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Engaged Buddhism through Thích Nhất Hạnh’s “The Fourteen Precepts of Engaged Buddhism,” which serve as guidelines for living with a stronger social awareness:

Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. Buddhist systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth.

Do not think the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice nonattachment from views in order to be open to receive others’ viewpoints. Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and in the world at all times.

Do not force others, including children, by any means whatsoever, to adopt your views, whether by authority, threat, money, propaganda, or even education. However, through compassionate dialogue, help others renounce fanaticism and narrow-mindedness.

Do not avoid suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who are suffering, including personal contact, visits, images and sounds. By such means, awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world.

Do not accumulate wealth while millions are hungry. Do not take as the aim of your life fame, profit, wealth, or sensual pleasure. Live simply and share time, energy, and material resources with those who are in need.

Do not maintain anger or hatred. Learn to penetrate and transform them when they are still seeds in your consciousness. As soon as they arise, turn your attention to your breath in order to see and understand the nature of your hatred.

Do not lose yourself in dispersion and in your surroundings. Practice mindful breathing to come back to what is happening in the present moment. Be in touch with what is wondrous, refreshing, and healing both inside and around you. Plant seeds of joy, peace, and understanding in yourself in order to facilitate the work of transformation in the depths of your consciousness.

Do not utter words that can create discord and cause the community to break. Make every effort to reconcile and resolve all conflicts, however small.

Do not say untruthful things for the sake of personal interest or to impress people. Do not utter words that cause division and hatred. Do not spread news that you do not know to be certain. Do not criticise or condemn things of which you are not sure. Always speak truthfully and constructively. Have the courage to speak out about situations of injustice, even when doing so may threaten your own safety.

Do not use the Buddhist community for personal gain or profit, or transform your community into a political party. A religious community, however, should take a clear stand against oppression and injustice and should strive to change the situation without engaging in partisan conflicts.

Do not live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature. Do not invest in companies that deprive others of their chance to live. Select a vocation that helps realise your ideal of compassion.

Do not kill. Do not let others kill. Find whatever means possible to protect life and prevent war.

Possess nothing that should belong to others. Respect the property of others, but prevent others from profiting from human suffering or the suffering of other species on Earth.

Do not mistreat your body. Learn to handle it with respect. Do not look on your body as only an instrument. Preserve vital energies (sexual, breath, spirit) for the realisation of the Way. (For brothers and sisters who are not monks and nuns:) Sexual expression should not take place without love and commitment. In sexual relations, be aware of future suffering that may be caused. To preserve the happiness of others, respect the rights and commitments of others. Be fully aware of the responsibility of bringing new lives into the world. Meditate on the world into which you are bringing new beings.

~Thích Nhất Hạnh

 

 

And I somewhat sheepishly admit that that made me think of this:

 

☮

If the first step of your Peace Plan is to kill all your enemies, then you don't really have a Peace plan.

The Only Difference

Turning toward home,
I bend to collect a wrinkled postcard at the curb:
an advertisement for the Monet exhibit. How I loved
those paintings when I was younger, all of them nearly the same:
haystack, haystack, haystack. The only difference
the season and time of day, which is to say
they are like this grief these months later:
all the same but for the light.

~Amanda Moore, from “Everything Is a Sign Today” in Requeening, ©2021

Arrr

Someone posted this:

And it reminded me of this:

I accidentally bought a pirated copy of Modern Family Season 10 on Ebay.  I didn't notice at first-- the sound and video quality were excellent, and the box looked the same. 

But there were two giveaways:  the menu was slightly different, and we didn't have to sit through anti-piracy warnings every episode.

It was actually pretty nice; five stars, would definitely do it again.

Haiku

What is haiku?

A poem in three lines,

With Seventeen syllables 

Of five, seven, five

 

~via Celebrity Death Haiku

Longing

Excerpted from Steppenwolf by Herman Hess, ©1927:

You have often been sick to death of life, haven’t you, longing to see the back of it? You are yearning to leave this world behind, the time and reality we live in, and to exchange them for a different reality more suited to you, a world that is timeless.

Steppenwolf is in the public domain in the original German, but the first English translation is still a few years away.

For What It's Worth

There's battle lines being drawn
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong…

Full lyrics HERE.

A Tremendous Blue Sky, and then…

Problem

 "Life presents you a situation… It is you who labels it right or wrong, good or bad, easy or difficult.  It is your viewpoint that it is a problem.  In reality it is just a situation.  Instead of labelling it, channel your energy into how to grow through it gracefully.  This is the art of living."  ~Osho

⁕

"The problem is not the problem.  The problem is your attitude about the problem.  Do you understand?"  ~Captain Jack Sparrow

God's Silence

From the movie Winter Light, ©1963 (source):

Algot Frövik, Sexton: This emphasis on physical pain. It couldn't have been all that bad. It may sound presumptuous of me, but in my humble way, I've suffered as much physical pain as Jesus. And his torments were rather brief. Lasting some four hours, I gather? I feel that he was tormented far worse on an other level. Maybe I've got it all wrong. But just think of Gethsemane, Vicar. Christ's disciples fell asleep. They hadn't understood the meaning of the last supper, or anything. And when the servants of the law appeared, they ran away. And Peter denied him. Christ had known his disciples for three years. They'd lived together day in and day out-- but they never grasped what he meant. They abandoned him, to the last man. And he was left alone. That must have been painful. Realizing that no one understands. To be abandoned when you need someone to rely on-- that must be excruciatingly painful. But the worse was yet to come. When Jesus was nailed to the cross-- and hung there in torment-- he cried out-- "God, my God!  Why hast thou forsaken me?" He cried out as loud as he could. He thought that his heavenly father had abandoned him. He believed everything he'd ever preached was a lie. The moments before he died, Christ was seized by doubt. Surely that must have been his greatest hardship? God's silence.

Who WIll Never

 

The Failure of Language in the Face of Catastrophe

Nick Cave in conversation with Sean O'Hagan, Faith, Hope, and Carnage, ©2022:

Yes, the small things that people say or do are often the things that stay with you.  So true, the small but monumental gesture.

There's a vegetarian takeaway place in Brighton called Infinity, where I would eat sometimes.  I went there the first time I'd gone out in public after Arthur had died.  There was a woman who worked there and I was always friendly with her, just the normal pleasantries, but I liked her.  I was standing in the queue and she asked me what I wanted and it felt a little strange, because there was no acknowledgement of anything.  She treated me like anyone else, matter-of-factly, professionally.  She gave me my food and I gave her the money and-- ah, sorry, it's quite hard to talk about this-- as she gave me back my change, she squeezed my hand.  Purposefully.

It was such a quiet act of kindness.  The simplest and most articulate of gestures, but, at the same time, it meant more than all that anybody had tried to tell me-- you know, because of the failure of language in the face of catastrophe.  She wished the best for me, in that moment.  There was something truly moving to me about that simple, wordless act of compassion.

There is a local doughnut shop nearby run by a Korean family, and I'd drop by about once a week and buy three doughnuts to take and share with my parents.

One of the hardest moments for me was buying doughnuts after my Mom died.  I walked in and the clerk asked brightly, "Three doughnuts?"

"No, just two now."

And I will never forget the way she looked at me.

Old Rivers

This is a weird one:

Full lyrics HERE.

The Rain

 

Oh, when those instruments come rushing in on the second verse!

Full lyrics HERE.

Prop.

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."  ~Aldous Huxley

The most stark example right now is immigration.

They never use the words "people" or "humans," they are careful to always use the term "immigrant."  They are always addressed collectively as horde, never as individuals with names and stories.

And there is a reason for that.

 

Meditation

"You just have to knock on the door. I was lucky to find meditation. It’s all within. Understand what you are. It’s a matter of turning your consciousness inward in order to then realize that God is in there, and then you can see him outside too. It’s just a shift in attitude, really."  ~George Harrison

⁕

"Meditation is not what you think. You sit in absolute silence and your mind starts going over all your movies. During that process, you become so familiar with the scripts you keep in your life that you end up getting sick of them. Then you realize that the person you think you are is nothing but a complicated script you spend most of your energy on. After a more thorough examination, you discover your personality disgusts you. And that’s because it’s not really you. If you feel terrified enough about that personality, you spontaneously allow it to fade away. And then, if you’re lucky, you can experience yourself without the distortion of that personality."  ~Leonard Cohen

⁕

“To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.”  ~Ursula K. Le Guin

⁕

"In our everyday lives, when we aren't attentive and mindful, we very often get swept up in a chain of associations and lose touch with what's happening in the here and now. The same thing can happen during meditation. Our objective when we meditate is to know what we're thinking as we're thinking it, and to know what we're feeling as we're feeling it instead of mentally ending up on another continent, wondering how we got there. When waves of memories, plans, and random thinking seem overwhelming, focus on breathing softly without forcing the breath. This will begin to settle your mind."  ~Sharon Salzberg

Altered States

 

When I was in my early twenties, my Dad worked in a different city.  He became ill with shingles, and I dropped everything and drove four hours to get to him.  When I arrived I saw that he was clearly in a bad state, so I immediately drove him to the hospital.  He was there for three days.

What I didn't know about shingles was that it is really The Chickenpox Part II.  The virus lays dormant in your body and eventually resurfaces.  I had never had chicken pox, so I was susceptible.  A little over a week  later I broke out with the telltale itchy sores.

Chicken pox is not a problem for children, but it can be very serious for adults.  My Dad should have taken me to the hospital.

He did not.

He left me alone and went to work, and as I laid on the bed soaking wet with fever suddenly the apartment began to shake.  Someone was playing "In The Air" so loudly that the windows were rattling and items were falling off the shelves.  I looked out the sliding glass doors and saw a 200-foot Phil Collins glaring in at me.

I passed out.

When my Dad came home I started to tell him what had happened, and that was when I realized it had been an extremely vivid hallucination. 

It kind of ruined that song for me.

An Unsmiling Guy

"I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you'd have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, it's a kind of blessing. It's certainly an opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you're going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights. … It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, à la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears."  ~Terence McKenna

A manual for living with defeat

Full lyrics HERE.

Those are the most hard-hitting lyrics Cohen ever wrote.

The idea of "home" is something that's a little alien to me.

I know I've told you this before:  I dropped out of school in the tenth grade, and I had been in twelve different schools.  Every few months my parents would tear me away from all that was familiar and plunk me down in a new location with new people and new expectations.

I never felt settled.  I still don't.

Any song that has home in it grabs my attention.  "I have no home."  "I'm going home."

It's something I've always yearned for and will never have.

What If

 

"What if - instead - your body was just a radio tuning into many different 'radio stations' and absolutely everything you consumed was altering your mind in subtle ways? Everything you eat, all of the air and gasses you breathe, the amount of exercise you do, these are all factors in affecting your state of consciousness."  ~via VeganPsychaelicElephant