Zionism was able to take hegemony because the whole world decided to betray Jewish refugees [after World War 2]. They specifically made laws to keep out the majority of Jewish refugees. This is what allows violent [ethnic] ideologies like Zionism to take root. Jews were not the only group of traumatized refugees, rotting in camps, radicalized into movements that promise redemption through violence. It is a common tale. This is the story of the twentieth century.

A Jewish activist and historian tells Sam of KYE about the history of The General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia (or, simply, “The Bund”). This 1887–1921 leftist, Jewish political group was presciently anti-Fascist, anti-Zionist, and anti-Leninist advocating instead for cultural pluralism and federated democracy. Despite the group’s ultimate defeat, they left behind a rich legacy of activism and clarity inspiring a new generation of Jewish leftists today.

This also comes back to the fact that we are not one thing. We are many things, and in fact, we are many things in the process of becoming many more things. And that feels to me like a kind of faith

Poet Ross Gay reflects on his practice of finding delight every day and how that practice has helped him to cultivate a distinct kind of generosity and equanimity.

I’m not looking at the bright side of things, I’m just trying to look at everything. I’m very capable of looking at what’s miserable!

If he has thoughts that he could or would communicate given an actual method of augmentative or assistive communication that actually works, you are robbing him of that chance.

The mother of a non-communicative autistic child interprets her son’s random jabs as she would like… and for some reason (read: profit), the publishing world enables her delusion with “feel good” stories and a book deal.

The video presents a short but punchy cautionary tale about how communication (especially with the vulnerable) is precluded when we (as loved ones, journalists, and media consumers) fail to think critically (read: empathetically) about what we’re seeing.

‘I know I’m going to get it!’ When you think negatively like that you’re building up the emotions. The emotions you get are built up by many, many moments of unskillful attitudes and thoughts.

The nun who is foremost in misbehavior: she is a very very fascinating nun and she is one of my favorite nuns so I’m very excited for the course today!

But, of course, women were not represented at the first council. So the texts of women were not collected…

Slowly, day after day, the ice is closing over the swift-running waters of the Zanskar River, transforming it into the Chadar: the frozen river.

During the harsh winters, this frozen river becomes the only way out of the mountains of Zanskar. In this short, beautiful documentary, we see what that journey is like.

You can only use a gallon of gasoline once.

This fundamental difference between renewable and nonrenewable energy sources is why you should be excited for the energy revolution that’s already under way.

In this video, Alec explains the benefits of using technology that you don’t need to burn and addresses the land-use and minerals concerns head-on in this must-watch video for anyone who uses electricity.

The celebrations, you can see, were not subdued meditation events. Dancing, instruments being played and so on. This is hardly restrained. This is extatic worship.

All of us exist within a world of deep forces that we navigate at a level that is not what we term rational. All of us exist within a context, a late capitalist world, that is by no means rational. And in such a world, are untapped, unharnessed, undirected energies and longings going to be funneled and directed by those who figure out how to do so? Absolutely. And we’re not above that.

‘Reason’ isn’t just ‘trust scientists’ and ‘check your sources’; it is a deep re-evaluation of what life is for…

[Children in these picture books] have qualities that differ from what mature adults have, but they are valuable none-the-less. And actually, in the case of 一休 (Ikkyū) especially, he is often shown as being wiser in a certain way or at least more clever than the adults. [… They show that] naughty or mischievous behavior isn’t necessarily an endpoint, and that change and growth are possible. [… So,] you can think about how these stories work for both children and for the adult caregivers who might be reading them.

Today you have to understand charity if you want to understand Buddhism.

[Charities in the event-network style] emphasize not staying to talk… so you’re not creating more karmic entanglement… whereas the Cherish Children Fund… created long-term sustained relationships… as a form of collective karma.

People are doing very different types of projects for very different reasons… [But] feelings of care, feelings of selflessness were key ways that people demonstrated themselves as good people… ensuring that they were making merit.

little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag…

This is the world I want to live in.

The people with dyslexia proved significantly faster at recognizing the impossible figures.

So the bear became synonymous with the cycle of the seasons, even the cause of the cycle. And the willful, ritualized little death that the bear undertakes every winter a sacrifice for the world itself. The world reawakens because of this sage-like, artistic, visionary, powerful figure who secludes himself in a cave and puts himself in a dream-like state of deprivation so that spring might once again come to the world. Sound familiar?

Nostalgia is for feeling, not for expecting to be real.

As we get more influential, we can expect more scrutiny and criticism.

What role does gossip play in human societies?

Kinesthetic genius exists. Intuitive genius exists. It’s simply that we may not always identify it as ‘genius.’

Josh interviews famed anthropologist Wade Davis about the ‘genius’ of other cultures and how anthropology can teach us to listen more deeply to each other and to thus expand our notion of what it’s possible for a human to be.

This is the first important function of Sangha: it carries and conveys the many components of the Buddhist tradition that can’t be shared through writing.

A talk on the importance and benefits of practicing in community.

In themselves, the forms are indeed empty and many of them are utterly arbitrary, but they are also profound and precious.

A short exploration of Buddhist rituals and objects, the work that they do for the Saṅgha, and the various ways people relate to the religious aspects of communal Buddhist practice.

We see all kinds of orientations, where someone’s neck is twisted, you can see their chin is pointing right, the chin is pointing left, the chin is pointing up… I see everybody misaligned in some gross or subtle way. When they get activated and the Qi is flowing in deep meditation, the Qi is going to want to jump that gap, pass through that gate into the brain. And what’s going to happen there?

A scholar and practitioner of Chinese medicine talks about how the psychological problems that can arise in meditation often have their start, or at least early warning signs, in the body, and how a more careful attention to our bones and muscles—as well as our physical and social environments—can prevent many cases of “meditation sickness.”

The nunneries and monasteries are trying to respond to these critiques and to this question of identity but, as often times with religious institutions, the changes are slower than the changes in the societies around them.

A former Tibetan nun talks about the slowly expanding opportunities for education available to women in Tibetan monastic institutions and the challenges adapting tradition to the modern world.

Jane Goodall started asking people to consider whether we are alone on this planet.

A short tribute to an incredible scientist.

You live in the mountains a few years and then you go into town, you sit on the bus… you look at all those people and you feel, ‘Who are you struggling for?’

It’s not easy I tell you.
If you can live here,
you’re sure to arrive
in the Pure Land.

A disciple of the hermits of the Zhongnan Mountains introduces us to the lifestyle and wisdom of his masters.

So when in deep, rapturous meditation, we enter the state of flow, when we are one with the present moment, this is the ‘immortal nectar.’ This is why the Tibetan texts speak of amrita as the elixir of timeless awareness. It’s not an external liquid. It’s a byproduct of steeping in the awareness of the present moment which, when all the hormonal centers of the brain kick in, feels like being soaked in honey, basking in the nectar of the eternal ‘now.’

This podcast episode explains the meaning of honey in myths from around the world by appreciating it as an apt metaphor for the experience of trance.

Why not
tend to your own horse

A poem in response to Auden’s poem about Bruegel’s painting about the fall of Icarus asking what it is that we owe one another and what is the correct response to the tragedy of craft.

Totally focused on the specific, yet transported into the universal at the same time. This rapturous focus, in its sublime triple aspect, is the heart of human ritual experience.

The Peak’s pluralism should not be read as pure romanticism. Some speak of the Peak as uniquely harmonious, but in reality it operates like any other human space, with continual negotiations and alliances among groups evolving over time. At present, the Peak is controlled by Buddhists, who make some accommodations for pilgrims of other religions, but still place many restrictions over the summit. Religious tensions can exist, as do divisions between Sinhala and Tamil ethno-linguistic groups. Nevertheless, the mountain can also encourage cooperation. The difficulty of the climb is a source of solidarity among strangers

A 97-slide Prezi presentation showing what it’s like to climb Sri Lanka’s most famous mountain along with teaching materials and a short bibliography of further resources.

Technologies are only obvious in hindsight.

Is there a story that could be told that isn’t ultimately about the experience of being in a body?

This is the yogic process: a churning ocean, a rumbling mountain, a game of cosmic tug-of-war, transmuted poison, and a pot of nectar … all within one body—yours, mine. Imagine that.

Horse myths are almost always related to the breath. Xanthus (Ξάνθος) and Balius (Βάλιος), the two horses of Achilles (Ἀχιλλεύς), are born from the generative wind. Two horses, born of the wind, that the hero must control. The journey of the hero, in the esoteric, yogic sense, is to be a “breath-controller” or a “horse-tamer” (ἱπποδάμοιο) which is what Homer called all his heroes.

Native American horse trainers tamed their steeds sometimes by getting nose-to-nose with the horse and trading breath. Imagine standing nose-to-nose with a wild horse—the fear in its eye, the fear in yours—and breathing together. It’s a precarious place, that place between tamed and untamed, between breath-power being harnessed and being unharnessed.

Where our individual perception meets the external world: that point of focus is the juncture between inner and outer space. It’s where we and nature find union. It’s the home of the muse, of inspiration, even of what have been called ‘angels’ which the visionaries saw shining in that meeting place between the eye of the observer and the light of the observed.

it’s damaging the planet, it’s poisoning our bodies and, worst of all, we kind of have to participate in it because not participating in it is even worse.

This episode is about what it takes for a poor kid to get a college degree. Strange as it may sound, campus food at a place like Bowdoin College is a big part of the problem.

For part one of this miniseries, see Carlos Doesn’t Remember.

Our bodies and our minds are built for the pace of walking. When we use machines, they’re built to do things faster than our normal pace. Even if you’re able to accomplish a task faster, for that period it’s not as easy to accomplish the task of being in yourself. So, if it takes you 10× as long to get somewhere walking, but your goal is to be present every moment, then walking is the better way to go as opposed to taking the car

It’s the same vows, but the volume is turned up, if I may say so.

An anthropologist and Buddhist practitioner discusses her field work at the meditation center of Lapchi in Kham ཁམས (Yushu ཡུལ་ཤུལ་ Prefecture, Qinghai 青海). She discusses how the strict ascetic practices of Master Tsultrim Tarchen are inspiring a new generation of Tibetan Buddhists, touching on the role of charisma in perpetuating the Dharma and on the paradoxically social nature of renunciation.

En-‘chanted’ land is not only land that has been sung to, but land who has had its own song listened to and sung back to it: land that is understood for its own specificity. And through that understanding, the land radiates back in true expression of itself, the same way a child beams when understood—or, when sung to.

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat…

the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it

a man must do more than sell roses
where the bums go and beg—
he must keep something holy.

Would we be nearly as intelligent without animals to teach us about ourselves?

“As the tulku tradition developed, there was a lot of corruption. There were wars, and all sorts of things went on. But there was also a social structure that developed to contain that privilege.”

A short clip from Ruth Gamble’s New Books Network interview, discussing the challenges of the Tulku system in Tibetan Buddhism.

Under pressure, it’s a liquid at room temperature. If I open the valve, it’ll shoot out of this pipe and evaporate very rapidly back to a gas. The cooling effect is quite dramatic.

A brief history and explanation of refrigeration.

You needed rails and these huge engines. You needed timetables and organization. That encompassed everything that industrialization was about.

The meditation was followed with the answers to a few questions, including whether “sending metta” to an ill person makes a difference, on having many teachers, and the role of ethics (“sīla”) in meditation.

Bruges in the 15th century was the hub of international trade, and people came from all over the world wanting to get rich, including the Arnolfinis

Engineers have done amazing things to turn this plentiful, shiny rock into the century’s most impactful piece of technology.

The famous cultural hero, King Sejo (1455–1468), at first he put in place, on the advice of his officials, very punitive and strict regulations around Buddhism. But as time went on, he got sick of the [Confucian State Council] he was dealing with. He started to think that his officials were nuts, I mean actually crazy. You can see in his documents, he himself was being driven crazy having to deal with these people. And the whole issue was Buddhism. They want the recurring thing: to convince a King to go the whole way and kill off Buddhism once and for all.

[By the 16th century], they kind of succeed in [stripping Buddhism of legal recognition] but there’s an unhappy conclusion: it didn’t atrophy and die. In fact, something worse happened: because they removed the government oversight of Buddhism, it started to flourish!

If you are a viewer in Canada you are very likely to own a type of screwdriver that viewers outside of Canada are very likely to have never seen or even heard of in their life.

The history of the Robertson screw.

Minds need a context. Mind needs fire and water, breath and ritual, it needs stories and song… it needs to establish a living relationship with those that came before and those yet to come, to offer in devotion and to enact its place in the cosmos. Such realizations return us to the sacredness of form. We find that all of the supposedly ‘non-essential’, ritual, form-based aspects of tradition actually architect a mind that has true fullness

Vatika bottle sits in the bathroom,
contents solidified by London’s night.

All the rage.

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley

Two English professors discuss this ode to new beginnings.

If your spirituality is just that you want to take yourself beyond, of course this is just illusion. But imagine that for, say, an Amazonian tribesperson. If they were to say that the forest they live in is ‘just illusion,’ they’d be dead within a day, right? Ecology requires us to have a deep attentiveness to the [relational] way reality manifests

Nature is full of intermediary forces. Traditions will always find their way back to intermediary beings because I think we need them.

‘Animism’ is just a Western term to describe the way everybody sees the world.

the sanitation department is the most important workforce in the city of New York

Jhāna practice is deeply embedded within other practices that help with the reemergence—The Noble Eightfold Path, the Saṅgha—so that once you come to these moments of malleability, the momentum of living a certain way will carry you through and allow you to come out of these states more beautifully.

83% of Earth’s farmable land is used for livestock; for example as pastures or to farm fodder crops like corn and soy. That’s 26% of Earth’s total land area.

The trouble is that the same carbon-fluorine bonds that make PFAS so stable and useful in consumer products also make them incredibly persistent in the environment. Which is why you might also know PFAS under a different name: ‘forever chemicals.’ They have been found everywhere from bustling cities to untouched areas of wilderness. Every continent, including Antarctica, has PFAS all over it. Almost every living creature, from polar bears to birds to fish to humans, this stuff is now everywhere.

These dull-edged blades-to-be are called ‘blanks.’

That’s the last war you’ll ever fight. So we need to find a way of avoiding total war. ‘And here’s the way,’ Clausewitz says. We can avoid it if we allow the political rational to govern war.

How the Napoleonic Wars rewrote the rules of warfare and on how Clausewitz’s two, very different takes on what he saw defined warfare before—and after—World War 2.

Slowly rotating scraper blades continuously remove the combined sludge and sand layer from the bottom of the tank while clarified water flows upwards into collection troughs.

electrical current, in nearly all cases, doesn’t flow into the earth; it flows through the earth. The ground is really just another wire. Although not a great one. Let me show you an example…

This is why you need a weird obsessive nerd somewhere on your staff!

How door closers work and how to mount and adjust them.

The danger in utopian thinking is that it can easily turn you into a pointless vandal. The more useful thing is to think of betterment as a process rather than thinking that we just have to get rid of the bad people and then everything will be okay. If you could have enough utopianism to question the world as it is and imagine how it could be better, I think that’s a wonderful thing, but if you take it too far, you actually undermine yourself. So, I would say, a like “homeopathic utopianism” I will support.

A sweeping interview about Silicon Valley and the possible shapes of the future with the man who coined the term “virtual reality.”

This podcast episode is a gripping summary of the true story told in David Grann’s book, Killers of the Flower Moon which was later adapted into an award-winning film of the same name.

frozen by design
our calling becomes all calling.

But the real innovation was coming up with a preserved protein. Ancient Egyptians went to war carrying dried fish…

How military needs drive culinary innovation.

firm in texture,
brimming with natural juices.

he was still petting the puppy’s wet head,
and I cried like I’d never known …

a crow
Shook down on me…

It’s not entirely clear when Japanese women began to fear attacks by the spirits of their vengeful aborted fetuses, but it is clear that beginning in the late 1970s, women began requesting and paying for a new religious rite called mizuko kuyō (water child memorial) that Buddhist and Shinto priests had never heard of before.

​This podcast explores the phenomenon of mizuko spirit attacks in 1980s Japan, where middle and high school girls reported hauntings by the spirits of aborted fetuses. It delves into the media’s role in amplifying these stories and examines the cultural and spiritual practices, such as mizuko kuyō rituals, that emerged to address the grief and guilt associated with abortions in Japan.​

To learn more about Yuki Kawae and his approach to Zen gardens and art see his 2021 interview with Whitewall.

Pigment presses out
you in
you
laurel
not yet in the wind

Here, take this palmful of raspberries…

… one camera
for every ten heads.
Most of the time,
I can’t even recall
my own reflection …

Devoured in secret,
she was punished for eating it
but loved the bitter wave…

A poem attempting to explain what depression and self-harm feel like.

Inside me lived a small donkey…

A poem on the everyday labor of living and the inner strength we find to go on.

Look at you two, he said. And we did.

A poem about finding dignity and connection in illness and dying.

We used to ditch them after school…

Tyrant, why swell’st thou thus,
 Of mischief vaunting?

An analysis of a poetic (prophetic), sixteenth century translation of Psalm 52 which shows how religions can provide a dignified response to times of tyranny.

I keep
a beautiful garden, all abundance,
indiscriminate, pulling itself
from the stubborn earth: does it offend you

Take a picture and tell the world
what it means, only I wasn’t sure…

they were in the middle of a lake in the middle of a desert in the middle of a war zone…

How fourteen ships of different nationalities trapped in the Suez Canal quickly formed a community.

When these coins get given out, they are a physical reminder of the fact that the military is not some faceless monolithic structure. The coins show that the military is an organization made of human beings.

How poised it is!
Petal and leaf
curving like a fan

Defeat, my Defeat, my shining sword and shield,
In your eyes I have read
That to be enthroned is to be enslaved,
And to be understood is to be leveled down

Yellow Bull: ‘Didn’t you tell me you were a ghost?’
Ghost: ‘People can be afraid of other people. And dogs can be afraid of dogs, can’t they?’

A collage of characters from street dogs to a hand model, from an amputee to religious statues all find themselves lost in Saṃsāra.

to work perfectly.
To simulate pleasure perfectly. To not cry at dinner

Take your time,
enjoy the fat chill
of each lick

A poem dedicated to George Stinney, Jr.

gazing into coals,
I skydive and pass through
stages of youth

Legend has it that a ninth century Buddhist monk sailing back from China was caught in a storm. The monk, Kukai, appealed to a statue of Fudo for protection. The monk was rewarded with the vision of Fudo attacking the waves with the sword calming the storm and saving him the ship

Brief video introducing the guardian deity Fudo Myoo, an emanation of Mahāvairocana.

How observant were you?

A short ad demonstrating how our brains filter and compress information.

Theories of consciousness are not ethically neutral.

Peter Hershock makes his case for a Yogacara-inspired view of consciousness, especially in the face of emergent technologies.

The brain is estimating how much confidence it has in certain predictions or certain bits of sensory information. This is known as Precision Weighting.

How Bayesian logic explains the brain: its extraordinary successes and surprising failures.

how you experience life is a representation of what you believe about it. If you attack your core beliefs about yourself and your life, you can change your thoughts and feelings, which automatically changes your behavior.

I want to be the one store that’s open all night
and has nothing but necessities.

Along with a word on the importance of surprise in writing.

One river gives
Its journey to the next.

A poem celebrating generosity in all its forms.

promising him special access to a better future life and even nibbāna, that possesses great appeal to him. […] When people engage in religious behavior, they are trying to see where there is a concentration of power to which they can connect themselves. So, the question is, where do you think such concentrations of power lie?

When the weizza appear, the sermons that they convey are simple, basic, Buddhist lessons. There’s nothing unusual about what they prescribe to people as the way to be good Buddhists. So, while the circumstances in which these lessons are conveyed is most unusual, their content is altogether garden-variety, Burmese Buddhism.

A discussion on Guillaume Rozenberg’s 2010 French anthropology work on miracle cults in Myanmar (Les immortels: Visages de l’incroyable en Birmanie bouddhiste), published in English translation in 2015.

He’d accidentally gone into climate-rant mode instead of speaking as a dad.

The apocalyptic stakes of climate change cause one Seattle father to go over the edge along with the story of a technique Santa Fe uses to put its glooms to rest.

Frederick Cook has just returned from the very roof of the world, the first man to reach the North Pole. Or so he says. Journalist Philip Gibbs has been watching him, and he’s convinced he’s lying.

This episode was previously called, “The City That Never Sleeps.”

Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala was of interest to me because he was such an influential and active figure among Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Buddhists in other countries, scholars of Buddhism, as well as with colonial administrators…

A scholar reflects on the life of the colonial-era, Sri Lankan revivalist who, among others, taught Anagarika Dharmapala

He is usually understood through the process by which Sri Lanka became independent, by which Sri Lankans who had become Christians returned to their Buddhist origins: an entirely Sri Lankan context. But reading the diaries, I realized he spent 80–90% of his adult life living outside of Sri Lanka.

A brief look at the life of a famous Buddhist advocate as he understood it.

I don’t think that lying is necessary. I think if we have honest, tactful interaction, we’re always going to be the better for it.

A brief analysis of white lies, bully lies, and mischievous lies and why people tell them.

What does it do to a person to study delight? Or, as it emerges, to study joy every single day? What do you discover?

Succumbing to algorithmic complacency means you’re surrendering your own agency in ways you may not realize.

It’s the kind of story that displaces other stories, easily sweeps them aside, which is what happened with Dan…

Three stories about how people fill in what they don’t know about strangers.

Disturbing the remains of the Egyptian Pharaohs is known to incur a deadly curse…

Scientists now think they know why…

We can put an Egyptian mummy in a museum and it’s nice and exotic, but we’re not gonna learn anything from it. That’s how we tend to think of tradition. We don’t literally destroy the past, but we render it something that we can learn nothing from.

people have been claiming to be modern since at least the third century BC.

Aesthetic beauty is as much about how (and whether) you look as what you see. From the cork to the supernova, wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply: our willingness to do the work that awe requires.

John Green reviews these two related phenomena on a five-star scale.

A gray hoodie will not protect my son…

the abandoned factories
there has lately been so much conversation about
through broken windows they stare
asking for us to decide…

super rich people people are going to support this because they realize that hatred of foreigners is the main thing standing between them and high levels of taxation. And they don’t want to pay taxes

The above is talking about the wealthy in general. For a discussion of Silicon Valley ideology specifically, see this talk by Bhante Sujato and for a discussion of Elon Musk’s specific flavor of psychopathy, listen to this conversation with Elon’s friend, Kara Swisher.

An abridged, ten-minute version read by John Lithgow can be watched here.

A child came up to me in the park
and asked for a cigarette.
Her eyes were startled cats…

The real point of FDR’s New Deal was to save democracy.

If a real democracy is going to thrive, if the real values of human nature are to flourish, it’s an absolute necessity that groups form in which people can join together, share their concerns, articulate their hopes, and discover what they think, what their values really are. This can’t be imposed on you from above: you have to discover it yourself

Part two can be seen here.

“Weapons of Math Destruction” have three properties: (1) they are widespread and important, (2) they are mysterious in their scoring mechanism, and (3) they are destructive.

Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.

Rousseau thought that it was polite society that made people evil and that a sufficiently enlightened social order could bring out people’s inherent virtues.

How this 18th century philosopher’s ideas came to dominate modern political thought.

going back in time and trying to find the origin of some of the foundational institutions of society, from democracy to the legal system, and at the heart of the origin of those institutions, I always found water.

Linked above is part 1, here is the link to part 2, and here is the link to part 3. I’d also recommend topping the series off with his tour of the IceCube facility which is the largest experiment at the South Pole and an example of the science they can do there that would be impossible to do elsewhere.

Perhaps the biggest of all the snacks the Milky Way has had since the Gaia Enceladus breakfast is the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy which first fell in about 5 billion years ago.

Before this point I had a very naive and simplistic view of the Israel/Palestine issue. I thought of it as a conflict between two religious peoples who had competing claims for the same area of land and occasionally killed one another over it…

why you take it personally when someone buys different things than you.

A man can write a book without drawing attention to the fact that he is a man, but I know that when I begin I must say that I am a woman for this is the background against which all I say will be heard.

Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.

Remember me, my father sings
to the forest…

Who decides where a river starts? …

She was nearing the river—in reaching the brink,
She heeded no danger, she paused not to think!
For she is a mother—her child, a slave—
And she’ll give him his freedom, or find him a grave!

In spite of all reports
Accusations
Predictions
We aren’t gone

To be specific, there are practically thousands of
the aforementioned abiding in perpetual near riot
of wild behavior, indiscriminate coloring, and only
the Good Lord Himself can say what diverse soliciting…

… the tourist town
below us, in buildings made old
by the deliberate hand of business,
not the rain, the sun, the untold
billions of raindrops and tear drops…

i am in the backseat. my father driving. from mansurah to cairo. delta to desert…

… the massive increase in demand for cheap, subsidized autonomous vehicle rides will result in an increase in the number of cars in our cities. AV companies will then lobby for some roads to be designated as ‘autonomous only.’ This will be pitched as a way to increase safety and efficiency but the ultimate goal will be to eliminate public transit and human driving in order to force people to sign up to an AV subscription.

The distopia self-driving car companies are trying to build and what we could do to design our cities for people instead.

My windows are your eyes not mine.

The one we tried to jump and failed
The one he jumped and wasn’t forgiven
The one in the books that made animals of us
The ones that told us who we weren’t

I wept in my clothes on the street
where olive trees turned their foil palms.

I am sorry that there is more
& more of you lately I do not understand.
Sometimes I want simply to sit alone a long time
in silence. America, you must want this too.

This four-minute clip from the podcast captures its most important insight. For the full interview, see Writ Large on the NBN.

You’re going to change your reporting based on what you think the political outcome will be? That’s an institutional failure…

The elite, American media continues to misreport American politics and Rick Perlstein thinks he knows why.

The history of Facebook from its beginning ‘til now is the story of numerous crucial moments in the development of the internet: rubicons that can’t be uncrossed. It’s the story of the transformation of our behavior and the story of how legal rules built for the era of TV and print are struggling to keep up…

around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house…

For more about this famous poem, you can also hear Pádraig Ó Tuama’s take on it in Poetry Unbound. (I particularly appreciate the way he reads the final lines of the poem).

Every leaf emerges as a green blade
and the cries of life take over the night…

For a similar poem by another Ukrainian poet about life during war, see “We Lived Happily During the War” by Ilya Kaminsky.

Everything is a union of one kind or another.
Foothills know this. Highways too.

Darwin showed that organisms are derived imperfectly from their history and it’s these imperfections, the radical historicity of life, that is our clue to it having evolved.

Mythology isn’t about “should.” It’s about “is.” It’s about describing life.

Bhante Sujato explains how Buddhist myths work: the ground the stories grew out of and how they were reshaped by Buddhist wisdom.

Note that you can feel free to skip the fourth lecture as it doesn’t add much to the previous three.

The classes can also be viewed as Youtube videos here.

Stories don’t just kick you over the head with a new idea but they embed these ideas in a richly imagined world. When you read a text, you’re not just influenced by a pet theory some character may be peddling but you’re much more influenced by the kind of world that is being created: what kind of rules does this world follow? A story always has an implicit theory of causality.

Kuhn realized that if Aristotle was stuck within his own way of seeing the world, then so are we.

The cultural context for Buddhist Modernism is really important.

… the idea that you could be both Buddhist and American at the same time seemed contradictory.

The author of American Sutra discusses how the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII reshaped Buddhist practice in the West.

This document has inspired human rights movements around the globe and gave the world something tangible to strive for.

A short discussion on the history and importance of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The disconnect between the popular portrayal of pretas and the reality of these early texts drives the first half of my book, which looks at how the concept of the ghost solidified over time. But what really interested me about these stories was the bodies of these pretas: how horrific they are…

It’s a 6-inch circle of soil and a column of air above it. The column is marked by a 6-foot granite ring embedded flush into the concrete…

Texas Longhorns wore the most unruly, belligerent cattle. And so the idea that this little piece of barbed wire could keep them out of anywhere was just laughable.

The story of how barbed wire enclosed the American West

These, and other, statements of his have been reinterpreted in ways that I feel Nāgārjuna would find difficult to recognize as fitting into his Buddhist worldview.

On taking Nāgārjuna seriously as both a philosopher and as a Buddhist

Only simple living can bring real satisfaction.

1. Sn 2.1 Ratana Sutta — Jewels, The Jewels Discourse
2. Sn 2.4 Mahāmaṅgala Sutta — The Auspicious Performance, Thirty-Eight Blessings
3. Sn 1.8 Mettā Sutta — Loving-kindness, Metta Sutta
4. Sn 1.1 Uraga Sutta — The Snake’s Skin
5. Sn 1.4 Kasībhāradvāja Sutta — The farmer Bhāradvāja
6. Sn 1.6 Parābhava Sutta — Downfall
7. Sn 1.7 Vasala Sutta — The Outcast
8. Sn 1.9 Hemavata Suttra — Sātāgira and Hemavata
9. Sn 1.10 Āḷavaka Sutta — Āḷavaka
10. Sn 1.11 Vijaya Sutta — Victory over Delusion
11. Sn 1.12 Muni Sutta — The Sage
12. Sn 2.3 Hiri Sutta — Shame
13. Sn 2.5 Sūciloma Sutta — Sūciloma
14. Sn 2.9 Kiṃsīla Sutta — Right Conduct
15. Sn 2.11 Rāhula Sutta — Rāhula
16. Sn 3.1 Pabbajjā Sutta — The Going Forth
17. Sn 3.2 Padhana Sutta— Striving
18. Sn 3.3 Subhāsita Sutta — Good Words
19. Sn 3.4 Pūraḷāsa Sutta — The Sacrificial Cake
20. Sn 3.8 Salla Sutta — The Dart

they imagine that most of us sit around small huts, waiting for the West to deliver another aid package. Or they imagine that, you know, we all grew up with lions and tigers in our backyards. Unfortunately, that’s a myth that has endured now for generations and generations.

The blurriness associated with myopia is caused by eyeballs that have grown too long; in a stretched-out shape, eyes aren’t able to properly focus images onto the retina. Researchers believe two culprits are to blame: the lack of outdoor play, and prolonged time doing up-close activities like using digital devices.

A double self portrait: the darker-skinned Frida on the right is the indigenous Mexican that was adored by her husband, and the lighter-skinned Frida on the left is the European Frida that her husband rejected.

He never wrote to me about his insecurities. In my 20s and 30s, I would have loved to know that he had this feeling, to hear him talk about the weight of being a newish adult so disappointed with yourself after imagining greatness…

I too am sick of the body…

Spared from the surgeon’s knife
you are a tiny flag of resistance

Look down. Look at your body,
how it falls from your head…

… bunched skin rough as braille above the heel bone,
the instep whitening under the pressure of my touch…

you descend, or drive, are driven
by mother’s body

My mother tells me she is ugly in the same voice
she used to say ‘no woman could love you’…

Recycled over and over
people born look like parents…

So, for Buddhists, as long as they try to cultivate a mind of equinimity and fortrightness, as long as they are compassionate, or use wisdom and an objective attitude to deal with whatever comes up, then there is no need to worry about whether one has a good fortune or not, or whether Fengshui is correct or not.

Ven. Master Sheng Yen explains that, while supernatural things such as fortunetelling or fengshui are not totally superstitious, they are also not accurate. The mind has the ability to transform and change its fate, so Buddhists need only be concerned with developing a wholesome mind.

According to our Buddhist sutras, the way things were handled in the age of the Buddha, we can’t act in a spirit of revenge. We cannot treat animals in a hateful or angry spirit.

In this brief question and answer, Master Sheng-yen discusses different contexts of taking life and their moral valence. Throughout the interview, Sheng-yen repeatedly points out that there are usually other options in common situations other than taking a life.

July is the 7-Eleven of your childhood, fluorescent.
Your jelly sandals are neon. Your panties—
washboard and starch white, snapping…

Anti-fat bias has an arguably more decisive impact on people’s health than physical body weight.

A hard, sceptical look at the data behind the “obesity epidemic.”

…whether you’re sweating and actually exercising or just sweating in a sauna, because your heart is pumping blood so quickly through your body in order to cool down, you’re getting the release of all these happy chemicals like epinephrine and endorphins. And they do make you feel so happy that you are having a catharsis, right? You feel like you’re getting out toxic emotions. While that’s certainly true, you’re not literally getting out toxic chemicals.

220–581 C.E. … This so-called “Dark Age” was highly creative. Innovations in warfare, religion, print technology, artistry of all types set the stage for the China to come out of this period. What scholars haven’t pointed out yet is that this period also marked a high point in the diversification of social roles for women. Indeed, the collapse of the classical tradition is what made space for new understandings of gender performance. Women experienced greater freedom of movement and choice with the entrance of Buddhism to the Yellow River Valley.

How Central Asian Buddhism came to the Chinese court and brought with it new ideas of women’s agency which culminated in the ascension of Empress Dowager Ling (靈皇後) in 515.

To make an idea system pristine you have to contain the contradictions. One way to minimize the contradictions is to build a filtering system so that people don’t get the ‘wrong’ ideas. But if you can relate all the different ideas out there to a framework, that creates a much more resilient idea system because you can account for all the, say, scandals.

A sociology professor talks about his monograph on how ideologies function in society.

I avoided mirrors. I avoided pictures. I wasn’t going to let anyone take a picture of me from the side until I got my nose fixed.

A passive prosthesis, also called a cosmetic prosthesis, is a device that closely resembles a “natural” limb. It doesn’t crush any cans or get you any attention… In fact, it serves the opposite purpose: to help you blend in.

You know, it would be better if you asked me how I’m sleeping.

A Black and a White American sit down and discuss how racism doesn’t just live in our minds and institutions, but also lives in (yes, all) our bodies.

1. The haunted mansion
2. The possessed raccoon
3. The hitchhikers
4. The parents
5. The morgue

Identities are something extremely useful to humans. Holding a particular identity makes it easier to do difficult, unrewarding things associated with that identity.

Besides silk, the Silk Road helped the dispersion of writing and paper-making, coinage and gunpowder, and it was along these trade routes that Buddhism reached China from India. The history of these transcontinental links reveals a dazzlingly complex meeting and mingling of civilisations, which lasted for well over a thousand years.

How do we understand the evolution of a prominent figure or any kind of deity like this over long stretches of time, especially when they have many, many iterations?

We historians of religion find ourselves in possession of rare and hard-won skills that are directly relevant to understanding this phenomenon and which may help in developing solutions.

Dr. Salguero reads his JBE paper on how the current conversation around adverse meditation experiences lacks a proper grounding in Buddhist history.

“It’ll Be Alright on the Night” was an outtakes show. It compiled mistakes, technical errors, and flubs from television and film…

An homage to a moment of British television history and to those who put in the effort to do things well.

This is Marconi’s original equipment that he brought to England with him. This is his transmitter with an induction coil like Hertz’s and these balls concentrated the energy of the spark.

You can get the booklets for both albums here:

• Dhammapada
• Therigatha

But the thing about a lot of problems is that they’re not a single prisoner’s dilemma. Impalas see each other day after day and the same situation keeps happening over and over again. So that changes the problem…

Axelrod’s main takeaways still hold: be nice, forgiving, but don’t be a pushover.

Eight thousand years of human civilization and here we are: still trying to bring the rain back with an animal sacrifice.

On the fake, and real, causes of California’s water crisis.

The process by which money value has displaced other languages of value is one of the enormous trends over the last 200 years…

During the second World War, radar created unprecedented opportunities for defense. Nevertheless, no matter how good your radar is, if the person looking at the radar screen isn’t paying attention you’re totally screwed. So an intense set of classified experiments took place to assess this new problem: how long could people pay attention to screens and what could you do to optimize their ability to keep paying attention to screens for long periods of time. […] We see the legacy of that work to this day in the way we think about attention.

From The Twelve Theses on Attention: ‘Sanctuaries for true attention already exist. They are among us now but they are endangered and many are in hiding: operating in self-sustaining, inclusive, generous, and fugitive forms.’

Chuchok fits into this genre of “Thai trickster figures.” When you think about the story not from the perspective of Vessantara but from the perspective of the peasantry, think about how amazing it is that a peasant would even think to ask a member of the royal family for their two children to be his wife’s servants! It’s absurd!

The humor and political themes found in the Northern Thai retellings of the Vessantara (Jujaka?) Jātaka.

… policy with intentional marketing titles.
Assimilation; Relocation; Termination…

I like a private life, it’s true…

The hefty steel speaker we hooked
over the passenger seat window.

No one asks how the tape worm benefits the host. What if consciousness is like that? What if it’s the cognitive equivalent of ‘junk’ DNA?

A sci-fi author and biologist ponders the significance of brain interface technologies.

A lot more subtle stuff changed during that election too: stuff that’s been forgotten because now it’s everywhere.

How the first televised presidential election (of 1952) forever changed politics.

Tell me how does it feel

How changes in technology precipitated a change in music.

The first portable audio recorder was made in 1945 by a man named Tony Schwartz.

To the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This reflects the way in which, when that hammer comes into that circuit of mind, body, and world, it transforms how the world appears to us or what it makes us see the world as.

We’ve structured modern life in such a way that it’s easy to say ‘this isn’t my fault,’ that the machine made me do it…

For people who say they have no religious impulse whatsoever… really? You have never felt overwhelmed by, in some way inadequate to, an experience in your life? Have never felt in yourself something staking a claim beyond yourself? Some wordless mystery straining through words to reach you? Never??

1. The Standard Case
2. Dr. Rock’s Taxonomy
3. Descend into the Particular

Now, what we can say is that, it is within these spaces of practices of mental cultivation that poetry, in the Buddhist world, takes its place, as well as being part of literary culture; as well as being part of religious culture. But, it has a central place in the practice of mental cultivation. 

In this lecture, Professor Charles Hallisey describes how Buddhism has historically used poetry as a vehicle for its teachings. Further, through various examples, he offers the idea that, in the Buddhist world, scholatiscism and poetry are forms of mental cultivation as much as meditation and ritual and have always been so. 

Farming uses 50 percent of [Earth’s habitable land] and what you find is that around 75 percent of our agricultural land is grazing land. […] We are using a huge portion of usable human land to raise cows.

A realistic picture of what building a “green economy” would require.

Before you start, be honest with yourself.

If you are like most people, there is a gap between the person you are and the person you wish to be.

There are three kinds of genies: Genies to whom you can safely say, “I wish for you to do what I should wish for”; genies for which no wish is safe; and genies that aren’t very powerful or intelligent.

Chess experts don’t have better memory in general, but they have better memory specifically for chess positions that could occur in a real game. The implication is what makes the chess master special, is that they have seen lots and lots of chess games. And over that time, their brains have learned patterns.

It’s easy to think of Emptiness as the “right” view in an ontological sense. What the sutra is saying is that there isn’t a “right” way to characterize reality. “Thusness” is ineffable. So, Emptiness is not so much the “right” characterization as it is the remedy to our tendency to reify things into essences.

A lengthy interview with Prof Waldron on his new book which explores Yogacara thought within its Indian, Buddhist context and in light of contemporary neuroscience and politics.

Brown divides his presentation into three periods. First is the Indiegenous Bronze Age, around 2000 BCE; second, Indian contact, 2nd century CE to 5th century CE; third, Indian-related art, 5th century onward. While showcasing the art of early Southeast Asia and its history, Brown explores topics such as the lack of diety images in pre-Indian art and the miraculously sudden transition to such anthropomorphic images.

Over Canada / or two hours of frozen waves I assume is Canada /
I’m surrounded by babies / so many babies…

Do not speak to the ghost [your ghost]
resting outside your head.
He is not real,
he is not real,
he is really [your ghost]

I raise a finger to a point in the night…

How much our minds live (and live on) in the people around us.

Everything’s been said
But one last thing about the desert,
And it’s awful: …

Throw me into a cloud o lord
with those awkward hands of yours…

Human horrors
are not inevitable. Some people stop
themselves, before they cross moral divides.

Whatever I learn makes me angry to have learned it.

You can also watch a post-film interview with the director here courtesy of the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies.

I share my house with a colony of bats.
They live in the roof peak,
enter through a gap.

You were between two animals.
Between two attributions.
At the crotch of a river’s fork.
At a loss, at least…

What it feels like to have to make a decision.

what counts here does anything count
on the short walk while looking down and then over then up…

They were very disoriented, obviously, after flipping. They got out of their seat belts and out of the car and, because I had skidded, my head was bleeding profusely…

A scientist talks about the difficult process of recovery after her traumatic head injury.

I think most people, who see and experience these statistics take them passively as just like, “That’s just concrete information.” They don’t think of it as a question of like, “Who’s the person you want to be?”

… your conscious mind is more a press secretary. You’re not the president or the king or the CEO. You aren’t in charge. You aren’t actually making the decision, the conscious part of your mind at least. You are there to make up a good explanation for what’s going on so that you can avoid the accusation that you are violating norms.

If you don’t feel challenged by the text, then the text isn’t doing its work.

… but I feel my life has been enriched by having these verses come bubble up in my mind.

This talk took place at the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, MA, in 2005, as a book launch for Gil Fronsdal’s then-newly published translation of the Dhammapada. In his talk, Fronsdal gives context to the Dhammapada and proceeds to read various verses and explain them, giving a broad flavor of the work.

In this video, we’re going to look at some prominent climate deniers, what they have to say, why what they say is clearly wrong, [and] why they seem to believe it anyway

Creativity is a human exercise that is only possible when we are free.

A Korean, Buddhist philosopher talks about contemporary philosophy—Western and Eastern.

What does it mean to meditate on anger?

How Buddhism engages with modern, Western social critique.

This is the story of the deadliest infectious disease of all time…

The greatest power of games is that you can explore this landscape of different agencies. The greatest danger of games is that you can get sucked into this experience of wanting to be in a clear, crisp and gentle universe where you know exactly what to do and exactly how it’s measured.

The brain is not a computer. It never was. Its failures are particular to its own nature, and it has to be understood on its own terms.

If anyone could see into the future of the British economy it was John Maynard Keynes.

The secret of super-forecasting? It’s a willingness to change your mind.

Could you explain whether the intermediary state is the same as what people call “ghosts”?

… one of the most interesting things Open Philanthropy does is the way you intentionally divide up your giving portfolio into buckets based on really different ethical, arguably even metaphysical, assumptions. So tell me about “worldview diversification.”

There isn’t “knowledge” as we’re used to thinking about it: figuring out, given observations and experiences in the world, what is “true” and once you come to “knowledge” you get to keep it for life. I now appreciate that everything is beliefs, is just a best guess.

How all reasoning is Bayesian.

His colleagues concluded that the crisis was an example of what’s known as a ‘Mass Sociogenic Illness’—what used to be called ‘Mass Hysteria.’

Every generation is susceptible to mimetic panic.

Why do we see more information [about other people’s stuggles] as threatening rather than as clarifying? At the point that we can see that things are hard for all of us, then we [should] know that it’s a structural problem.

Why is the solution always “my kid is going to be one of the twenty” rather than “why are there only twenty slots?” The inability to make that [mental] shift [from competition to solidarity] is what keeps messing us up.

One of the greatest illusions in life is continuity…

For the fascinating story of how we learned about this special day, millions of years ago, see Preston, 2019.

And for an alternate theory of what killed the dinosaurs, see Kurzgesagt’s video on the Deccan Traps.

… but if you were to move your hand slowly over a fly it would perceive your hand much like we would perceive grass growing or ice melting or paint drying: it would be too slow to be visible. So here is a good life hack if you ever want to catch a fly with your bare hands: take your time.

Then happiness became an egg that broke…

A poem on how children focus us on the present moment.

first bright-red manicure, first
chipped nail, first note taped to the door
saying don’t come in…

They are a kind of spiritual materialism, but they are a good kind—the kind you work at developing, the kind you can amass. And there is no greed in amassing them. It’s a sign of initiative. A sign of the right effort.

Five spiritual treasures (conviction, virtue, shame, compunction, generosity, learning, and discernment) are worth hoarding, as they lead the practitioner toward nibbāna and also bring benefit to others around them.

What if each time
you caused pain
a small round stone
was put in your pocket…

To wake when all is possible
before the agitations of the day
have gripped you

To come to the kitchen
and peel a little basketball
for breakfast…

…there’s a river that runs beside it the whole way down,
and there’s an over-song that keeps the river company: I’m leaves,
you’re the wind…

Sunday morning, the wind has washed our minds,
the streets are bleak…

Shinjin is the true cause of birth in the Purland.

This talk by Rev. Miyaji first discusses how Jodo Shinshu Buddhists do not believe in luck and astrology, but rather, they follow closely the principle of cause and effect. In part two, Miyaji explains how karma is understood from a self-power and other-power perspective. Rebirth into the Pureland depends on faith in the loving compassion of Amitabha Buddha, therefor merit and demerit do not bar a person from entry. Yet, when this loving compassion is fully understood, a person does not want to perform negative actions.

The truth is
money is in war, not poetry…

O New Day, I get to build the boat!

What shall meadow hold to please me,
Spreading wide its scented waving…

Windowless now, roofless, tucked
under the first, sheltering hill of a range
that ran all the way to Mexico…

A frog leaps out across the lawn,
And crouches there…

That summer we’d hop fences
and call them gates…

Backward crossovers into years before: airy
afternoons licking the wooden spoon…

Is it difficult to get away from it all once you’ve had a child?

It turns out however that I was deeply
Mistaken about the end of the world…

… Mistaken for a child running to tell of a bomb
That did not knock before it entered
In Gaza with its glad tidings of abundant joy…

When you understand the world that you are in and you are in that place of mental fortitude, then you’re not looking for anything “out there.” But maybe you have something to offer people who are caught up in their fears.

In this heartfelt dhamma talk, Venerable Panyavati explains how the mind creates problems such as fear and insecurities, but once it is cultivated by the Buddhist path, it becomes peaceful and able to give peace to others.

The main topics of each lecture are:

1. The historical background of non-Buddhist thought at the time of the Buddha
2. The Buddha’s critique of those existing epistemological attitudes
3. The uses and limits of logic
4. The role of authority and reason on the path
5. The limits of knowledge

More info on the classes can be found on the course page on SC:D&D.

Eall þá óþer cild mid findġum soccum
Sċulon betera rinnen, cwicra þonne mín boga

What will our culture look like to people a thousand years from now?

shamans endowed with powers to cure the sick, predict right times of planting and harvest, and invoke the souls of ancestors to guide the deceased to the afterlife.

Surviving a famine nearly doubles the risk of diabetes in the next generation.

However, if you simply practice with the mind, neglecting body and speech, that won’t work either. They are inseparable.

Where will stops, there is freedom.

Ajahn Brahm explains his belief in “Free Won’t.”

They discuss: past-life recollection, Western scientific methods in relation to rebirth, and whether a practitioner needs to believe in rebirth to attain awakening.

What we can take from this history is the precarious thread by which Theravāda came down to us today. It only survived by a very narrow margin in more than one instance.

An introduction to the trials and tribulations of the Saṅgha in Sri Lanka.

At the third council, the Canon was closed. The one, very important, addition that was made was the Kathāvatthu: the final book of the Abhidhamma as a summary of the positions of the various schools that were deemed heretical.

It’s useful for us, understanding the Buddha’s teaching, to see it (as it were) through ancient Indian eyes and to put ourselves in the space of his contemporaries.

An introduction to society at the time of the Buddha and the broader historical moment he lived in.

In those days, of course, there was no easy transportation or communication, so there was a natural tendency for different groups of Bhikkus to begin drifting apart and a crisis moment arrived about a hundred years after the Buddha.

The earliest events are the legendary visits of the Buddha to Burma. These can be doubted of course, but are an important part of Burmese mythology.

An overview of Burmese Buddhist History and its relevance today.

In the 17th Century there was established an examination system where monks would have to take an oral test of translating Pāḷi passages into Thai. So, there was an attempt to regulate the quality of the Saṅgha and there’s still an examination system in Thailand today, although it’s evolved quite a bit (as we’ll talk about later) in the Bangkok period.

A brief overview of Thai, Buddhist history.

The rule in Buddhist countries is that even the King bows to the monks.

The whole history of these schools, as obscure as it is, illustrates the very human tendency of religions to split and divide on points of doctrine, but it also highlights a particularly Indian love of philosophic speculation and love of debate.

A history of the “Hīnayāna” sects from the Theravāda perspective.

Has humanity ever really learned from the past and been able to apply the lessons?

A short defense of studying history, despite its difficulties.

I felt for the first time this is what I was supposed to be doing.

A song about feeling nostalgic for the past, hopeful for the future, and focused on the present.

You will never let go of the things you love. So you don’t have to worry.

In this talk, followed by questions and answers, Yuttadhammo explains the different categories of meditation and their common factors, such as mindfulness and concentration.

We’re living in a time-travel golden age. But why? What happened to time?

A short history of time travel, including the Yahoo time capsule and the birthday party Steven Hawking only announced after the fact.

The body is like a robot. The mind is the one who directs and tells the robot what to do. So, whatever happens to the body, the mind should stay clear.

It must’ve been quite a dangerous job. Particularly for an older woman. You’d have to be pretty tough.

The story of English railroads, the knocker-uppers, Beijing Time, and Daylight Saving.

It’s not that complex—the idea of agriculture. But because the brain of most animals is not particularly good at linking cause and effect across large periods of time, agriculture wasn’t invented by other animals. So this ability to create the future, this ability to engage in what we call mental time travel, is really, in many ways, the defining cognitive signature of our species.

My first thought was, ‘Wow, I’m going to view history and then get wiped off the map.’

Three stories of people confronted with a hard deadline and the choices they made when faced with impermanence.

So, you’re not impressed you say
With a beat up Chevrolet
But that driver man Jose
Knows his way around

It has to do with spending a great amount of time in a meditative state where I am able to connect with people [energetically] in anticipation of meeting them [physically].

An African-American, Buddhist herbalist explains how she’s able to build communities of care across political and cultural divides.

Kamma gives us opportunities to learn.

In his usual wit and humor, Ajahn Brahm explains the functioning of kamma in our daily lives and its relation to the various rebirths one can have.

They were able to make all these iron implements and once you’ve got that, the social situation changes quite considerably because you’re able to grow a surplus of crops.

A brief history of Northern India setting the stage for the Buddha’s life and teachings.

This brought about the third great persecution of 845 which spared only a few temples.

A brief outline of the most important events in the history of Chinese Buddhism.

Gender is something that happens between me and other people. It doesn’t actually happen inside my body. […] We all depend on the generosity of strangers to give us our gender every day.

The Buddha is like a physician that is capable of turning poison into medicine.

How “the Queen of Rock-‘n’-roll” became a Nichiren, Buddhist teacher.

I know there are different worlds…

An analysis of this airy, Anishinaabemowin song about the space between us.

For an interview with this poet, listen to the bonus episode.

Here, I’d like to talk about those things that the meditator will often misunderstand to be unbeneficial or improper practice or a sign that the practice is going wrong when in fact these things are a sign that one is practicing correctly.

A talk about how right perception of the three characteristics is often misunderstood by meditators as “wrong” when they expect meditation to always lead immediately to “blissful” states.

If we don’t freeze to death in the winter and don’t die of hunger on the other days, that’s good enough.

A loving biography of a modern Chan Master who faced many challenges in his mission to revitalize authentic, Chinese Buddhism.

For his offical autobiography, see Footprints in the Snow (2008).

If you have the type of anatomy that isn’t suited to lotus pose, time and effort won’t change a thing. There is a saying in yoga that “practice and all is coming”. In this context all that will be coming is pain.

A short video explaining the anatomy of the lotus pose and why some people cannot meditate in this posture.

You know how it goes. You love something dearly…

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet…

Curled thrush song staggering over moral tally
Number is all wrote Baudelaire
Fox kits hunting solitary voles
So many beings here without despair

Your job isn’t to cure. It’s to care.

Ajahn Brahm’s seventh talk during the 2009 rains retreat.

So that also became its own self perpetuating narrative about me, because now I had to continue to fulfill it because everyone says I’m not scared and I’m down. And so I have to continue to prove that narrative right to everybody around me…

A personal monologue about the power of the stories we choose to tell ourselves.

Look at the body with wisdom and realize this. If your house is flooded or burnt to the ground, whatever the threat to it, let it concern only the house. If there’s a flood, don’t let it flood your mind. If there’s a fire, don’t let it burn your heart. Let it be merely the house which is outside of you that is flooded or burned. Now is the time to allow the mind to let go of its attachments.

Ajahn Chah gives an inspiring talk to a dying disciple.

If you’re peaceful, learn from peace. If you’re not peaceful, learn from not-peace.

Ajahn Jayasaro offers a talk covering a wide variety of themes on Buddhist practice during and outside formal meditation practice, such staying mindful and cultivating wholesome thoughts.

The mind is the master of all behavior.

The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth

… a call to a hotline of sorts, though one I’d never heard about before and was surprised to learn existed…

We are all backlit by completeness.

From the inside out, I can know exactly where I am at any time and so, even when I’m falling short, I still have confidence because I know where I am. I’m not lost because the Dharma can find me.

How to learn the Dhamma.

That was a bargain I thought I had made with life: when all is said and done, I will somehow have done a little bit more good than harm. That was completely busted.

I am only kind to my father
in poems he will never read.

Let me make the songs for the people,
Songs for the old and young;
Songs to stir like a battle-cry
Wherever they are sung.

Hours before the TV, my mouth
agape, repeating after every American cartoon…

Someone yelled, ‘That dog gonna end up in a pot of rice!’

Today’s poem faces, head on, the way jokes can harm people and proliferate racism.

While sipping coffee in my mother’s Toyota, we hear the birdcall of two teenage boys in the parking lot…

…a gripping account of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s unlikely, ill-fated advocacy on behalf of a death-row prisoner with literary ambitions.

Ah poetry,
god of molting turkeys, save
my brother from the truck

There are excellent resources linked in the video description, and all of his videos are highly recommended for the self-studying student of Pāli.

PBS taught us English…

I think I will do nothing now
but listen. Listen and rest

At two a.m., without enough spirits
spilling into my liver to know
to keep my mouth shut, my youngest
learned of years I spent inside a box

Rather than “primitive” hill tribes being attracted to the glamour and stability of valley settlements, hill cultures are formed by people running away from civilization.

We soak rice until
the water clouds. On the television, a fiesta…

My grandfather would spell certain words so that the dog couldn’t comprehend…

Note: The poem’s epigraph mentions this photograph.

It used to embarrass me when my father talked back to the TV.

May the dead    be ever-evidenced
        May their clandestine names
bellow from the mouth…

For most of the shift, it was more about not looking
bored or wanting to seem invisible behind the ER desk
while nothing much happened at all…

a field mouse
racing
across fallen leaves…

you spoke of dancing. And the Baltic
Sea you placed in tiny glasses
what you knew of Kosovo
and how our students marched…

Though it wasn’t the only time that I went home and cried during that week.

[Three] stories where people are like, ‘oh, I’m going to be the one to fix that.’ And only later did they really discover, to their surprise, what that can really entail. Even when you think you see things coming, you’ve got it under control, that’s who you are, you do not see things coming.

The first set of emojis was designed for a Japanese cell phone company by Shigetaka Kurita in 1998. Texting was still really new. There were only 176 of them and they were 12-by-12 pixels each.

In fact, a bigger problem than panic is its opposite: people don’t grasp how serious a situation is; too calm, they don’t react in time.

… what is the essential part of our voices, and what isn’t?

An audiophile explains why we seem to hate phone calls these days.

In the 1940s, a freelance wiretapper named Big Jim Vaus got mixed up with the cops, the mob, and the most famous preacher in America.

I was the angry one, and I was the sad one,
and I am the head shaking in wonder

How “Buddhist” do you think this poem is? Can it be interpreted in multiple ways? How does it make you feel about the world?

In 1911, a Native American man, the only member of his community to survive a genocide, encountered the new Anthropology department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Why do we feel this and what can we do about it?

Where are we?

What is Tibetan Buddhism? What distinguishes it from other Buddhist traditions? Where do its unique practices and concepts come from?

People in Japan are born Shinto and die Buddhist.

While hell realms seem pretty distant from the serenely meditating monks and mindful contemplation that Buddhism is usually associated with in the Western imagination, Buddhism has some of the most elaborate hell realms in the history of religion.

i have so much hope for the future

i hope everyone gets everything they deserve

… the act of disappearing is not illegal in and of itself. You have the right to go missing. But believing that no one would miss you? That’s ridiculous

We do have something that is very unique about us as animals. And that’s that we can build alliances with any other species […] to build loving, supportive, safe relationships to save us from the difficulties of life

On how advances in science are undermining the dualities we have long assumed separate us from the “lower” animals, and a proposed alternative narrative for what makes humans so special.

… stories of humans encountering non-human intelligences

Whatever the hardship, one should never abandon their land or their animals.

On how the modernization of the Kashmiri economy is experienced as a moral disruption by the agropastoralists of Ladakh.

… the integral, yet unacknowledged, role that Indians played in the making of modern global Buddhism in the century prior to Ambedkar’s conversion, and the numerous ways that Buddhism gave powerful shape to modern Indian history

When a doctor reveals a terminal diagnosis to a patient, that process is as delicate a procedure as any surgery

Here’s John Cleese…

It’s better to think of democracy less as a government type and more as an open communicative culture.

People think “Sesame Street” teaches children to love learning, but what it teaches them is to love television.

One of the main paradoxes of Buddhism’s coming to the West is that the teaching on karma, which in Asia is probably the most basic Buddhist teaching, is the one most Westerns don’t like and is most often dropped from the teaching one way or another.

This lecture describes the various ways karma has been misunderstood in the West and how a close reading of the Buddha’s words correct such views.

… back in the 1800s, Ellis Chesbrough was the man. And no one has ever worked harder to save Chicago from its own poop.

Hanko, sometimes called insho, are the carved stamp seals that people in Japan often use in place of signatures.

Hanko seals are made from materials ranging from plastic to jade and are about the size of a tube of lipstick. The end of each hanko is etched with its owner’s name, usually in the kanji pictorial characters used in Japanese writing. This carved end is then dipped in red cinnabar paste and impressed on a document as a form of identification.

We’re not going to get away with this forever. I mean there’s a price to be paid for this kind of materialism

About 100 vehicles were taken to the Bethel landfill last year. Meanwhile, about 300 vehicles were barged into town.

Some questions to ponder and discuss after watching this video:

• Are there any minority groups that have not historically or still might not feel welcome in your community?
• What norms or behaviors contribute(d) to that?
• Are there any people you’d have a hard time “greeting with a smile” if they showed up at your temple?

We have this tendency to jump to conclusions…

A conversation about the Chankī Sutta and how to cultivate the path in a polarized world.

90 percent of Canadians [say they] will tell the truth in court. Whereas in other places, it would be crazy to tell the truth. Aren’t you a good friend? How you trade those virtues off has a big effect

On parochialism versus universalism in human societies and how Western culture became so WEIRD.

It’s not what you believe. It’s what you do.

The term enviromentalism does not appear in the sutras, but everywhere in the sutras you can see things related to environmntalism.

Ven. Master Sheng Yen explains the implicit understanding of environmental conservation in Buddhism.

Many people have this paradigm of seeing it all as natural, but…

Everything we know is because somebody told their master, “you’re wrong.”

abíní hoolzish
the low-moon horizon turquoise serenes pink-lit…

Ka awobi owero (ber)
If the young men sing (it is well)

A traditional Lango prayer for rain in a time of drought arranged by a Cantonese-American composer and performed in grand style by Jimmer Bolden, Allie McNay and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London.

Loneliness in America isn’t merely the result of inevitable or abstract forces, like technological progress; it’s the product of social structures we’ve chosen

To have rejected strategy; to sit, instead, with one’s bafflement

We have a billion years to fine tune our plans without missing too much of the universe.

Everything with edges, a shape, parts, or an internal structure is the result of energy flowing through matter within certain boundaries and is only maintained so long as that energy keeps flowing and the boundaries don’t change.

… though money is an idea, basically, it represents stuff, and stuff is made of carbon

An interview with the woman spearheading the new discipline explaining how human social structures impact the environment.

my blood moves like tectonic plates

They are not new, these most ancient of divinities.
Our clamor woke them from the subdivided soil.
They rise to rule us

Their design ideas were radically different but the reaction was the same: people hated it.

On the importance of autonomy and power in interior design.

Loves  How I  love  you…

All these problems with information have always been a problem for human beings. Then you get the internet, which is the informational equivalent of giant cities and now it’s an existential crisis. So we’ll have to develop the generational equivalent of both sanitation at the platform level and best practices as individuals—the “washing your hands” of misinformation. Both things will have to happen

On what it takes to change someone’s mind, and a reflection on whether you should even try in the first place.

Chatbots fool us more often than we think… especially when they replicate our very worst habits.

Never was a scene more desolate. The trees in these regions were incredibly large and stood in scattered clumps over the white wilderness. The vast expanse of snow was checkered only by these gigantic pines and the poles that marked our road.

An exploration of some of the effects caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815, and a reflection on how humans respond to disasters.

This is something of a sequel to Tim Harford’s earlier episode on the unplayable piano.

Changing the work and how we work is the unpleasant task of dealing with what we’ve been denying. It is probably the biggest test in the creative process demanding not only an admission that you’ve made a mistake, but that you know how to fix it.

The story of Twyla Tharp’s Billy Joel musical and the unlikely bicycle-powered airplane.

Each year, the local community celebrates the day that Khru Bah Neua Chai Kositto became a monk.

… the kind of tragedy that befell Tierney and her daughter can be averted if we appeal to the better parts of human nature

It’s an anthropological fact that masculinity is a bit fragile in that it has to be constructed. Every society has worked on constructing roles and rites-of-passage for men that attach them to their communities. [But] this [nurturing, pro-social] behavior—being learned—is rather fragile, and can disappear quite quickly under circumstances that no longer teach it effectively.

A tour de force on the state of men and boys today along with its political—and personal—ramifications.

Staying in your comfort zone isn’t always the best option.

The incredible stories of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies and Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert and why diversity is better than it feels.

For the exciting part two, see Frankenstein versus the Volcano.

In days I hope will come…

… did she feel her heart chambers darkened

It’s holding a little, obsidian shard of the experience of being human. And because it’s gone into print, other people can read it and they can laugh with me at all our hope and uselessness

The poem is the evidence of the survival. And that comes as a great comfort when we’re not sure if we’ll survive what has been asked of us. I have come to really value this quality of humility as something that helps me get through the day.

The Garden of Eden. My ancestors’ graves. A watermelon field in Central Texas…

Glenwood, Irvington, Scarborough, Poughkeepsie…

Tuning in, meditatively, all these things can loosen up. And it’s the loosening that’s the main thing.

My God is still there, the one I prayed to as a boy:
he never answered but that didn’t keep me
from calling out to him.

Friends I am here to modestly report
seeing in an orchard
in my town
a goldfinch

… hurt and harm are not the same. You can have damage to your body without accompanying pain. You can have pain without accompanying tissue damage. […] what we know about chronic pain is that the brain does become more sensitive over time, and it misinterprets these danger messages as amplified when they don’t need to be.

On the pyre the fire burns bright
Setting alight this searing pain
With only my fate to blame
For the fierce flame that brands me.

… learn about—and listen to—the Cambodian Dharma song tradition

In Khmer and English translation.

and then there are times
that both sides seek to disown
to cut my cords
let me fall…

You read the road as if it’s encrypted with what a father should say on a drive like this.

The key is to think of what we offer as a gift.

Some “sage advice” on how to find—and be—a “hero.”

Once there were coyotes…

Against my cheek, my tree was comfort

Here the ancient lava slid into the sea,
hissed up steam clouds, then cooled

my uncle
rose at dawn
and stepped outside—to find
his paddocks gone

Sometimes the verbs
Aren’t important

What over the gable end and high up under tangled cloud
that the raven might be saying to its tumble-soaring mate…

Having escaped, I came back alive.

Centuries, minutes later, one might ask
How the hilt of a sword wandered so far from the smithy.

you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt

i was made out of clay    out of time

Woke feeling nauseous—my wife’s soft breathing
beside me. Outside the immense Sierra dark and silence,
a sky still glittering with a strew of stars

One thought arising, it is hell;
One thought reversed, it is heaven.

Inside the 2001–2002, 90-day, winter meditation retreat at Baek Hung Temple, Palgong, Korea.

Who was harmed? What do they need?

… the fight for disability rights in the UK and India, the remarkable life of Helen Keller, how a Rwandan Paralympic volleyball team made history, and the invention of the Invacar

Fast to death and get Enlightened? It really doesn’t work that way. You have to come back. You have to be able to deal with these emotions.

We can simply answer, from the Buddhist point of view, that we put ourselves here.

Why we revere them, why it’s important to keep them in mind, and why we appreciate them

A rambling talk about the Buddha and the Cosmos.