Tagged: Jared Diamond Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • hardie karges 6:38 am on December 16, 2018 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , Jared Diamond, , Khmer, , , , , , ,   

    Buddhism 101: Metta means Friendship, Karuna means Compassion… 

    IMG_2290You’ve got something pretty special when you put friendship and compassion together, and something pretty simple. Even people who profess to believe in nothing, and categorically reject use of that word ‘belief’ can surely believe in friendship and compassion. And friendship, universal friendship, is a very important concept, easy to forget in our day and time that at some time in the not-so-distant past anyone who was not part of the family was suspect and an object of great fear and suspicion…

    One of my favorite stories, recounted many times, is by Jared Diamond of ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ fame who related that while doing anthropological fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, when two strangers would meet each other, they’d count back to see if they had a mutual relative, so that they wouldn’t have to kill each other, or die trying… (More …)

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    • Dave Kingsbury 4:28 pm on December 21, 2018 Permalink | Reply

      Informative survey with a convincing historical explanation for fellow-feeling, if that phrase fits. It all builds nicely to your final thoughts where you suggest how experience of different cultures can develop the facility. It’s an important corrective to the divisions – silos, bunkers, echo chambers, whatever – of the modern era.

    • hardie karges 4:45 pm on December 21, 2018 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks, Dave! Merry Christmas from Cambodia…

  • hardie karges 5:56 am on September 9, 2018 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Anthropocene, bonobo, , chakras, , , Jared Diamond   

    Religion as Existence, Being and Emptiness… 

    IMG_0599” The born metaphysician is a person…astonished at the fact that there is anything at all.”

    Those of you who’ve never asked the Big Questions of life are really missing something, I think, because the best part about the big Q’s are the Big A’s, of course, and the fact that, despite all odds, we in fact are here, on a thinly congealed surface suspended between hot glowing molten rock and cold black outer space, the Goldilocks species on the Goldilocks planet, of all-too-unlikely biological life, the Middle Path ‘sweet-spot’ people…

    …foraging for fruits and flowers in forests and fields, eating not just desserts, in so-called deserts, still not deserted after all these years, but intent on finding the beauty in nature, even when the obvious signs are forbidding, though if you poke around the edges and look between the cracks, then you just might find something there to sustain organic life through thick and thin, sickness and health, for better or worse, till death do us part… (More …)

     

  • hardie karges 5:24 am on July 22, 2018 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: agricultural revolution, , , , , , Jared Diamond, , , , ,   

    Buddhism is not Superior to Christianity, but… 

    20180625_092428I only know that it is more appropriate for these self-engorged capitalistic end-times than the prevailing paradigm, which is probably the cause of this effect. The original teachings of JC and the Buddha are almost superfluous at this point, anyway, what with so much cultural baggage added on over all the years, much of it far from the original teachings…

    And in short, those original teachings consist briefly of Jesus’s ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ and the Buddha’s ‘cure for suffering in the cessation of craving’, and from those two starting points evolves the history of much of the world, the traditional west largely ambitious, aggressive, individualistic, loud and consuming, while the traditional East is largely passive, shy, conforming, quiet and retiring. Note that those two traditional paradigms largely parallel the traditional paradigms of male vis a vis female… (More …)

     

    • Esther S. Fabbricante 5:44 am on July 22, 2018 Permalink | Reply

      Deep!

    • modernhadassah 5:59 am on July 22, 2018 Permalink | Reply

      Interesting. “Womanly wiles” came about from having no other recourse. That’s the only way oppressed womanhood could effect change. I guess, when I follow the logic through of how religion effects change it’s on the manipulated and oppressed. What do you think? You have started a good conversation, I suspect.

      • hardie karges 6:53 am on July 22, 2018 Permalink | Reply

        Yes, I suspect that there’s an inversely proportional relationship between worldly success and religio-philosophical adherence…

    • Alex 2:27 pm on September 3, 2018 Permalink | Reply

      “frankly I wash dishes to clean them, for purposes of health, and sanitation, and aesthetic compatibility”

      Sounds to me like you are washing the dishes mindfully… That’s a good meditation!

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