The Tribe
“If you wish to experience peace, provide peace for another.” —14th Dalai Lama
We live in an interconnected world. Like ripples in a pond, our thoughts, speech, and deeds influence and affect each other, waxing and waning like a delicate dance of our lives unfolding. Read on for reflections, thoughts, and theories that examine how we interact with each other and our environment.
[Berkeley Buddhist Monastery will be offering a series of Sunday evening classes using Dhamma with modern issues led by Ajahn Guna. It will be a blend of modern documentaries, walking meditation, discussion, reflection, and other spiritual tools such as chanting.] I have devoted my life to the study and practice of the teachings of the [...]
I was raised without religion. My parents are rational, intellectual, and basically atheist – one comes from a vaguely Christian family, the other from a slightly Jewish one, and they never really made anything of it. They are both professors; they don’t believe, they think. So I had to wonder what they would make of [...]
We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous [...]
My last post on Late-Capitalist Youth looked at Nietzsche’s call to control our passions, in order to gain a sense of freedom and new direction for our lives—but the Buddha looked at self-overcoming as well. To move towards a new patterning for our desires, we need to have some space for the conditioned systems of [...]
So what went wrong? As Lacan and Zizek point out, our dissatisfaction begins with a sense of lack. For Lacan this lack is basic to our psyche. Why did each of us get so confused and dissatisfied with such a simple project? We are conscious and aware. If we have enough to eat, a place [...]
We visited Taiwan for several weeks and witnessed the marked ascendency of Asian economic dynamism grounded on a functional culture and rational economic policies. There is a good balance between free-market capitalism, functional social values and pragmatic public expenditures. The speed of economic growth and social optimism during the last 20 years is in marked [...]
Youth, without much self-reflection, certainly feels the fluidity and markless flow of emotions, thoughts and overwhelming stimuli, and has reacted with various defensive postures from back-to-the-land movements to in-your-face hedonism. Looking at the contemporary world with all its challenges and possibilities, I am reminded of Nietzsche and his admonishment of modern mankind’s quest for freedom [...]
On May 2, 2011, thousands of Americans poured into the streets of New York and Washington, DC dancing and cheering. What was their cause for celebration? They were rejoicing and celebrating at the news of the death of Osama bin Laden (McKellogg 2011). President Obama, in his address to the Nation that day, said, “…this [...]