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  hardie karges 4:20 am on December 30, 2023 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: awareness ( 5 ), Buddhism ( 428 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 160 ), Hardie Karges ( 239 ), ISLAM ( 67 ), meditation ( 189 ), mindfulness ( 34 ), passion, philosophy ( 101 ), religion ( 158 ), suffering ( 28 )   

  Buddhism in the Balance, Aware and Mindful…  

  

  You don’t have to fight for your religion, like Christians do. You don’t have to surrender to your religion, like Muslims do. You can just be, right in the center, with eyes open or closed, aware and mindful, with no particular judgements to make either way, good or bad, offensive or non-offensive. This is the way Buddhism works, simple yet effective, with no ribbons or bows, and no deep bows, except the ones you make to the senior monk when in his presence.  

  Christianity is a religion of passion: weeping, wailing and all that gospel. Islam is a religion of submission. Buddhism is a way of life dispassionate, quiet, serene, full of passion only in the original sense of passion as suffering, the stuff of life in this material world, long before someone decided that it could be fun, as long as someone else was suffering more or worse than you. Because suffering exists, whether we are in the throes of it or not, and the only way out is to give it no quarter.  

  So, the way to deal with suffering is to remove its source of sustenance, the craving and lust which it consumes for breakfast and lunch, hunger and thirst of the craven kind, crude and rude, cowardly and unforgiving in its lack of moral distinction. But this kind of turpitude depends on negligence for its survival, inattention to all detail and the passive acceptance of all things most easily proffered. Buddhism has no such luxury. Buddhism demands awareness, and mindfulness, and wakefulness to the sleepy dream that is all too often the standard for life. It’s never too late to meditate… 

   

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  hardie karges 4:09 am on June 24, 2023 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 428 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 160 ), Hardie Karges ( 239 ), language ( 144 ), love ( 49 ), meditation ( 189 ), metta ( 25 ), Middle Path ( 53 ), passion, suffering ( 28 ), Virtual Reality ( 9 )   

  Buddhism, Love, and the Middle Path to Survival  

  

  Europeans and Americans live to fall in love, and many other countries and languages aren’t much better. Live to fall, wow! In the Thai language the equivalent expression would be to get ‘lost in love,’ not much different. But Buddhist metta is better than that, all the best parts of love and none of the bad, friendship mostly. You can be kind and still be balanced. But this is a hard lesson to teach, because we’re hooked on passion like junkies on the hard stuff, and there’s not too much that we can do about it, even if we wanted to. Or can we? Of course, we can. And it’s no accident that the original meaning of the word ‘passion’ is ‘suffering,’ just like that for which Buddhism is so famous. 

  It’s just that at some point we started to like all that excess emotion, just like we began to ‘love our lives,’ while Eastern ascetics continued to renounce the pleasures of flesh and fish, just as they continue to do to this very day. I suppose that the Western attitude is that if we try hard enough, we just might create that eternal life that Jesus promised us all along. Does Virtual Reality count? It might have to, if we’re serious about that as our goal…or, maybe we could just train our minds and tame our desires to a more acceptable level that allows for plenty of free time and a healthy dose of creativity, also. 

  Bingo, the Middle Path is always the solution, not passivity nor stress tests, just good honest old-fashioned hard work, complete with rationality, such that extremes of thought and opinion are rejected in favor of more conciliatory positions. In other words, you might gain less than the wildest stock option, but in return, you are also likely to lose less if your risks fall short of the mark. But that’s more than a conservative business portfolio decision. That’s a principle of life: make steady gains going forward, with always the option to change direction with any new information that accompanies the passage of time. That’s the Buddhist Middle Path. We’re playing for keeps here. 
   
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  hardie karges 8:16 am on March 11, 2023 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 428 ), caste system ( 2 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 160 ), dialectic ( 13 ), dispassion ( 3 ), eternal life ( 3 ), Hardie Karges ( 239 ), Indo-European ( 5 ), Indus Valley ( 2 ), Kramer, language ( 144 ), passion, Passion of Christ, rebirth ( 37 ), religion ( 158 ), samsara ( 12 ), Seinfeld ( 2 )   

  The Passion and Dispassion of Buddhism…  

  

  

  There is no worse slavery than the slavery to your passion(s). And that’s a tough pill to swallow, because we tend to think of our passions as our pleasures, as though it’s only natural to be obsessed and conflicted. It’s not. But that shows the path that western culture has taken, in which our passions, which once meant ‘suffering,’ now are the focal point of our lives, and full of positive connotations—even if it kills us. So, with the ‘passion of Christ’ fully articulated as his suffering, in defeat, with no victory implied or intended, then Buddhism and Christianity are not so far apart, at least not superficially, at least not originally.  

  For both see suffering as seminal. The differences only become apparent when we realize that Christianity and the West make of suffering (i.e. passion) something to be encouraged, and sought, not something to be avoided and mitigated, as in Buddhism. The examples are many: samsara, for instance. This is a word that in the time of Buddha meant, and still means (in modern Nepali), ‘the world.’ And the Buddhists made something distinctly negative of that term, it now symbolizing the drudgery and misery of incessant rebirths. But most westerners, and especially Christians, are famous for their (our) ‘love of life’ and the world, too, of course.

  So, is the Christian belief in (and desire for) some sort of ‘eternal life’ really any different from the Buddhist rebirth? Only in that one is desired and the other abhorred, it would seem. So, if it’s not surprising that Buddhism and Christianity spring from similar roots, given their shared Indo-European proto-language and homeland, it IS a bit surprising that they’ve diverged so far from that initial starting point, and in apparently opposite directions. What would cause that? Good question. There would seem to be nothing in the physical landscape to explain the divergence, though the cultures encountered, and conquered (Indo-Europeans didn’t lose too many wars, except among themselves), differ quite radically.

  Considering that they went both ways from the Yamnaya Horizon’s original Pontic steppes, West and East, to Europe and north India, respectively, they would have encountered light-skinned ‘old Europeans’ on the one hand, and dark-skinned Indus Valley people on the other. That’s the biggest difference between the two groups right there, and may be significant, with respect to the caste system and perhaps more. But my own pet theory is that West and East were mostly playing out a dialectic of ideas, that likely dates back to 4000-3000BCE around lively campfires on high steppes and with spirited discussions.

  In this theory that dialectic is still being played out today, albeit in more ways than could ever have been imagined in the years BCE. The important thing is to not become a slave to your passions, though, even when you enjoy them, or when they cause you suffering. I’m reminded of Kramer’s statement to the ‘Soup Nazi’ in the old Seinfeld TV show: “You suffer for your art.” Touche’. Freedom FROM is the important thing in life after all, even more than freedom TO. Does it really matter whether you get the espresso or tamarind flavored ice cream today? Enjoy… 

   
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  hardie karges 6:07 am on December 26, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: anger ( 6 ), Buddhism ( 428 ), craving ( 15 ), dispassion ( 3 ), lust ( 4 ), passion, spiritual bypassing ( 5 ), Three Poisons ( 2 )   

  Buddhism Unmoved: in Support of ‘Spiritual Bypassing’ 

  

  

  Anger is an object lesson, not just about hatred, which seems obvious, but lust, craving, passion, and all the rest. It feeds on itself until it destroys something, if not everything. This is one of the Three Poisons of Buddhism, along with greed and ignorance, and it would be hard to decide which is worse. Because they all destroy whatever is in their path, like fires burning endlessly and mindlessly, when the obvious solution would be to simply let them go, to burn themselves out. If any three words could sum up the message of Buddhism, it would likely be, ‘let it go.’

  But it’s not always so easy, of course, given the nature of the beast, its very nature being its difficulty to let go. So, in a sense, they are all one, that fire burning, which we Westerners like to immortalize as something romantic called ‘passion,’ while conveniently forgetting that word’s roots in suffering, as in the ‘passion of Christ,’ nothing romantic about that. But so we fantasize, that our greed is our glory and our lust is our love, when nothing could be further from the truth, from any metaphysical viewpoint—at least, not in Buddhism.

  Because Buddhism is a religion and philosophy of dispassion, in both the traditional meaning of ending suffering and the modern meaning of avoiding strong emotion. This drives many Western psychologists crazy, of course, because they sense any emptiness as a cause of alarm. The first thing they teach in photography class is to ‘go for peak emotion.’ And the psychologists want all potential conflicts to be met head-on. To not do so is something they call ‘spiritual bypassing,’ with obvious derision. Well, if avoiding anger is ‘bypassing,’ then I heartily recommend it. For nothing good can come from anger. One man’s religion is another man’s aversion, I suppose.

   
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  hardie karges 11:18 am on June 6, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 428 ), chesed ( 2 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 160 ), Indus Valley ( 2 ), Kama Sutra, lovingkindness ( 16 ), Malcolm Gladwell, metaphysics ( 5 ), metta ( 25 ), passion, philosophy ( 101 ), religion ( 158 ), suffering ( 28 ), Vedantic, Vedic ( 5 )   

  Buddhist Sutra on Passion and Dispassion… 

  

  

  Now I make no secret of the fact that I don’t think that Buddhism is necessarily any better than any other religion, philosophy, or way of life. But it is the right one for the right time. And it is no accident that it took me more than half my life (and counting) to finally make the switch from an eclectic form of ersatz Christianity to an equally eclectic form of Buddhism, however much more authentic, I reckon. After all I never got my MA in Christian Studies, though I guess all my liberal arts courses and BA in philosophy is probably as much as that, if not more.

  But neither Buddhism nor Christianity exists in a vacuum, so what we get is a mix of the original intent in its original environment, full of causes and conditions, situations and circumstances, inspirations and misgivings, as combined with the mandates of the mandarins, the rulings of the rulers, the laws of the legislators and the cravings of the consumer. Caveat emptor. But the salient point is that both are but the metaphysical underpinnings and psychological overtones of something much larger, equally symbolic and patently manifest.

  (More …)
   
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  hardie karges 1:03 pm on September 6, 2020 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 428 ), internet ( 10 ), Middle Path ( 53 ), passion, technology ( 12 ), violence ( 7 ), Virtual Reality ( 9 )   

  Buddhism and the Balancing Act of Excellence… 

  

  Violence solves nothing. It only creates more violence. We all know it, yet still we do it, reveling in our passions and bathing all awash in our emotions unapologetic, for this is what we are taught from day one, in the wild wild west, to be passionate about what we do, and anything less is ‘middling…’

  Yet middling is part and parcel of Buddhism and its Middle Path, the avoidance of excess and its extremes, in favor of the boredom of ‘middle-ness.’ From this viewpoint happiness is as often as not the avoidance of sadness, and bliss might very well be suspect for its dalliance with extreme emotion…

  Does this attitude build great cities? Does this attitude conquer continents, and send rockets to the moon? No it probably doesn’t, and we are probably better off because of it. Because neither does it commit genocides, enslave peoples, or cause global warming, and it can produce great art…

  Has your life really improved with the invention of Roombas to Hoover your floors? Do you really need four hundred channels of mediocre programming on the idiot box to satisfy your palate? And before you point out to me that I seem to be championing mediocrity as the Middle Way between lack and excess, I wish to point out that excellence is not a threat to anyone’s existence in the same way that luxury and self-starvation are, which is the original inspiration to the Buddha’s awakening…

  The Middle Path itself is nothing if not excellent. Do you think that it is easy finding that meandering sweet spot between extremes? It’s not. It’s an exquisite, but not excruciating, balancing act. And balance is crucial to the equation. Is it even possible for an equation to not be balanced? Of course not…

  Yet our lives in the 21st century are far from being balanced. We worship the gods of technological salvation, but we are never saved. We are only further addicted to our own existential cravings. Now I love science, and technology, i.e. applied science, but I don’t really need a self-driving car. I need a city that doesn’t’ require automobiles…

  Internet is sublime, and Virtual Reality is transcendent, but what else do we need? Interstellar exploration is wonderful, but you don’t need rockets for that, just better telescopes. Our cities are sh*t-stained pits and our lives wallow in the mire, accordingly. Nature, and dharma, can, and should be, a refuge, on a good day. Cities and technology? Meh, not so much…

   
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  hardie karges 6:56 am on April 16, 2017 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 428 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 160 ), Easter ( 2 ), heaven ( 2 ), hell ( 2 ), passion, physics ( 13 ), sex ( 39 )   

  Easter and Buddhism: Religion of Passion, i.e. Suffering… 

  Christianity is the only modern religion based on emotion, rather than reason, submission, devotion or some other. Christians apparently LIKE suffering—read: passion—and so don’t avoid it but seek it out, with daredevil stunts, extreme sports, torrid romances and hot hot bodies, buffed and tanned and laid in the sand, for hours at the time, until well-done…

  Somewhere along the way we decided we liked all that and the word ‘passion’ took on new meaning, with a positive connotation, in life and in love. We’ll suffer for our art gladly, just like we’ll suffer for our sport, and we’ll suffer for love, just like Christ suffered for us, i.e. the ‘passion’, celebrated every year around this—Easter—time… (More …)

   
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  hardie karges 9:09 am on March 27, 2016 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 428 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 160 ), passion   

  Passion of Christ = Suffering of Buddha 

  

  Buddhist Temple in Laos

  “All Life is Suffering” is the First Noble Truth of Buddhism. Unfortunately that’s as far as some people ever get, the more adventurous maybe even deciding that they’ll choose ‘the way of Zen’ instead, as though they could somehow avoid those pesky Noble Truths and all that suffering. Sorry. But wait: what if the First Noble Truth were to be phrased as, “All Life is Passion?” Then would you feel any different about the outlook? Sounds Christian, doesn’t it? The original meaning is the same. The Passion of Christ is all about suffering.

  Shiny happy people are a relatively new phenomenon, and arguably predicated upon the suffering of others, but… Regardless, there’s good news. Within certain limits you can live and move and have your being, but those limits are what defines our dimension—the speed of light, the speed of sound, the average life expectancy, etc… So: that desn’t mean that you have to be miserable; no, quite the contrary. You just need to know your limits and then you can proceed accordingly. (More …)

   
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  hardie karges 9:37 am on January 24, 2016 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 428 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 160 ), JESUS ( 21 ), love ( 49 ), passion   

  Religion 101: Christianity is all about Passion; Buddhism is all about… 

  …’getting over it’, of course, as if you didn’t know that already, you who’ve probably fallen in love more times than you care to admit and probably never ‘got it right’, or maybe just once or twice, depending on how you count and who you ask, not that you let that stop you for one moment, reaping maximum rewards from a face, or a glance, or an imagined encounter while waiting in line for coffee, just waiting for something—anything—to ‘kick in’, and not just caffeine…

  Or maybe you followed his/her activities closely enough to know where he/she might be at any given time of day on any given day of the week, and you just happened to be there, too, with an enigmatic smile and a pithy salute, full of vim and vigor and whatever comes later, counting the babies by the look in his/her eyes, or at least the efforts to be made if not dying then at least trying, lucky if you don’t end up at the keyhole on your knees…

  We’ve all been there and we all understand, of course, unless you’re lucky enough to have been born so rich or so pretty that they all come to you and you can pick and choose from the daily queues—yeah, right. This is the likely origin of ego, even, that mustering of personality and passion that makes brakes squeal and hearts break. Ah, passion! That’s the word, embodied in Christ and emboldened by religion, enshrined by the centuries and embedded with our remains… (More …)