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  hardie karges 2:47 am on April 6, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 432 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 161 ), Hardie Karges, language ( 147 ), Mars ( 2 ), meditation ( 193 ), passivity ( 5 ), SPECIES ( 7 ), suffering ( 28 ), Virtual Reality ( 9 )   

  Buddhism, Life, and a World Defined by Challenges 

  

  Good things take time. Anger solves nothing. Life is defined by its challenges. So, I think that’s my philosophy of life, in a nutshell, based heavily on the Buddhist acceptance of suffering, but without succumbing to that fact and any sordid fate that may await that cruel date. Because it doesn’t have to be seen as pessimistic. And that’s the rap that Buddhism has to fight hardest, in order to make Western converts, the idea that it’s too negative, not full of abundance, eternity, infinity, and all the other fantasies that Christianity has bequeathed us, in its two short millennia of existence.

  But Buddhism is not pessimistic, just realistic. You’re going to die, so get over that, and let’s get some things done while we’re here—or not. There’s no shame in renunciation. That’s not passivity. That’s acceptance of reality. Buddhism is only guilty of a mistake if it promotes passivity. Passivity is residing homeless on the streets of LA, not as an ordained monk in Asia. That’s creative, collective, and cooperative. Society could survive like that, even if the pay’s the same as the godforsaken streets of LA.

  Survival is the current concern, also, species survival as much and as well as individual, since we are living in a world of species identity, even if we sometimes transcend those limitations. But we don’t have to go to Mars to do that, though the moon would be nice, especially during the rainy season, haha. Or we could possibly accomplish as much or more in Virtual Reality, if and when the time is right, and the speed and memory are sufficiently available. It’d probably cost less than Mars, too, to create a perfect world as a digital twin of this world. We already have a neural twin. It’s called life, defined by challenges.

   

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  hardie karges 3:05 am on March 30, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 432 ), Eightfold Path ( 17 ), Hardie Karges, meditation ( 193 ), Middle Way ( 4 ), samma vaca ( 8 ), Vajrayana ( 22 ), Zen ( 31 )   

  Buddhism and the Pursuit of Truth(s) 

  

  Absolute truth is a difficult subject. But right speech is easy: honesty and politeness, no trash talk, samma vaca. Most truths are relative at best, anyway, and that includes science, but it goes double for superstition. Because science acknowledges its limitations up front, and that’s the best that you can do. Buddhism is pretty good about that, also, at least in its earliest purest phase, when control of the self (not-self) was primary and gods were kept in their place—somewhere else.

  Buddhist truths are limited to only a very few ‘truisms,’ which is probably more accurate than the notion of absolute truth. Those pretty much consist of the presence of suffering, the main cause of suffering which is the bad habit of craving, and the way out of that condition, which is the Middle Way, between luxury and lack, and strict adherence to the Eightfold Path. One key element of that is samma vaca, right speech. Then there’s right actions, right intentions, right views, right livelihood, and so forth.

  Add to that the acknowledgement of change, or impermanence, and the deleterious effect that has on us, and you’ve got the basics of original early Buddhism, before the verbal antics of Zen or the elaborate trappings of Vajrayana. It’s pretty simple, really, just do good things and watch your tongue, say good things or you could just say nothing at all. That works, too. Don’t worry about absolute truths. Buddhist Noble Truths are more than enough of a guide for living this life.
   
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  hardie karges 4:36 am on March 23, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 432 ), Hardie Karges, homelessness ( 2 ), language ( 147 ), Mars ( 2 ), meditation ( 193 ), mindfulness ( 35 ), philosophy ( 104 ), sati ( 17 )   

  Buddhist Sati: Enjoy the Mindfulness… 

  

  Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing, absolutely nothing. Just do it mindfully, with intent and purpose. But this is the hardest thing for a Westerner, European or American, to comprehend, that sometimes we don’t need to be jumping up and down, racing around, and blowing things up, that indeed sometimes it’s preferable to chill, baby, chill, and let things proceed one step at the time with clear and simple awareness, rather than obsess about populating Mars instead of making our own planet earth more livable.

  So, the Mars freaks blow things up in midair, invent self-driving cars, accelerate them zero to sixty in four seconds, bore tunnels under cities, insert chips in your brains, and what have they accomplished? Not nearly enough, and far too much, all at the same time. Have the sick been healed? Have the homeless been given housing? Has anyone even tried? True, the poor may always be with us, but that’s no excuse for not trying to help. Jesus knew that, and the Buddha did, also.

  I’d like to go to Mars, too, truth be told, but only when the time is right, and the opportunities exist for anyone to share in that dream, if they are so inclined. But I made a conscious decision that renunciation would be preferable than for the world to continue on its path of mindless consumption. Enter mindfulness, the opposite of mindlessness. Do things consciously, one thing at a time, without fear nor favor. If something isn’t broken, then don’t pretend to fix it, just to satisfy transient desires. Live like there is no tomorrow, calm and steady, because there may not be…

   
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  hardie karges 4:47 am on March 16, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 432 ), DOGMA ( 5 ), emotion ( 6 ), Hardie Karges, Hatred ( 6 ), impermanence ( 6 ), language ( 147 ), meditation ( 193 ), personality ( 3 ), self ( 20 )   

  Buddhism in the Time of Troubles… 

  

  The healing begins when the fighting ends, and hatred subsides in its wake. Because, what is hatred, if not misplaced emotion in search of a carrier, like some disease looking for a victim? We assume that these emotions are ‘ours’, as if we should be proud of that fact, when neither assumption is true. That is, we don’t own those emotions, and even if we did, there’s nothing there to be proud of. And nothing is better proof of the ‘aggregate’ nature of our personalities than the transient nature of ‘our’ emotions.

  Because, when we speak of ‘personality’ it’s clear that we are not speaking of any kind of ‘self’, much less an immortal soul. And that is our predicament here in this life in this world, that we are not much more than a bundle of emotions, looking for a place to lay the burden down. If that sounds like cruel fate under a cruel weight, then the reality itself may not be quite so bleak. Because the flexible nature of impermanent circumstances does have the advantage of a flexible response to changing conditions. If Buddhism is a failure, the it’s a failure as dogma.

  After all, how can you fashion agreement from a core fanbase that speaks probably at least a hundred languages from a few dozen countries spread out over the world’s largest continent and two largest countries over the last two millennia? And that’s just the core! It’s a challenge to be overcome, and it’s a glory to behold, that these diverse peoples from a thousand different circumstances can and do debate the dharma from diverse traditions, whether conservative or liberal, and still agree on certain starting points: the presence of suffering, the vacuity of personality, and the impermanence of…nearly everything.

   
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  hardie karges 4:47 am on March 9, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Alpha male ( 9 ), Hardie Karges, meditation ( 193 ), renunciation ( 15 ), rishis ( 2 )   

  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.

   
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  hardie karges 2:56 am on March 2, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: CHRISTIANITY ( 161 ), compassion ( 14 ), gratitude, Hardie Karges, Hegel ( 4 ), kindness ( 16 ), lovingkindness ( 16 ), meditation ( 193 ), metta ( 25 ), Middle Path ( 55 ), Pali ( 20 ), Pangea, religion ( 158 ), Sanskrit ( 22 )   

  Buddhism and the Middle Path Dialectic… 

  

  Gratitude is the companion to kindness and compassion in a perfect circle of Right Action and virtuous intent. Gratitude may be more of a Western thing than an Eastern thing, but that changes nothing. Gratitude is good. Lovingkindness was more of a Western thing than Eastern, also, until the Buddhists adopted it as their own as a suitable translation for the Sanskrit/Pali word metta, and the rest is history. The circle is complete, West meets East, Buddhism meets Christianity, and we are all better off for it.

  Because there is no fundamental distinction between the positions of West and East, not really, simply flip sides of the same coin, two pillars of a dialectic, in which antithesis counters the thesis in order to reach a higher synthesis. Now that’s not strict formal Buddhism (it’s Hegel), but I think it’s a nice approach to the Middle Path, illustrating clearly the fact that the Middle Path is not a cold hard set of prohibitions or dogmas, but is open and fluid and capable of change if and when the time is right for it.

  Notwithstanding the fact that India and the West have a common origin (see my upcoming book) genetically and geographically, if you go even farther back, the entire civilized world has common origins in Africa as homo sapiens and even farther back in Pangea as the large family mammalia, that split then from their reptilian ancestors. That’s who we are, consciousness and all, putting nouns and verbs together in sentences growing more complex every day, looking for a path with heart, despite all the suffering. Look inside; that’s the trick.

   
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  hardie karges 4:55 am on February 23, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 432 ), defilements ( 4 ), Dependent Origination ( 7 ), Four Noble Truths ( 18 ), greed ( 3 ), Hardie Karges, jealousy ( 2 ), language ( 147 ), lust ( 4 ), meditation ( 193 ), Pali ( 20 ), religion ( 158 ), Sanskrit ( 22 ), suffering ( 28 )   

  Buddhism 102: Craving is the Curse… 

  

  Don’t test positive for COVET disease, because jealousy is a hard habit to break, as many a fine pop song has elucidated quite well. But it rings true, especially in the Buddhist attitude toward the world, fully established in Noble Truth number two as the cause of suffering. That’s craving, of course, also known in its manifestations as jealousy, which is only slightly different, or even lust, with its own category of trsna or tanha, Sanskrit or Pali, a thirst gone too far, beyond the simple satisfactions of life, and into unrequited desire. And then there’s greed, one of the three poisons, all closely related on the scale of Dependent Origination.

   But such is the nature of desire, or craving, that it can never be satisfied, by the very nature of its existence, the unsatisfactory nature, i.e. suffering. The best that we can do is ameliorate it, that is, acknowledge its presence, and its call, and give it something, but don’t give it all, of your time or your money, just enough to keep it at bay, far far away, out of your life and out of your mind. Because that is the greatest curse of all, to let nefarious emotions and influences occupy all of your precious thoughts.

  This is why thinking sometimes gets a bad rap and a bad rep, simply because, if left to fester uncontrolled, thoughts can run wild and waste all your time, leading to what we often call ‘monkey mind’, in reference to the constant chatter and mindlessness that defiles us and denies the reason we’re here. And so, we seek more mindfulness, and a decrease in suffering, caused by craving, firstly, and impermanence, secondly, the phenomena of existence that must be dealt with, but not succumbed to, similar to wild dogs prowling Main Street late at night, howling at the moon for lack of something better to do. But we have something better—meditation. When danger threatens, do nothing—quickly.

  Hardie Karges and jmoran66 are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    jmoran66 5:00 am on February 23, 2025 Permalink | Reply

    “When danger threatens, do nothing—quickly”. That’s a keeper.

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    Hardie Karges 6:06 am on February 23, 2025 Permalink | Reply

    Haha, thanks

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  hardie karges 5:19 am on February 16, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 432 ), dream, Hardie Karges, Illusion ( 2 ), Maya ( 4 ), memory ( 3 ), neural twin ( 3 ), simulation ( 2 ), Virtual Reality ( 9 )   

  Buddhism 499: Life is but a Dream… 

  

  Grasping at memories is like trying to grab air. There is simply not much there. And yet we treasure our memories above almost all else, that walk in the park and that kiss in the dark, that moment so long ago that seems almost like today in its freshness. You can still taste it, right? And smell it? See it and hear it? Everything but touch it, something that you probably never did in the first place, the non-tactile sensations much easier to reproduce in an ephemeral memory or dream.

  And that’s fine, as long as we give little or no weight to it, because memories are notoriously unreliable. That’s an object lesson, also, about the nature of reality and the phenomena that inhabit it. Because none of the phenomena of life are any different. It’s just that memories, like dreams, are such obvious bad actors in a hollow play with no substance real or even imagined. This is heavily implied in Buddhism, also, that life is but a dream, and not in such a shallow way as a kid’s play.

  Because the word maya is used frequently, and that’s magic, at best, illusion, more accurately, or deceit, at worse, more or less the acceptable range of sense perception as an accurate description of reality. But in modern parlance it might actually be more like a simulation, but not digital, like Virtual Reality; it’s neural, a precise, if not exact, neural twin of our brain’s (mind’s) own neural landscape, so that we can coexist in this world, the facts of which are too complex to duplicate by art or artifice. Another quark for Mister Mark? I’ll take a rain check. That’s too complicated. Just buy me the moon, or some reasonable facsimile.

   
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  hardie karges 4:45 am on February 9, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 432 ), compassion ( 14 ), control ( 6 ), Hardie Karges, karuna ( 9 ), kindness ( 16 ), language ( 147 ), meditation ( 193 ), metta ( 25 )   

  Buddhism 201: Beyond Metta and Karuna 

  

  If kindness and compassion are the primary virtues, then patience and restraint are the primary disciplines. Be willing to wait, all the time. Whenever someone baits you with fear and anger, just wait before responding, usually nothing else required. And isn’t that the hardest part? Of course. The heat of the moment is always the peak emotion, and if that is magic for some, it’s probably misery for others, because the present moment is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can be the most sublime pleasure. But, on the other hand, it can bring the worst pain.

  If you want to take the analogy one step further, then we could easily say that self-control is one of the best tools of Buddhism, but that is a tough sell to a free-thinking crowd in the Western world, where the word ‘control’ smacks of subversion and freedom is the cause for which we will die gladly. But, there’s a difference between self-control and control of others, just as there is a difference in the freedom TO and the more important freedom FROM, at least from a Buddhist standpoint. Just because we want to be free of certain defilements doesn’t mean that we can do whatever we want.

  Bottom line: what’s good on the battlefield isn’t necessarily so good on the Buddha fields. Because here we’ve got all the time in the world to do things right, and little time or tolerance for doing it wrong. We’re playing for keeps in this samsaric time out of mind and hedging our bets on another life after this one. But that issue is above my pay grade here as a humble scribe, so I’ll let the physics and philosophy professors and proficiency masters work out those equations and analyze that language. Me, I’ve got a tea kettle whistling, so that’s all for now. The Big Questions can wait until next time.   

   
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  hardie karges 4:56 pm on February 2, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 432 ), causes ( 2 ), conditions ( 2 ), Einstein ( 11 ), Hardie Karges, language ( 147 ), meditation ( 193 ), philosophy ( 104 ), Plato ( 17 ), religion ( 158 ), Science ( 25 ), shunya ( 11 ), Socrates ( 3 ), spirituality ( 27 ), Theravada ( 51 ), Vajrayana ( 22 ), zero ( 13 )   

  Buddhism 499: Causes and Conditions… 

  

  It’s not enough to temporarily alleviate a bad situation, but better to permanently change the causes and conditions that created it. This gives the lie to the dismissive notions that Buddhism is only interested in the ‘present moment’, and that ‘thoughts have no thinkers’, and other casual self-disses that imply that Buddhism is superficial and unconcerned with deeper meanings. The Buddha never said that, and nothing could be further from the truth. Those are popular modern themes, but the historical reality is quite different.

  In fact, Buddhism has been extremely concerned with causes and conditions since day one. And if that’s readily apparent in the earliest Theravada Buddhism, it’s a frank obsession by the time of Vajrayana. Never is there a call to cease suffering without a simultaneous call to end the causes of suffering. I think it’s even fair to say that this was likely something of a revelation in that pre-scientific time. Because in that era prior to the scientific era of experimentation, deep contemplation was the next best thing.

  Even Einstein knew that from his deep thought experiments, and the Socratic dialogs of Plato at or around the same time as the Buddha’s sutras were a dualistic echo of the same approach. It requires deep thinking and difficult training, not just a fly catcher nabbing a thought or two on their way through the garden to the kids’ pool. It’s even very possible that it was Buddhist monks who invented (yes, invented) the zero, something which would not catch on in the West for almost 2000 years. It first existed as a concept in shunya, before making the jump to higher math. How do you transfer the liquids between two full containers? You need an empty container. That’s a zero. Think about it. Then meditate. That’s a zero.