Buddha

Buddha’s Truths Pertain To All Life

Buddha’s Truths apply to all Earth’s creatures, although only humans need to have truth stipulated. For me, this suggests that our need for “Truth” is a symptom of something we feel missing. For that reason, considering the widest possible scope of these truths gives helpful context for their application – ‘profound sameness’, as chapter 56 […]

Trump and the Mandate of Heaven

To better comprehend the Trump phenomenon, I need to examine it from a symptoms point of view (1). After all, judging circumstances at face value easily perpetuates ignorance and exasperates things. First off, I see Donald Trump as mostly symptomatic of the devolution of the cooperative politics essential to maintain a stable civilization. Secondly, cooperation […]

Who are you? (Part IV)

The social qualities integral to our ancestral hunter-gatherer old way (1) just happen to mirror the core “spiritual” qualities that the world’s religions promote. That’s no coincidence. Indeed, those innate qualities of harmony we now seek are the very ones we lost when we left the old way for the alluring material benefits and security […]

Who are you? (Part II)

I tried to point out in Who are you? (part I) how civilization plays a major role in ‘educating’ its citizens who they are and who they should be. This contrasts sharply with the natural intuitive way our ancestors previously acquired a secure sense of self. Religious stories have been central to every civilization’s agenda. […]

Who are you?

Civilization ‘helps’ answer the question, “Who am I”? The cultural story we hear from infancy drums into us who we are and who we should be. Essentially, this is a form of ‘natural’ brainwashing — ‘natural’ in that the brainwashers are themselves brainwashed. Because the story is essentially arbitrary, we spend our lives striving to […]

The Word Trap

We are innately attracted to promises of solutions to problems, not to examining the underlying problems. In the wild, that is the healthiest approach because problems there share wilderness simplicity, and the solutions are straightforward. It was natural for us to evolve the inclination to opt for the simplest view of most any problem, and […]

Stressors of Comfort and Security

This Science News article, The mess that is stress, ties right into my last post, “Right state of peaceful mind”. Notice how the lightening bolt in the graphic (left) points to the brain, and from there down through the rest of the body. The article puts it this way: “The effect of stress starts in […]

“Right state of peaceful mind”

While living in Thailand in the early 60’s, I bought a book on Buddha put out by the Buddhist Society of Ceylon, as I recall. Recently I wanted to find a copy. I finally found a translation by Paul Carus, The Gospel of Buddha Paperback, that matched my version of Buddha’s four noble truths word-for-word […]

Science Proves Buddha Right!

Another nail has been driven into the coffin of faith-based thinking. Watch this short video, Low Expectations = Happiness, that outlines how we shoot ourselves in the foot through expectations born of wishful thinking. This is not to say expectations aren’t useful or natural. Indeed, considered from a symptoms point of view, I realize they […]

Alleviating the Hoarding Disorder

The video for this was great, but I waited too long so the video link is gone. 🙁 However, the transcript is still available. Search: Seeking Help For Hoarding. Here is a brief excerpt: At some point I got a lot of stuff,” said Joanne Garland. “I kept too much paper. I kept too many books. […]

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Buddha