Awake in This Life

Terry Patton hits the topic of enlightened activism on several different levels in his most recent blog post.

One of the problems with conventional political activism is that it can be so painfully egoic. Egos commonly experience anxiety, and on that basis they feel an urgency to take action. But anxiety-based activism tends to recreate the disharmony that motivates it. If you’ve ever volunteered in a political campaign or for a political cause, you’ve probably come across the incredible narrowing of vision—and often the incredible lack of understanding or compassion for the “other side”—that accompanies these efforts, even if the candidate or cause is otherwise just. That anxious urgency frequently leads to unnecessary conflict, emotional burnout, and even a disaffected cynicism that gives up on the very possibility of meaningful change.

via Evolutionary Activism — A Bodhidharma Strategy | The Integral Heart.

Could it be that the MSM is verging on a discussion involving higher order self-hood? Is fully responding to life starting to creep into our dialog? While this column doesn’t necessarily do this, we can still lean into hope.

The person leading the Well-Planned Life emphasizes individual agency, and asks, “What should I do?” The person leading the Summoned Life emphasizes the context, and asks, “What are my circumstances asking me to do?”

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Summoned Self – NYTimes.com.

About to hear Roger Walsh talk about Integral Ethics, which differ from regular ethics because they’re more… uh… integral.

Listening to Dr. Elke Fein talk about history from an integral perspective.

She argues that collective traumatic experience has more of a social, cultural, and political development than we’ve imagined. This and how a society relates to its past work to determine behavior on the world stage.

Sensors up, heart open.

Even if these people did “scuttle” his meditation, imprisoning and beating visitors is not the most Buddhist of behaviors. Maybe he’s rebranding as Nepal’s “Buddha Bad Boy.”

PATHLAIYA: Ram Bahadur Bamjan, 20, popularly known as Buddha boy, thrashed 17 locals after holding them for nearly 24 hours in Bara district on Friday.

The injured locals from Manaharwa VDC said they were thrashed at Ratanpuri forest where they had gone to collect wild vegetables on Thursday afternoon.

via The Himalayan Times – Buddha boy shows wrath – Nepal News

I can’t quite do this as well as Bruce Lee did, back in the day. Give me a few more decades… and some nunchucks.

Hat tip: elephant journal

Interesting op-ed from Van Jones in yesterday’s NYT. As with many, I was bummed by the knee-jerk responses so many had to the Shirley Sherrod situation. Jones offers some interesting insights relating her situation to his own.

The worst of the partisans will get their comeuppance and become cautionary tales for others. Public leaders will learn to be more transparent. We will teach our children not to rush to judgment. Technology will evolve to better expose fakers.

But the big breakthrough will come not when we are better able to spot the lies. It will come when we are better able to handle the truth about people. We are complex beings; no one is all good or all bad. And people do evolve into better people over their lives — just look at Senator Robert Byrd, who died this month and who entered politics as a segregationist and left as a statesman.

via Op-Ed Contributor – Shirley Sherrod and Me – NYTimes.com.

I’m always appreciative of empirical explorations of the things I yammer on about from the cushion. I also like that for any of Brooks’ perceived failings he’s intellectually curious; something refreshing among the punditocracy.  We are, it appears, moral animals. But when we attach to our morality, we lose its offering.

By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.

Paul Bloom of Yale noted that this moral sense can be observed early in life. Bloom and his colleagues conducted an experiment in which they showed babies a scene featuring one figure struggling to climb a hill, another figure trying to help it, and a third trying to hinder it.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Moral Naturalists – NYTimes.com.

The most recent flap over whether or not to put a mosque near NYC’s ground zero has struck a chord for many. Although its okay for a strip club to be located nearby, a mosque crosses the line.

Robert Wright does a nice job in his essay on the topic for the NYT, and Shambala picks it up here:

The irony is that the mosque project is spearheaded by one of the most liberal and ecumenical Muslim clerics in the US, Feisel Abdul Rauf (pictured), a good friend to many Buddhist, Christian, and Jewish progressives and contemplatives.

The irony, of course, is that he is exactly the kind of person that those who oppose religious extremism should be supporting. But in this age of neo-McCarthyism, the cynical find it useful to tar all Muslims with the same brush.

via Shambhala SunSpace » What’s Right—and Wrong—with Islam.

As much as I enjoy philosophical discourse, the whole “Free Will” things get’s old. This, in my view, is because the arguments as to whether or not we have it tend to miss the most fundamental aspect of the debate: free will is an intedependancy. In other words, there is no free will if there is no fresh water or clean air. Any of our choices depends on all sorts of stuff. I once heard it said that the Buddha pointed this out at Deer Park when he exclaimed, “There’s no such thing as independence! All things are interdependent. Got that, Jack?”

Still, in “Your Move: The Maze of Free Will” , GALEN STRAWSON, makes the flawed case… again.

You arrive at a bakery. It’s the evening of a national holiday. You want to buy a cake with your last 10 dollars to round off the preparations you’ve already made. There’s only one thing left in the store — a 10-dollar cake.

On the steps of the store, someone is shaking an Oxfam tin. You stop, and it seems quite clear to you — it surely is quite clear to you — that it is entirely up to you what you do next. You are — it seems — truly, radically, ultimately free to choose what to do, in such a way that you will be ultimately morally responsible for whatever you do choose. Fact: you can put the money in the tin, or you can go in and buy the cake. You’re not only completely, radically free to choose in this situation. You’re not free not to choose (that’s how it feels). You’re “condemned to freedom,” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase. You’re fully and explicitly conscious of what the options are and you can’t escape that consciousness. You can’t somehow slip out of it.

via Your Move: The Maze of Free Will – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.

The first copper-domed Tibetan Buddhist temple will be built on the coast of west Cork, according to IrishCentral.com

Garranes, Ireland — It has been announced that the Dzogchan Beara retreat centre will build a copper-domed traditional Tibetan Buddhist temple on the centre’s land.

The 14.5 meter tall temple will perch, by the retreat center, on top of the cliffs at Garranes, near Allihies, west Cork.  The retreat center, which was founded in 1992, sits on 150 acres.

Matt Padwick, the director of the retreat said “A number of fishermen returning to (Castletownbere) port tell us they love to see the centre because they then feel they are home. Maybe they will soon see a new building which will be like a spiritual lighthouse.”

Spiritual lighthouse, indeed. Having traveled through this part of the world, I can’t imagine a better setting. Plus there are great pubs nearby where practitioners can sink Guiness between recognitions of consciousness’ ultimate perfection. Cheers.

via Buddhist Channel .

Interesting lines being drawn here:

some progressive Christian leaders are arguing as battle lines are drawn for the 2010 mid-term elections. They say Beck and his Tea Party followers are, in a word, unbiblical.

And then of course:

Tea Party activists, who claim biblical grounds for a libertarian-minded Jesus. He didn’t like tax-based welfare programs, they say, and encouraged his followers to donate from the heart.

via Is the Tea Party unbiblical?.

The commitment to walking along the Path of Awakening challenges us in ways that most of us don’t expect. Truly dedicating ourselves to anything is hard work, but this is especially true for this process. Devotion to deep spiritual work is perhaps one of the most treacherous areas for any of us to explore since it involves nothing short of an all-encompassing promise to live our lives as profound expressions of the Truth that all the great spiritual teachers, whether they be Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, or anything else, have been pointing out over the course of human history.

via Chapter 8 – Commitment | Awake in This Life.

In this talk, Michael discusses the difference between wonder and doubt and how each of these experiences affects practice. He argues that doubt, especially great doubt, can enhance our awareness as long as we are not caught by our doubt.

via ISmile246 – Doubt: Wonder with an Attitude | Infinite Smile.

To be fair, I’ve cracked up during meditation plenty of times. Still it’s funny to see Daisy Duke lose it in front of a Thai monk.

Sojourners has set up a way to “report” ourselves to the appropriate authorities if we espouse social justice in our interpretation of sacred scripture.

Feel free to join me. Here’s my report:

Dear Mr. Beck,

I’m a Buddhist who believes in the compassionate call to social justice upon which so many historical wisdom traditions base their teachings.

I stand in support of the traditions of the Hindu, Muslim, Hebrew, Buddhist and Christian prophets that echo the teaching of an infinite intention for justice in every aspect of our individual, social, and economic lives. Practicing this intention, after all, helps us embody the most sacred of all spiritual teaching, regardless of tradition.

With this in mind, I hereby “report” myself to you, and promise to report myself to the appropriate organizational authorities. I hope you’ll be hearing from them as well.

Sincerely,

Michael McAlister

This is interesting. I’ve always thought that a commitment to social justice was at the core of Christian (as well as other) spiritual teaching. At least that’s what Thomas Aquinas seems to point out in his writing.

Perhaps Beck has something on Aquinas.

Money quote:

On his radio program, Fox News’ Glenn Beck encouraged listeners to leave their church if it proclaims a concern for social justice:

I’m begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words ’social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!”

You can listen for yourself here.

Soren Gordhamer, organizer of the Wisdom 2.0 Conference, writes that we need to 1.) know that our external reflects our internal, 2.) do one thing at a time, 3.) invite instead of force, and 4.) know where our attention is most needed. Phrases for any spiritual practitioner to live by.

As a conclusion, Gordhamer gives us this money quote:

In the coming years, the amount information at our disposal is only likely to increase. When Google recently launched Google Buzz, their team addressed the challenges of this information era, saying, “we want to present some tools and techniques to help you manage your attention better.” While this is partly a technological problem, it is also an internal and life balance problem.The challenge of our time is to live connected and use all the great social media available to us, while at the same time harness and direct our attention where it is most needed at any given time. After all, where we decide to put our attention is, essentially, how we choose to spend our life.

Blogger, Matthew Yglesias suggests:

The map lumps the plains states in with the church belt, but if you look at the data more specifically you’ll see that nine of the ten churchiest states are in the south and the remaining one is Utah.