Tempest in a Teapot

I've gotten back in my groove this year, with meditation becoming a daily practice. I'm not up to two hours a day of walking/sitting, but I'm getting in a good 45-60 minutes. It's like anything you practice and then cut

Misunderstanding Buddhism

This is an excellent piece insofar as it compiles various quotes critical of Buddhism from older Catholic sources. It's a fine basket of old chestnuts and provides ample material for a looooong blog post. Ecumenical dialogue has been an obsession among Western churchmen for some decades now, and

2024 Year in Review

It's not too early to do a self-indulgent entry on the previous year. I lead an incredibly dull life outwardly but inwardly, the last few years have been quite wonderful. 2021, 22 and 23 were good years for me spiritually. 2024 in contrast saw a gradual decline

Autumn Ramble

One thought that occurred to me about a year or two into the practice was that it was really about dissociating ourselves from the very things that give us a sense of me, myself, and I. The Buddha, in his discourses, returned again and again to the question of what

Equities will be the last to go

Our American Empire is backed by a petrol dollar. It is the world's reserve currency, and every country that wishes to buy or sell oil on the international market must have a central bank fully stocked with greenbacks to do business. This basic fact means that America can

Dummocracy

Thursday night was the first debate between Biden and Trump in the 2024 race. I lasted about twenty minutes before tapping out. Decades ago, I worked for almost a year in nursing home as a certified nursing assistant. The world was different then and I was young, directionless and looking

Preparing for War

I posted a few days ago in my Memorial Day reflection that the New Americans have never been conscripted to fight in one of the empire's many wars. The last active conscription was at the height of the Vietnam War, and it didn't go over very

Memorial Day 2024

Today is Memorial Day, and I went to work. In my decades in corporate America, I've never worked on Memorial Day until now. This year is different. Many companies now are doing away with the traditional calendar of July 4th, Memorial Day, and so on, and just giving

Learned Helplessness for the Masses

Learned helplessness is the behavior exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control. The behavior includes lethargy, boredom, depression, and non-responsiveness to negative environmental conditions, which would, under normal circumstances, lead to the subject acting so as to achieve a neutral or positive position. If

Turning Spiritual Gains into Dead Idols

Meditation for me of late has become de-energized along a few different lines. I'll share some here. I have made progress, and this has turned into a mental assertion that is gradually eroding the energy that made the progress possible in the first place. Think of it

Devotion

There are two ways in which world religions bring a person into a state of felicitous wholesomeness, where there is a temporary cessation of the Three Poisons of Greed, Hatred, and Delusion. The first is bhakti, which is Sanskrit for devotion, piety, worship, and faith. The second is taking refuge

Powerful Women

Since the advent of modern women's liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, the period of so-called First Wave feminism, everything in American society has gotten worse. Middle brows are furrowing already as the phrase "correlation does not... uh... causation..." begins to form on chapped lips.