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  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 6:34 am on October 23, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Buddhism, ,   

    Religion 210: Messiah Complex, God Simple… 

    img_0996I’ve seen fad religions and therapies come and go over the last forty years, alternative this and consciousness that, each one the newest and the latest and the most mystical and the most scientific, flooding in like water over the spillway, dripping on to ice and going nowhere fast, few of them any better than what was already here, but people want the novelty factor, apparently, so that’s that. And where are they all now? Scientology is the only survivor…

    But before Scientology there was EST and Eckankar and Rolfing and Polarity, Don Juan and Tensegrity, Transcendental Meditation and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. And before that there were Tarot cards and Aleister Crowley, Annie Besant and Theosophy, Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science, the one I was brought up in, and now trending downward. And even before that there were Sufis and Kabalists, Rosicrucians and hashishins, Albigensians and Gnostics and Manicheans and Mahayana Buddhists, the only group that really ‘made it’… (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 12:20 am on October 16, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Buddhism, , , ,   

    Religion 221: Less is More, Time for New Paradigms… 

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    Christian church in Ethiopia

    If the Renaissance man was our hero of the 1500’s and the scientist our hero of the 1600’s, then Enlightened Man was the paradigm for the West in the 1700’s and the entrepreneur was the paradigm in the 1800’s. But then the paradigm in the later 1900’s took a dive and our new culture hero was the wild man, the playboy, the gangster, the rogue, the drug addict, the bad boy, the bad girl, the streetwalker, you get the idea: so what is the paradigm of the 2000’s? The hacker, maybe, or a terrorist? Sounds grim…

    Or maybe it’ll be a ‘gender-fluid’ ‘metro-sexual’, born and bred to do the exact opposite: never bear nor breed. Such dirty work is better left to specialized breeders and the truly old-fashioned who know how to do little else. LGBTQA’s have better things to do with their specialized hardware, especially now that non-traditional marriage has largely withstood court challenges. Now nothing is prohibited. That might help ease population pressures… (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 4:33 pm on October 9, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Buddhism   

    Buddhist Boot Camps: Kopan vs. Suan Mokh, part 1–Price of Rice… 

    IMG_0526“…(in) sitting meditation…we free our mind from past experiences and…any anticipation of the future. Instead we abide in the nowness of the present…”–HH the Dalai Lama

    Sounds a whole lot like Eckhart Tolle, doesn’t it? But no, this is from His Holiness the DL’s book ‘The Four Noble Truths’, compiled from talks he gave in 1996, some years before the publishing of ET’s break-thru book-thru drive-thru one-stop soul shop, in which a lump of basic Buddhism is twirled up into fluffy cotton-candy comfort-food for the disenchanted, just lose all that pesky suffering, add some New Age flavorings, and let’s call it ‘The Power of Now’ instead of ‘Enlightenment for Dummies’…

    …or even ‘a Metaphysics of Meditation’, which is probably most accurate. There you go: perfect, ready to market, and the rest is history—good work. But I’m not here to talk about ET, just HHDL, who largely inspired me, along with certain Beat Poets at Naropa last century hooting and howling next door, to further investigate Tibetan Buddhism, to supplement my current efforts in the forest temples of Thailand. Here’s the deal: (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 5:37 am on October 2, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Buddhism, , , ,   

    Religion 102: She’s Gotta’ Have It—Christianity, that is… 

    IMG_0379…stuff, that is, the more the better, piles and piles of it highly derived and thoroughly contrived, mostly useless adornments and bows of worship to the gods and goddesses of fashion, reflecting the finely manicured thumbnail status of our culture, whatever is trending; that’s most important, much more so than whatever came before and whatever will come after, pesky details best left to historians and our paid apologists…

    Yes, apparently Jesus died on the cross so that we could go shopping, among other things. Some of my favorite ‘other things’, by way of example, are the daredevil stunts that we Westerners have become famous for. How many people risk their lives each year climbing mountains that there are no reasons to climb, or reaching speeds that there are no reason to reach, or performing stunts just for the big screen, just for the sake of celebrity?

    (More …)

     
    • jodie's avatar

      jodie 10:32 pm on October 31, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      It would seem that the path you are on is as experientially biased as all religious, philosophical, or psychological endeavors ultimately are. If it suits you then ….. sit well…..

  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 5:50 am on September 18, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Buddhism, ,   

    Rainy Day Religion #24 and #42: Windowless Monads and Digitless Nomads… 

    IMG_0738So this is what it’s like, I guess, to die so alone so far from home with no crib for a bed no greatest hits from the Grateful Dead, just four walls and two sheets and an extra pillow might work I guess in a pinch in a delirious state of mind where a thing anything soft and curvy might satisfy the existential need to put hard things in soft places, beats the current rage of scurvy and influenza, dengue and consumption ravaging my body with its heartless tentacles eating my soul and leaving me alone dying trying…

    so this is how it all ends, does it (?), under the weather under the gun under anything but the godforsaken sun, out there somewhere the brilliant fiery orb symbol of our existence and our insistence at certainty in the face of things that could only be described by the word God if indeed it is a real word, not just some feel-good mechanism manufactured by the conspiracy know-it-alls and designed for immediate consumption… (More …)

     
    • Dave Kingsbury's avatar

      davekingsbury 12:48 pm on September 19, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      A really alternative perspective … makes me wonder how things are with you. Hope this is an imaginative excursion into the miracle of life …

      • hardie karges's avatar

        hardie karges 7:31 am on September 27, 2016 Permalink | Reply

        That’s exactly what is is/was; sorry for slow response, been off at Buddhist boot camp…

  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 5:43 am on September 11, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Buddhism, , , , ,   

    Religion’s Final Quarter, Tie Score: Monotheism 1, Zero-theism 0… 

    IMG_1183

    Statue of Buddha in Kandy, Sri Lanka

    Christians and Muslims will always be at each other’s throats, because they’re both playing offense, which I find rather offensive. We Buddhists prefer to play defense. Don’t you wish the DOD did? It used to be called the Department of War, you know. Nothing’s changed. The best defense is a good offense in American football, but life is no silly game…

    In real life the best offense is a good defense, all kung fu’s and eastern martial arts based on the idea of letting the enemy’s own aggression destroy him–just facilitate the matter. China was for a long time, and is arguably still today, a Buddhist country. It certainly isn’t Communist, far from what Marx or Mao envisioned, with its state-sponsored capitalism, and keeping up with the Joneses… (More …)

     
    • quantumpreceptor's avatar

      quantumpreceptor 1:46 pm on September 11, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      Great read, thank you. I like how the Tibetans describe emptiness with the word DETONG, it has two parts, the first is empty of. And it might seem that I did not finish my sentence but I did 🙂 The second part is Joy. One might say that emptiness is the union of that which is empty of and joy. It is so simple but really a loaded statment. I might explain it this way that when one realises the empty nature of things composite that joy is the natural result.

      I have always been so disapointed of all the catholic missionaries that went to India and falsly translated the vedas and other scripts with the intention to paint Buddhism and Hinduism as a buch of nhilists wanting to disapear in to nothingness. How boring would that be? They demonised these two ways of life and purposly misrepresented them. Your entry is here to help clean this up, and we will all be better off when eastern philosophy is properly represented and understood.

      The idea of zero I find totally interesting. Zero is less dependent on one that one is of two or three. There is a logic here that a mathmatician might love. Anything that helps us get past the dependant origination of things is helpful. Does that make sense to you?

    • hardie karges's avatar

      hardie karges 3:41 pm on September 11, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks, yes, but it’s a huge subject, so could take days, years. My goal is to try to determine what Buddha himself meant, and the more I researched the concept of Zero, the more I became convinced that the coincidence with Buddhism was no accident…

    • Dave Kingsbury's avatar

      davekingsbury 2:26 pm on September 12, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      Fascinating account of the paradoxical power of non-assertion, not too far from what I was trying to say in my post – don’t know if you saw it – https://davekingsbury.wordpress.com/2016/09/04/me-ander/

      • hardie karges's avatar

        hardie karges 4:04 pm on September 12, 2016 Permalink | Reply

        No, I didn’t, and yes, it IS a very similar treatment of a role for ego, just enough to get by, I’d say…

    • Christadelphians's avatar

      Christadelphians 8:38 am on March 2, 2017 Permalink | Reply

      Instead of accusing all Christians and all Muslims you would better say ” Certain Christians and Muslims will always be at each other’s throats”. For real Christians would never go at any body’s throat, accepting all beings to be creatures to be created in the image of God,

      We too should like every body come at ease with ourself and find the emptiness but also the fullness in ourselves. We should try “to be one” with the universe and with our and the “being”.

      Real Christians should not aim to win against other people, they should win the race of them selves to the self (that is also what Jesus and his apostles are talking about).

  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 6:14 am on September 4, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Buddhism, , , , ,   

    Buddhism, Existenz, Ego and the Three-Body Problem… 

    IMG_0712The ultimate conundrum of life is that we didn’t ask to be born. The ultimate responsibility is that we not dare to risk death, either. For that we never know the reason why, but simply that it—life—is given, and things given must be accepted in the spirit with which they are given, not without question, but definitely without fail…

    Yet we do risk death, deliberately, repeatedly and with great flair, and often for no good reason. Up until less than a hundred years ago, as hard as it is to believe, people wanted to go to war, to fight, to kill, and this was the high point in many a young man’s life—or death! We look at the past with a mixture of wonder and agony at all the gratuitous violence and senseless destruction without realizing that the key to that phenomenon is right within us—and largely curable… (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 5:03 am on August 28, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Buddhism, Kopan, , , , ,   

    Buddhism and Rebirth: Karma Crushes Dogma in 3-Body Pile-Up 

    IMG_0542Dear Readers: If you happen to follow my other (travel) blog, backpackers-flashpackers.net/, then be forewarned that I’ll repeat some of the same material as in my last post there, so I’ll understand if you have other fish to fry. It’s not that I’m lazy, but rather that the issue that presented itself last week I believe is worth repeating, since it affects my future and the future of this blog…

    As you know, if you follow me here, I’ve been moving steadily toward a life of Buddhism over the past year or two, to the point of spending sessions in actual temples, in study of the Dharma, but also to prepare myself for eventually following the monk-hood myself, on a sporadic, if not permanent basis, something you can do in Thailand, whose Forest Tradition is extremely attractive to me… (More …)

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 7:12 am on August 7, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Buddhism, , Mae Chan,   

    Thai Forest Temples: Books Not Required; Internet? Pending… 

    IMG_0738Thai Buddhist ‘Forest Temples’ are not the saffron gilded air-conditioned temples of the cities and towns, but rustic temples of the woods, the outback and the heart, a tradition dating from a time when Thailand actually HAD forests and itinerant monks walking through them. This tradition dates back little more than one hundred years, but in that period of time has gained many adherents, both local and international, mostly due to the efforts of the late Ajahn Chah, who taught many foreign disciples, and set them loose upon the world…

    ‘Tam boon’ is the usual Thai term for Buddhist ‘merit-making’ and could just as easily be translated ‘doing good’, though that probably doesn’t convey the urgency with which most Thais accept the need for a showcase to display their gratitude, not simply submit silent offerings. The best deeds tend to be spectator sports to which all are invited, and many a belly is filled, spectacles and feasting more than introspection and fasting, which is a better goal for religion IMHO… (More …)

     
    • kc's avatar

      kc 7:18 pm on August 7, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      interesting, recently a COMMUNITY HELP GROUP, all men btw, came and helped me get the front yard/garden set to city specs. they do it for the glory of god, any and all gods, they do not discriminate against the gods nor the people requesting help. i wrote a letter to the editor, that they published, much to my surprise as it mentioned Islam. so, yeah, we’re learning, slowly but surely, to embrace all. for now, i am attempting to reteach r things he has long known, in this instance it has been 2 hours so far, how to turn on the electronic contol oven, by googling the manual and following instructions. this gives him an enormous amount of angst. I really believe that he is somewhat sexist his own self, by demonstrating that he is showing his inability to learn form me, or is it ageist. he has completed rejected the notion that he has any memory issues, and although 3 docs said no driving, he continues to drive, and continues to have car crashes. he may soon learn, but that time may come when it is too late. As the Animals sang in that fab Vietnam War protest song WE GOTTA GET OUT OF THIS PLACE, i must get out of here, to save what is left of my mind and spirit. wish me luck, adventure awaits me. fuck an electronic control oven, give me sticks and a way to start a fire, and i’m good.Glad that you are well, except for gout. i am fine, except for pain.

  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 7:05 am on July 31, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Buddhism, ,   

    Buddhism 222: If you Can’t Find the Suffering, then Look Harder… 

    IMG_0712Many people say they like Buddhism, but without all that pesky suffering that Buddhists keep talking about. “I’m just too happy to be a Buddhist,” is a common sentiment. Of course some of those people have already gravitated toward Zen, which is as close as you can get to Buddhism without the suffering, but still it’s there…

    So what to do? Go find some suffering, then. Do you really doubt that it exists? Of course not, since many of these same people are the very ones who support—at least verbally—multifarious programs to aid the downtrodden. But have you actually gotten your hands dirty in the process? Have you actually experienced that suffering? There are many ways to do that, you know, and be helpful at the same time, without wallowing too much in the mire, so to speak, if that’s the problem… (More …)

     
    • quantumpreceptor's avatar

      quantumpreceptor 5:28 am on August 1, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      Interesting post, I would like to add something if you don’t mind. Everything is suffering, the best party, the most beautiful lover, all the money and wealth is suffering in comparison to enlightenment.

      Instead of nothingness it is very likely better to use emptiness as Buddhists are not nihilists.

      I love you photos, keep writing, I love reading.

    • Dave Kingsbury's avatar

      davekingsbury 3:44 pm on August 1, 2016 Permalink | Reply

      Enlightening …

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