m not so sure about.

    Now I suppose it may be an unhealthy craving to be too attached to one’s own life, but not for the purpose of violence, I wouldn’t think. But this is the age of patriarchy, and such are the ways and means of its workings. Only one man is needed to fertilize the wombs of a hundred women, as any self-aggrandizing Alpha male knows, and the rest are free to rumble. Ouch.

    Oh, how I long for the pre-Aryan Old Europe of Marija Gimbutas, the Old Asia, Old America, and the Old Africa of matriarchy, when women’s value was paramount, in direct proportion to the need to multiply the species, long before unemployed men began the long division of slicing and dicing body parts for mass internment, ashes to ashes and all that rap. But there is another clause in the dharma of Buddhism that pertains to this discussion and that is the need to remove the causes and conditions of suffering.

    And assuming that these causes and conditions are originally internal, then they must be applied to all persons equally, across the board. If women refused to submit to the Alpha males for purposes of reproduction, would the problem simply go away? It might be worth a try. Everything is perfect in its imperfection. It is just what it is, Trump notwithstanding, nor left standing. Opinions fall flat in the face of reality…

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 11:24 am on June 21, 2020 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Alpha male, ,   

    Buddhism and the Myth of the Alpha Male… 

    Buddhism is a peaceful reaction to an aggressive world. And that is the beauty of it, of course, the fact that some 2500 years ago, situations were such that the increasing aggressivity of the world was obvious, and remedies would certainly need to be taken, better sooner than later, even if the worst were yet to come.

    Because the paradigms are timeless, the aggressivity of men, in their quest to subdue nature to their needs of reproduction and nutrition and survival. So we worship the Alpha male as if there no other choice. But there is. That was then. This is now. The Alpha male is no longer ‘naturally selected’ for evolution the minute that women say ‘no’ and the other males say ‘me, too’. And that is that.

    Cultural evolution trumps the biological survival of the fattest, and history proceeds on a more equal footing. But it was always cultural, wasn’t it? Even in the ranks of the ‘lesser animals’ the myth of the alpha male only rules to the extent that others are unwilling to step up to the fight, and to train themselves for it. But the fight is the problem, now, isn’t it?

    Because fights are destructive, by definition, and many people are unwilling to submit to that, even when it means a possible increase to their dignity. And dignity is more than ego. Dignity is the inherent sense of self-worth that makes life worth living and fights worth fighting, even when they ultimately must be replaced by a better system of discourse.

    Are we ‘psychologically evolved’ for a system that no longer is viable in a world soon to be ten billion souls? The question is circular, because natural selection cannot predict. Natural selection can only rationalize the past. Only free will can create the future, even if none of us are truly and absolutely free.

    Use the illusion. And it doesn’t matter to me if we move backwards into that future with an eye to inclusion, rather than slashing and burning our way into that future with no reference to the past and its by-products, which includes most of the population of this world. Ten billion people slashing and burning will not a better world create, but only with careful and cautious movements designed for long-term sustenance, if not unrealistic permanence.

    Our mistakes are the raw material of evolution, random mutations not a superior product in itself, but the clay from which a better piece of pottery will emerge, whether by conscious design or brilliant mistake. And that is what Buddhism does, suggesting a middle way between aggression and escape, being and nothingness. A better world awaits, neither north, south, east or west, but somewhere deep inside…

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 10:51 am on January 19, 2020 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Alpha male, , , , ,   

    Buddhism and the Power of Silence… 

    Many of the world’s problems might vanish if certain people could only learn the power of silence, blessed emptiness. And by silence, of course, I mean self-silence, to the extent that ‘self’ refers to something largely indefinable, but we all know what to do with it, and in this case, as in many cases, the thing to do is simply STFU. Because we are indoctrinated in the arts of debate from childhood here in the Europe-descended West, and so imagine that this is the natural way to be, chomping at the bit, and foaming at the mouth, all for a chance to assert our rights to pre-eminence, and if we’re lucky, maybe even monopolize the deep end of the gene pool. But to pretend that this is normal is where the hubris and the ultimate fraud come to play, simply because violence and arrogance are choices, just as is silence, and ultimately rewarded by behavior, of others, in that everyone has a right to decide whether the behavior they witness is conducive to their cooperation, or not, and so the ultimate submission to power, or not. But the only way to ‘speak truth to power’ is to have other options than reliance upon that source of power for any perceived benefits, whether real or simply imagined, and ultimately the spread of genes, which will heavily determine whether this behavior is repeated indefinitely and infinitely into the distant future, or not. And this is where evolutionary psychology kicks in, because these patterns become ingrained across the generations, and will continue to haunt us far beyond the present circumstances of power’s abuse, whenever and wherever it perceives there to be a vacuum, and thus an opportunity. For ‘Type-A’ male behavior may exist across the range of species, but only humans, and chimpanzees, actually go to war over it. For all others it’s simply the gratification of the urge to merge, and the will for thrill, as the also-rans look on in envy. Human consciousness is capable of changing all that, though, the self-correcting addendum to the will to warfare, an instinct for survival, and the ability to see futures where no clear paths yet exist. And that is the path of silence, now that we have run amok for so many years now, stuffing ourselves on so many unearned rewards, far beyond what is necessary to survive and reproduce. So we over-produced, and now it comes back to haunt us, when the main causes of death are obesity and suicide. We need to relearn how to simply survive. Buddha to his credit discovered this some 2500 years ago, from the twilight’s first gleamings, as the age of cities took hold, and the potential for disaster became obvious. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There is another way, the path of non-aggression, and non-cooperation with tyrants. Our silence is our ultimate act of freedom. Whether Homo Sapiens will be a successful species is uncertain still, yet anybody’s guess, and everybody’s choice…

     
    • Tim's avatar

      Tim 3:29 am on January 20, 2020 Permalink | Reply

      It is the 70th anniversary of George Orwell … there is some interesting discussions on the disillusionment he had in his engagement with the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. The obsession with not only leftist doctrine but ‘my leftist doctrine’ saw multiple fault lines run through the opposition to the rise of fascism. I find myself withdrawing from political activism for the same reasons … finding my radical voice lost in so many contemporary provisos and caveats … but is silence the answer? But I think that you do not refer to this sort of silence? Perhaps the silence is a listening silence … one that tries to understand, through listening intently, from whence the provisos and caveats emerge … and why.

      • hardie karges's avatar

        hardie karges 5:02 am on January 20, 2020 Permalink | Reply

        Yes it’s a bit of a conundrum, how to maintain a noble silence when the world is clamoring for details and opinions, especially when one’s own well-being is being threatened in the process, whether real or imagined. So there is no absolute mandate for it, but I do believe that it is best in many situations, not least of all meditation…

  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 6:50 am on December 9, 2018 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Alpha male, , , human zoo, , , , , type A,   

    Buddhism, taming the wild beast within… 

    IMG_1190

    Buddhism in Sri Lanka

    The zoo is one of my favorite analogies and metaphor for the human species, such that we tame ourselves and our worst impulses, in order to make of ourselves one great human zoo, a petting zoo, properly fed and cared for, so that the need to compete and the struggles with predators should be reduced to little or nothing…

    I know for a fact that two unrelated mammal species raised together from infancy can easily learn to accept each other for the mutual benefit of all, so cats’ and dogs’ need to fight is only learned behavior. Even in the savannas of Africa, at least in the protected areas, many if not most species have symbiotic relationships, such that none are subject to the regular predations of any one specific species–except man. So we are the main problem of violence on this planet, as much or more than any lions, tigers or bears… (More …)

     
    • Dave Kingsbury's avatar

      Dave Kingsbury 4:29 pm on December 12, 2018 Permalink | Reply

      Your own experience here shows the power of adaptability we human beings have, though it can’t exactly have been plain sailing for you. Pride of ego has a lot to answer for, indeed, including our imagined superiority over the rest of life. A phrase I have particular problems with is ‘dog eats dog’. Mostly, they don’t …

    • hardie karges's avatar

      hardie karges 9:03 pm on December 12, 2018 Permalink | Reply

      Yes, I’m particularly struck by how young our civilization is, barely 10K years, and we’re at each others’ throats most of the time. As space becomes scarce, it’s really time for a new paradigm, which is fairly easy to imagine, really. The hard part is getting people to accept it!

  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 10:31 am on July 9, 2017 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Alpha male, , , , , , , , , Type-A behavior   

    Buddhism, Meditation, Alpha Males and the Myth of Leadership… 

    img_1893When people ask me about meditation practice and/or Buddhism, I make it clear that meditation is one thing, and Buddhism is another, though I certainly appreciate both, even if knee problems likely mean that I’ll never achieve the classic lotus pose, and maybe not even the half of it…

    …so sitting meditation becomes chair meditation, which is just as good or better, just not as cool to look at, though maybe better for sati, ‘mindfulness’, if the cross-legged pose is uncomfortable, thus freeing the mind for focus, on nothing, emptiness, the vast undefined, even if in a sitting position less defined than the classic figure-8 flower… (More …)

     
    • Dave Kingsbury's avatar

      davekingsbury 3:45 pm on July 10, 2017 Permalink | Reply

      I think the link with the wider world is as significant as the opportunity for personal development. This makes that point firmly, Hardie.

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