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  hardie karges 4:26 am on February 25, 2024 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Abhidharma ( 5 ), Buddhism ( 434 ), compassion ( 14 ), Dalai Lama ( 12 ), ego ( 33 ), karuna ( 9 ), lovingkindness ( 16 ), meditation ( 195 ), metta ( 25 ), nirvana ( 13 ), philosophy ( 105 ), rebirth ( 37 ), religion ( 160 ), self ( 20 ), spirituality   

  Kindness and Compassion are the Heart and Soul of Buddhism  

  

  Compassion has no expiration date. It’s never too late to make new friends with old enemies. This is one of the secrets to a good life: no grudges, no scorched earth, no retribution, and, most importantly, no regrets. It should be simple, since you don’t really have to do anything, but in fact it’s one of the hardest things ever, so attached as we are to our egos and our ‘face’ that we spend so much time and effort saving, lest someone steal it right off of our heads, haha. 

  The Dalai Lama once said that his religion was simple, and that’s kindness, which is compassion, in a word, same thing, same time, and that’s Buddhism, too, in a word. All the elaborate lists and literary expositions that comprise the Buddhist Abhidharma are unnecessary to describe the heart of Buddhism, so why waste so much time and effort when you can put it all in a word, or two? Because yes, there is another word that needs to be included, and if karuna is the first word, then metta is the second, often translated as ‘lovingkindness’ or simple ‘friendliness.’ 

  Put the two words together, and you’ve captured the heart and soul of Buddhism. In fact, modern standard Thai language does indeed often combine the two words for extra effect, so mettakaruna is a word or phrase that you will hear often there. Suffering is famously the back-story to Buddhism, that and its cessation, and that’s pretty much all you need to know. The cosmology of self and rebirth are important but debatable, IMHO, and thus of secondary importance, ditto nirvana. The analogy to Christian forgiveness might be worth mentioning but it isn’t necessary. Be good; don’t be bad. It’s that simple. 

   

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  hardie karges 3:35 am on January 28, 2024 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 434 ), emptiness ( 30 ), Hardie Karges ( 245 ), meditation ( 195 ), philosophy ( 105 ), POETRY ( 12 ), prayer ( 2 ), shunya ( 11 ), shunyata ( 23 ), silence ( 13 ), spirituality, zero ( 13 ), zero point   

  Buddhism and the Power of Silence  

  

  Words once spoken cannot be taken back. Actions once committed cannot be retracted. Silence is better than violence. This is one of the hidden little gems of Buddhism, the value of silence. And other than the emphasis on meditation, it’s something that doesn’t often get mentioned—until now. Because here and now, in the modern age and the Western world, the noise is almost deafening, and the calls to engage are never-ending, no matter that much of that engagement is cruel and disheartening.  

  As a ‘digital creator’ on Facebook, I get it all the time, as if non-engagement were synonymous to incompetence. But nothing could be further from the truth. Silence is not violence, and BLM (Black Lives Matter) should know this. MLK (Martin Luther King) certainly knew it well, as did Mohandas K. (Mahatrma) Gandhi. Silence is one of the most powerful weapons in the world, in fact, but it is also much more than that. As the operating method of meditation, it can save souls (people) and so, it can also save nations.  

  If silence is the zero point for meditation, then meditation is the zero point for life. In this analogy, silence is like the zero (shunya) for which emptiness (shunyata) is named and can be thought of like the mathematical zero as the point between positive and negative (existence or non-existence?) numbers or the absolute zero temperature beneath which there is no lower, or even the zero-point energy of quantum physics as that point closest to absolute stillness. That’s the goal of meditation, insight optional, and that’s the goal of life, if only for a moment, now and again, always and forever. 
   
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  hardie karges 4:06 am on January 20, 2024 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Branhmanism, Buddhism ( 434 ), Divine Feminine, dualism ( 5 ), Hardie Karges ( 245 ), Hinduism ( 29 ), Indra ( 2 ), meditation ( 195 ), mindfulness ( 35 ), non-dualism ( 11 ), philosophy ( 105 ), religion ( 160 ), Sanskrit ( 22 ), spirituality   

  Buddhism and the Divine Feminine  

  

  Is a creator God a product of patriarchy? Probably. Buddhism doesn’t need it, regardless. Buddhism embodies the Divine Feminine, whether it knows it or not. This goes way back, of course, even before the Abrahamic religions, at least as far back as the Sanskrit-era Dyaus Pitr (think Deus Pater) ‘Sky Father’ of the proto-Hindu Rigveda, and probably before that. But Sky Father was always with Earth Mother Prithvi Mata, and that pretty much defines the Hindu/Buddhist dichotomy that dominated the philosophical debates of 500 BCE India, Hinduism the more male-dominant principle, Buddhist the more female-dominant. 

  And this is important, even if it is seldom stated, or even acknowledged, given the lesser status of Buddhist nuns, in comparison to their male counterparts. But it’s there, and it’s true, from what I can see, and that is good. It means that Buddhism is non-agressive, and that is purpose-built, in stark opposition to the early Brahmanistic war god Indra, which Buddhism refuses to acknowledge as its heritage. It also means that Buddhism is more concerned with down-to-earth issues of kindness, and craving, than abstract considerations of dualism vs. non-dualism. 

  Thus, Buddhism embodies many of the qualities often associated with the ‘divine feminine,’ such as ‘intuition, nurturing, creativity, empathy, and wisdom’ (www.anahana.com). So, it should be unnecessary to say that Buddhism is not a conquering religion, unless you count the hearts and minds conquered, not bodies inscribed with epithets and enlisted in future wars with imaginary enemies. Buddhism is better than that. Conquer yourself and you will have conquered the world, your world… 

   
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  hardie karges 3:10 am on January 6, 2024 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: compassion ( 14 ), Hardie Karges ( 245 ), karma ( 51 ), kindness ( 16 ), love ( 49 ), New Age ( 8 ), religion ( 160 ), spirituality   

  Buddhism 102: Kindness is Contagious  

  

  Disease is not the only thing that is contagious. So is kindness, and compassion, and the smile of a stranger. That is how karma works. What goes around comes around. And if that sounds all New-Agey and superstitious, I suspect that it could be proven, if we only knew how to properly frame the questions, to probe the parameters of truth, in an open field without any markers nor metrics. After all, just how do you measure kindness and compassion, anyway? I mean: you can’t just walk into the supermarket and order a quart or a liter or it, now, can you? I wish, haha… 

  But what you can do is ‘pay it forward’, i.e. not just return every kindness with a kindness as an equal and equitable ‘payback’, but initiate such actions without any promise of a return on that investment. Because, if you’re expecting a return, then it’s not an act of kindness at all, but an act of business, interest on principal, compounded annually, if not quarterly. But true kindness is entirely selfless, by its very nature, and so avoids the back-slapping and hand-clapping which is the minimum that most people expect as reward for their generosity. 

  Why have most nations adopted some form of religion at some point in their history, anyway? To enlarge the circle of friends, of course, and hopefully improve people’s lives in the process. Because, without it, the only people you can trust are your immediate family, and beyond that, maybe even your so-called ‘race’. Religion is a way to transcend racism, and what is religion if not a circle of kindness? The challenge is to include everyone in that circle. Because then karma is not only a likely story, but a living breathing reality… and the meek will inherit the earth.  

   
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  hardie karges 3:57 am on December 17, 2023 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: duality ( 6 ), Hardie Karges ( 245 ), homo sapiens ( 7 ), language ( 149 ), logic ( 14 ), meditation ( 195 ), monkey mind ( 4 ), patanjali, samadhi ( 13 ), samatha ( 4 ), silence ( 13 ), spirituality, yoga ( 6 )   

  Buddhism: Silence is Better than Language…  

  

  You can say ‘namaste’ all day and prove little. You can say nothing and prove much. Or you can sit in samadhi all day and prove everything, ‘samadhi’ being that meditative state of total absorption, in which the threads of language are locked out at the gates without credentials for entry. Because language is that element of mental activity tainted with the brush of corruption, duality at its most obvious, subjects verbing adjectivized objects so adverbially that prepositions threaten to revolt and assume post-positions, conjunctions just looking for somewhere to put an ‘and,’ ‘but’ only ‘if’ conditions can be avoided, so tenses only indicative, nothing subjunctive allowed. 

  All of which is to say that there’s more to life than language, OR logic, and often it’s even positively negative, if you care to find some meditative transcendence for even a moment in this increasingly noisy world or ours, crowded and clusterf*cked almost beyond recognition of the sublime Nature that it once was, notwithstanding the sporadic violence inherent to that same Nature.  

  Language is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it allowed homo sapiens to subdue, or outdo, all its competitors in the competition for the low-hanging fruit of life, those skills allowing multiple individuals to act as one for the purpose of being ‘firstest with the mostest,’ skills indispensable for survival when life is on the line and food is not yet on the table. This can be proven conclusively with the timelines of our competitors’ mutual demise in the face of sapiens’ overwhelming superiority. 

  On a more practical day-to-day basis, it’s simply an easy recipe for mindfulness, antidote for the common complaint of ‘monkey mind,’ during which our minds are so possessed of internal chatter that it’s virtually impossible to think properly, much less achieve some level of ‘calm abiding,’ i.e. samatha. So, ironically, the very thing that is our military strength is our existential downfall—unless we can control it. This is the unique sapiens challenge to zoological superiority and key to the future ascendance of our species—or not. Thus, Buddhist practice is more than an individual accomplishment; it’s truly intrinsic to our survival. 

   
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  hardie karges 7:44 am on June 26, 2016 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Eckhart Tolle ( 13 ), identity ( 3 ), LGBTQ ( 2 ), sex ( 39 ), spirituality   

  Religion and Identity; Sex and Spirituality; Penises and Breasts… 

  

  Christian church in Ethiopia

  Now I have no problem with the LGBTQ community in general and would like to think I could even qualify as the ‘A’ in ‘ally’, not ‘alley’, that sometimes puts the pickle on that little alphabetic sandwich, attached by wooden toothpick and a little smile to last a little while, even though I don’t deliberately seek gays out, though seem to usually have one or two as friends, BUT…

  …that doesn’t mean that I buy the entire narrative, especially the ‘born this way’ rap which was once de rigueur back in the days of last-line don’t-attack-the-victim defense, very quaint and old-fashioned charming now that ‘gender fluidity’ is all the rage, and there is increasingly little to be ashamed of in the first place, so no reason to claim DNA as a defense, if there is no offense, and given the lack of any proof of a ‘gay gene’ any more than a ‘basketball gene’ or even a ‘black gene’, really…

  …given that pigment genes tend to mix, somehow, much less a ‘backpacker gene’, but what concerns me is the identity with sexuality—any sexuality—in the first place. Is this all we’ve accomplished in the last ten thousand years, to come to blows (no pun) over who gets access to whose genitals, and by what means and for what purpose? I guess so. Strike one for civilization, i.e. city-fication.

  We were better off in the wild, where queer was queer, and that was that, no big deal and nothing to fear. Now we’re forced to draw the lines of decency, circling the wagons, dotting ‘I’s and crossing ‘T’s, consulting the prophets and taking a loss.  What a waste of time, and what a loss of dignity, that we’re so busy greasing the wheels (pun) of our lower chakras, that we have no time for the larger questions with the trickier answers, enigmas all wrapped up in riddles and garnished with mysteries left to lightly ferment… (More …)

   
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  hardie karges 9:29 am on July 19, 2015 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Facebook ( 18 ), social media ( 13 ), spirituality   

  Spirituality on the Half-Shell: Social Medium, Neither Rare nor Well-Done 

  I just joined a ‘Spiritualism’ group on Facebook last week, hoping for something more than the usual cat videos and pictures of everybody’s good ol’ granddad. It was pretty disturbing, frankly. First of all, ‘Spiritualism’ apparently not only does not include religion, but religion is outright forbidden, in fact. So I thought maybe my definition of ‘Spiritualism’ was imprecise, skewed if not screwed, but if it is, then so is theirs. They even use the term ‘ Spirituality’ interchangeably, so I definitely know what that means. Am I the only one who sees a clear connection between religion and spirituality? Duh…

  Second, the leader of the group (“We are all one”) is apparently so paranoid and back-biting, that not only will he talk trash against a competing  (!?) FB group (“they talk about religion—even politics”), that he will kick you out of his group if he sees that you are on theirs, too. Now that’s truly weird. That makes Scientology look positively Unitarian, if not Universalist. He makes it repeatedly clear that he can and will control the flow of info on his page in his group. If no religion is allowed, then I guess that leaves only New Age (fill-in-the-blank)… (More …)