thenatureofmind

Two Friends

Recently I lost two close friends. They were husband and wife and were in their early 60's. They were both therapists and spent their lives working with people to help them live fuller more sane lives. Susan fought a 7 year long battle battle with cancer, Michael was apparently perfectly healthy. A month before Susan died, Michael was hospitalized with what was thought to be a stroke. It turned out to be a highly agressive brain tumor. He died within 2 weeks. Susan died two weeks later. When I was talking with one of our Mexican friends who knew them he said, "It's magic". "I have heard this happening with older couples but never with two people who were so young". Having been a Buddhist for many years, I have had the 4 noble truths drilled into my head for a long time. I have heard more lectures on the doctrine of impermanence than you can shake a stick at. In a real way I am one of a group of friends who have entered the Bardo with them. We are all trying to find our way in a culture that does not functionally recognize the realm beyond life.

This is for Michael and Susan.....

The Moon Cannot Be Stolen

From Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
By Paul Reps & Nyogen Senzaki

Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing in it to steal.

Ryokan returned and caught him. "You may have come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler, "and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift."

The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.

Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. "Poor fellow," he mused, "I wish I could give him this beautiful moon."

Living Beyond Your Means

I am sure all of us have had the experience personally or at least have had friends or family who for one reason or another have found themselve in the situation where their rate of debt acquisition has exceeded their rate of income. This could be for a variety of reasons; it happened to various members of my family during the Great Depression. There might also be the circumstance where there is the loss of one or all of the income in a family.

On the global scale we have a similar situation. The problem is that where natural resources are concerned there is no bank that is going to forclose, no sheriff who is going to evict you from your house. When shortages occur, world prices change rapidly potentially destabilizing the world political scene. Suddenly the survival of small national groups becomes more important that the survival of all of the planet's inhabitants and the ability of those inhabitants to interact in a mutually beneficial and constructive way. It's a slippery slope and we are starting to slide......

World Living Beyond Its Environmental Means-WWF

Bush's Christianity vs. Christ's Christianity

The Gospel According to Dubya

Are we about to invade Iraq?

A re-post, because of a bad link.... but with some new information....

An article from Australia passed to me by a friend. Could the crazies running our government be that crazy?

If Iran doesn't behave...

Voice of the White House

Brought to you by your friendly Neo-Cons: World War IV

You would think that the Neo-cons in the Bush government who designed the policy that got us into Iraq, predicting that we would be greeted as liberators and would have flowers strewn at our feet, would have a little egg on their faces but apparently not so. You would think that they would be disgraced and sidelined if not outright fired, but not so. They are still at it in full force and the next targets are Iran and Syria, they call it World War IV. Read on....

Sidelined Neo-Cons Stoke Future Fires by Jim Lobe

Fascism in the US

There are three excellent articles by David Neiwert on his site Orcinus entitled 'The Rise of Pseudo Fascism". They are lengthy but of more than passing interest to those who really would like to understand the threat that the current right wing politics presents to the United States. This is not politics as usual, this is an attack on the very core values that are embodied in the US constitution. We need to regard this movement in the same light that we regard Communism. It aims to destroy the actual fundamental principles that it purports to defend.

Orcinus: The Rise of Pseudo Fascism Part 1: The Morphing of the Conservative Movement

Orcinus: The Rise of Pseudo Fascism Part 2: The Architecture of Fascism

Orcinus: The Rise of Pseudo Fascism Part 3: The Pseudo-Fascist Campaign

Why, It's Pretty as a Picture

By Charles Wright

From A Short History of the Shadow

A shallow thinker, I'm tuned
             to the music of things,
The conversations of birds in the dusk-damaged trees,
The just-cut grass in its chalky moans,
The disputations of dogs, night traffic, I'm all ears
To all this and half again.

And so I like it out here,
Late spring, off-colors but firming up, at ease among half things.
At ease because there's no overwhelming design
                      I'm sad heir to,
At ease because the dark music of what surrounds me
Plays to my misconceptions, and pricks me, and plays on.

It is a kind of believing without belief that we believe in,
This landscape that goes
           no deeper than the eye, and poises like
A postcard in front of us
As though we'd settled it there, just so,
Halfway between the mind's eye and the mind, just halfway.

And yet we tend to think of it otherwise. Tonight,
For instance, the wind and the mountains and half-moon talk
Of unfamiliar things in a low familiar voice,
As though their words, however small, were putting the world in place.
And they are, they are,
           the place inside the place inside the place.
The postcard's just how we see it, and not how it is.
Behind the eye's the other eye,
              and the other ear.
The moonlight whispers in it, the mountains imprint upon it,
Our eyelids close over it,
Dawn and the sunset radiate from it like Eden.

An Interview with Charles Wright
by Morgan Schuldt

Armageddon

Over the past few years a number of articles have come to my attention that deal with a set of beliefs about the biblical prophesies concerning Armageddon. These beliefs are held by a segment of the evangelical christians in the US. Their belief centers around certain interpretations of the bible that specify the "signs", the things that will occur before Armageddon begins. One of these things is the total control of the ancient state of Israel by the Jews and the re-building of the temple after the destruction of the Dome of the Rock, the Islamic temple which now occupies the site where the Temple of Solomon once stood. When the prophesies come to pass, a nuclear war will ensue in which most of the population of the earth will be destroyed, except for the "elect", and of course those believing in these prophesies hold themselves to be that "elect". The elect will be whisked up to heaven without having to die and will be saved from all of this suffering.

The Intelligence Failure In the White House (cont)

In 2002, at a crucial juncture on the path to war, senior members of the Bush administration gave a series of speeches and interviews in which they asserted that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program. Speaking to a group of Wyoming Republicans in September, Vice President Dick Cheney said the United States now had "irrefutable evidence".......

How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence
By DAVID BARSTOW, WILLIAM J. BROAD and JEFF GERTH (may require login)