streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 5:47 am on October 8, 2017 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: breath ( 2 ), Buddha ( 49 ), Farang ( 5 ), itch ( 2 ), meditation ( 223 ), samadhi ( 14 ), sangha, Thailand ( 76 ), Vipassana ( 16 )   

  Buddhism and the Meditation Itchy-Scratchies: Peace of Mind, Peace of body… 

  You know the routine: position cushion on the floor, position butt on the cushion, position body on the butt spine straight crack shoulders eyes closed breath focus nose focus navel focus nothing nothing breathing breathing breath breath in out in out breathe breathe hmmmm… hmmmm… breath… hmmmm… hmmmm… Donald Trump….. hmmmm… moron… hmmm… breath… hmmm… Mormon… hmmm… Buddho… hmmm… ice cream… yummm… hmmm… Buddho… hmmm… salsa… hmmmm… afrocubism… hmmmm… Pablo Picasso… hmmmm…  Matisse… hmmm… mind wandering… hmmm… wandering… hmmm…  Buddho… hmmm… breath… hmmm…

  When I first started meditating in northern Thailand my mother-in-law would ask me, “Have you calmed your mind yet?”

  “Calm my mind? I’m still trying to calm my body…” (More …)

   

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  hardie karges 6:54 am on October 1, 2017 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: anatta ( 22 ), Buddhism ( 464 ), Chogyam Trungpa, Dalai Lama ( 13 ), defilements ( 4 ), DNA ( 46 ), ego ( 33 ), Hinduism ( 29 ), ISLAM ( 67 ), kilesha ( 12 ), Mahayana ( 48 ), Sam Harris ( 2 ), sangha, Theravada ( 53 ), Tibet ( 8 ), Vajrayana ( 23 ), yoga ( 6 )   

  Buddhism 301: Do I save myself, or do I save the world? Decisions decisions… 

  I’m paraphrasing, of course, but this is the question that has plagued—no, let’s say intrigued’—the sangha (Buddhist community) for two and a half millennia, more or less, if not in so many words, then in so many actions, cutting to the chase, and allowing for interpolations and extrapolations, i.e. whether to think big, farming ideas and allowing for fierce and free debate, or to think small, on the achievement of individual ‘liberation’ and the purging of ‘defilements’ from the composite makeshift personalities that we call ‘I’…

  And if that’s an oversimplification, then it’s for a worthy cause, ’cause sharper focus is what’s needed for Buddhism to escape the same fate in the West that it met in India a millennium ago, going down in defeat largely because of its inability to distinguish itself from a resurgent ultra-nationalistic Hinduism and an insurgent Islam, such that Buddhism simply got lost in the shuffle of competing meditative traditions and could no longer count on its fall-back position as the non-Hindu alternative… (More …)
   
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  hardie karges 7:19 am on September 24, 2017 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Aryan ( 13 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 163 ), DNA ( 46 ), dukkha ( 17 ), Forest Tradition ( 3 ), genome ( 5 ), haplogroup ( 4 ), Hindu ( 9 ), mitochondrial ( 2 ), Noble Truth ( 2 ), Pali ( 21 ), sangha, suffering ( 31 ), Thailand ( 76 )   

  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 …)