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 desire 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 leaves out all the underlying causative forces at play, and this just perpetuates my ignorance. First off, I see Donald Trump as symptomatic of the deterioration of the cooperative politics […]

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 my initial Who are you? post 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 that our ancestors acquired a secure sense of self. Religious stories have been central to every civilization’s […]

Who are you?

Civilization simultaneously asks and answers 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 […]

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. Thus, it was natural for us to evolve the inclination to opt for the simplest view of most any problem, […]

Stressors of Comfort and Security

Google: Chronic stress can wreak havoc on the body, for research that ties right into my last post, Right state of peaceful mind. Notice how the lightening bolt in the graphic (right) points to the brain, and from there down through the rest of the body. The article puts it this way: “The effect of […]

“Right state of peaceful mind”

While living in Thailand in the early 1960’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!

Google [CBS News When low expectations achieve big results] for research that reveals how we shoot ourselves in the foot with our expectations. This drives yet another nail into the coffin of faith-based wishful thinking. This is not to say expectations aren’t useful or natural. Indeed, considered from a Symptoms Point Of View, they help […]

Alleviating the Hoarding Disorder

Google: Seeking Help For Hoarding for a brief yet telling report on 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. I kept too many clothes.” Too much of everything! Garland’s Greenfield, Mass., home is packed […]

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Buddha