streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 9:17 am on April 15, 2023 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: awareness ( 2 ), capitalism ( 22 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 131 ), dukkha ( 13 ), eternal life ( 2 ), global warming ( 14 ), mindfulness ( 13 ), patriarchy, sati ( 11 ), suffering ( 16 ), Virtual Reality ( 2 )   

  Buddhist Mindfulness: No Shortcuts to Salvation  

  

  

  Mindfulness, sati, requires some awareness of the unpleasant details, also, unfortunately or fortunately, for this is the nature of existence, the existence of suffering and the ways to ameliorate it, on a path to cessation, if not the twenty-five-dollar cure that we’ve grown so accustomed to expect, in some binary fashion, now you see it and now you don’t, as if there were indeed magic bullets that can hit every target, with never a miss—at least in theory. 

  But, until someone can bio-engineer us with eternal life or create us a Virtual Reality so perfect that we can’t tell the difference, then the (not-so?) harsh reality is that each and every one of us will die, later if not sooner, peaceably if not in agony. And this is the truth of Buddhism, that suffering is ubiquitous, and implacable, if not the all-embracing disastrophe that it so recently was. But that was likely due to the dubious emboldenment of patriarchy, in distinct contrast to the previous matriarchal survivalists that sustained us for so many millennia. 

  But the point is that Buddhism is not pessimistic, but realistic, and the obvious corollary would be that the silly-eyed optimism of capitalistic Christianity is itself the cause of many of our problems, especially global warming, for which it is singularly unprepared to offer a credible solution, given the demands of economic growth. But Buddhism can offer that solution: conscious mindful existence that accentuates self-sufficiency, not the excesses of abundance and infinity that capitalism and Christianity demand.  

  In other words: less can indeed be more, in quality if not quantity, and that is the important consideration, now, isn’t it? Yes, I think that it is. And that is also the cautionary tale with so-called ‘mindfulness.’ Be careful which way you turn your gaze of awareness, because you will have to deal with the circumstances in your field of vision. And that is good. Buddhism in its origins never pretended to transcendence. This is the real world we find ourselves in, and that is the challenge… 

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  hardie karges 11:11 am on December 24, 2020 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: childbirth, feminine, patriarchy, sacred   

  Sacred Femininity and Magical Childbirth… 

  

  The feminine was sacred, when populations were smaller, and survival was doubtful. Thus reproduction was divine, and the act of childbirth truly magic. Some have even speculated that the connection between sex and childbirth was unknown until relatively recently, but I doubt that. The causal connections would seem to be too obvious. Likewise the mathematical connection between scarcity of life and the sanctity of life is also obvious, not to mention the role of the primitive mother, who could bear only once every three years, at most, so as not to be burdened with more than she can physically carry. The psychology implications were secondary, and the rise of patriarchy tentative. The biggest cities seem to have the loneliest people…

   
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  hardie karges 1:00 pm on December 6, 2020 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Alpha male ( 5 ), Aryan ( 13 ), Buddhism ( 315 ), Marija Gimbutas, matriarchy, Old Europe, patriarchy, WAR ( 10 )   

  Buddhism in a World at War with Itself… 

  

  Fight the war within your heart, and so leave the world at peace. That largely summarizes the Buddhist philosophy in a nutshell, with regard to the world at large, at least. And that was always a source of some consternation for me, at first, I coming from a Western country with a strong sense of action, freedom, and individualism. So to simply turn the eyes downward, or turn one’s head aside, hardly seems to be the correct way to deal with problems.

  But it works, at least to a certain extent, by forgoing the bluff and bluster, and most of all the violence, and simply walking away calmly. In fact, that’s the first thing I learned in my Kung Fu class, for all the fancy moves and sleights of hand: just walk away; and 90% of the time it will work. The problem arises when there is no place to walk to, whether for lack of space or circumstances.

  But this is a problem that the ‘minority’ groups of the world have encountered since Day One. As long as they have some place to escape to, then problems do not have to ‘come to a head,’ so to speak, and everybody is happy, more or less, and the world’s largest ‘races’ occupy the choicest valleys and prime sea coasts, and the most valuable trade routes between them.

  And this is largely tolerable until the world’s population starts to surpass a billion or two, and then quadruples in population over the next hundred years. Welcome to 2020, and lots of hindsight. Now there is no place left to hide, and that didn’t always work so well, anyway. As hard as it is for us moderns to believe, there was a time not so long ago when young men were anxious to go to war, for reasons that I’m not so sure about.

  Now I suppose it may be an unhealthy craving to be too attached to one’s own life, but not for the purpose of violence, I wouldn’t think. But this is the age of patriarchy, and such are the ways and means of its workings. Only one man is needed to fertilize the wombs of a hundred women, as any self-aggrandizing Alpha male knows, and the rest are free to rumble. Ouch.

  Oh, how I long for the pre-Aryan Old Europe of Marija Gimbutas, the Old Asia, Old America, and the Old Africa of matriarchy, when women’s value was paramount, in direct proportion to the need to multiply the species, long before unemployed men began the long division of slicing and dicing body parts for mass internment, ashes to ashes and all that rap. But there is another clause in the dharma of Buddhism that pertains to this discussion and that is the need to remove the causes and conditions of suffering.

  And assuming that these causes and conditions are originally internal, then they must be applied to all persons equally, across the board. If women refused to submit to the Alpha males for purposes of reproduction, would the problem simply go away? It might be worth a try. Everything is perfect in its imperfection. It is just what it is, Trump notwithstanding, nor left standing. Opinions fall flat in the face of reality…