streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 10:35 am on May 20, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: belief ( 3 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 131 ), culture ( 20 ), devotion ( 3 ), DNA ( 39 ), Faith ( 2 ), Forest Tradition, genome ( 5 ), juju, language ( 89 ), logic ( 11 ), woo-woo, Zen ( 24 )   

  Got religion? Juju or woo-woo: take your pick… 

  Beyond all the fibs and fantasies, behind all the lies we tell ourselves, is the l-DNA we create for ourselves in language, a trail to our past and an arrow to our future, and pretty much the only thing we had before y-DNA and mt-DNA, revealed now to be something like a parallel universe to those more precise measurements, yet far more analogous to the largely hypothetical cultural tracks and traces, like c-DNA, full of long lonely nights and broken promises, frightened misgivings and belated thanksgivings…

  But the first thing we did in every case, and probably even before language, was to speculate on the nature of things, and try to create some meaning for it all, maybe even best articulated in fear, that which we fear being that which we worship, synonymous anonymous, or even better in groups to amplify the effect exponential… (More …)

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  hardie karges 4:00 pm on December 10, 2017 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddha ( 40 ), Buddhism ( 315 ), defilement ( 2 ), Descartes ( 7 ), Forest Tradition, kilesha ( 8 ), Mahayana ( 30 ), mind ( 5 ), mindfulness ( 13 ), rebirth ( 28 ), sati ( 11 ), THAI ( 5 ), thought ( 12 )   

  Buddhist Dilemma: Does Mindfulness = No Thought? Hmmm… 

  

  

  Reflections in the back seat

  ‘Mindfulness’ is one of those words deliberately created to defy definition, it seems, so when anybody asks me what it means I usually reply with something semi-snarky, like “the opposite of mindlessness” which seems like maybe avoiding the question, but which in fact is about as accurate as is possible, given the quasi-religious overtones and the need for a certain amount of obfuscation for dramatic effect, such being the need in Western circles, witness the ‘woo-woo’ factor of certain Pali/Sanskrit words like ‘samadhi‘…

  But the word ‘sati‘, from which ‘mindfulness’ is translated, by itself carries no transcendent connotations, at least not in modern standard Thai, in which it means simply ‘consciousness’ or ‘mind’, in the sense that one’s sati, i.e. brain, is maybe not so good anymore, or that he now has sati, i.e. is no longer unconscious—get it? And the usage of the term in Buddhism is not so much different, I think, and mindfulness is probably the best term for it, mind twice removed from pure simplicity, first with a ‘full’, next with a ‘ness’. But doesn’t that imply some level of thought, whether in narrative form or simple awareness, of cause and effect, spatial relations and orderliness? I would think so. So…

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  hardie karges and quantumpreceptor are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    quantumpreceptor 3:26 pm on December 11, 2017 Permalink | Reply

    No thought, no. It’s the space between the thoughts where things get very interesting.

    QP

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    hardie karges 3:58 pm on December 11, 2017 Permalink | Reply

    True, BUT…. I think (oops!) there’s always room for thought–good thoughts…

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    quantumpreceptor 1:52 am on December 13, 2017 Permalink | Reply

    What I mean is this. Thoughts are not a problem in fact they can be used as a tool in the right circumstances. Avoiding them does not work, however slowing them down and seeing into the space between them is where we can begin to see that all is a reflection in the mirror of consciousness.

    QP

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    hardie karges 3:45 am on December 13, 2017 Permalink | Reply

    There you go, now we’re on the same page…

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  hardie karges 7:19 am on September 24, 2017 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Aryan ( 13 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 131 ), DNA ( 39 ), dukkha ( 13 ), Forest Tradition, genome ( 5 ), haplogroup ( 4 ), Hindu ( 3 ), mitochondrial ( 2 ), Noble Truth ( 2 ), Pali ( 12 ), sangha ( 10 ), suffering ( 16 ), Thailand ( 67 )   

  First Noble Truth of Buddhism: It’s a Heartache… 

  

  

  …and that’s about as accurate as any translation of the Pali word dukkha as any other, certainly better than the ‘stress’ or ‘discomfort’ or whatever currently making the rounds in Buddhist blurbs online and elsewhere, anything but ‘suffering’, the traditional and still most accurate definition. We’re talking about a metaphysical level of suffering here, after all, or at least existential, the kind that envelops you in its inimitable embrace, and lets you know exactly where you stand, or fall, which is usually somewhere nearby and knowable, so treatable…
  

  The newer ‘stress’-full definition of dukkha suggests a modern post-capitalist phase that the Buddha himself could hardly have imagined back in the classic Upanishadic era of pre-colonial India, actually post-colonial if you count Aryans as intruders, and not the high-class homeboy Brahmins that they usually like to see themselves as. They brought as many chariots, horses, cows and racism as they ever brought religion, more like high plains cowboys than the meditative masters that we now see them as (though they did have good drugs—I hear)… (More …)