Share, Care, and Be Fair

Ashley Wells, Co-Editor, Wisdom Quarterly

Reliquary burial mound (stupa, dagaba, pagoda) in Sri Lanka (Digifancanon/flickr.com)

 

Nature's own little stupas

I recently came across the apparently defunct Conservative Buddhist blog, not realizing that my grouchy grandpa's friends could write.
  
Kindred spirits, I thought, curious curmudgeons with one eye on the Dharma and another on keeping the status quo -- "conserving" everything just as it is.
  
We at Wisdom Quarterly are more in tune with social liberals like American patriot and Transcendental author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who could have been speaking of serenity-meditation when he pointed out: 
   

"Happiness is a butterfly which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."

-Nathaniel Hawthorne

Poet Nathaniel Hawthorne, Salem

Being an American Buddhist is being a reader. It might be about being a practitioner in the future. But it goes with our laid back, easy going approach to not being Puritans anymore. Now as mild Unitarians or Spiritists we are free to investigate and explore the world's spiritual traditions as well as paranormal perplexities.

Imagine one day when we all share, care, and are fair. That will be paradise, bliss on Earth, a sparkle of sunshine for the morning of our humanity. But conservatives want to go backward to a time that didn't exist, when the American Dream worked, everyone lived in suburbia, and we were all uniformly homogenous.

American Buddhism: Against the Stream

• Caroline Myss yells with Michael Beckwith: PLAY 
• Silent Auction, Aug 5, Santa Monica
• The Meaningful Life, 8-Week Series with George Haas, Aug 9, Melrose
• Breath Meditation Daylong with American monk Ven. Thanissaro, Aug 18, Melrose
• Intro to Meditation, Aug 18, Santa Monica
• Women's Group, Sept 8, Melrose
• Mindful Music, Sept 8, Melrose
• Impermanence Daylong with American Zen scholar and former monk Shinzen Young, Sept 23, Santa Monica
• Mindset, Mindfulness, and Money - Evening and Morning with Caitriona Reed, Sept 28-29, Melrose
• Unleashing the Soul of Money, Lynne Twist: PLAY
• SIT DOWN, RISE UP (Young People's Group, 15-21)

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Enlightened Daniel Ingram speaks (video)

Daniel Ingram; Britton Lab; Wisdom Quarterly

Daniel Ingram speaks at Cheetah House, Part 1 of 3 from Britton Lab
  

In Part 1, Ingram discusses:

• the impetus for the practical or hardcore Dharma movement
• how the emphasis on open discussion of practice distinguishes the movement from other Dharma movements
• the history of Western Dharma, the interaction of Western Dharma with consumer demand, and how this interaction has led to the current state of Western Dharma
• how the Western Dharma movement might be restructured into a pyramidal model with a full acknowledgement of higher states and stages, using the education system as an analogy
• the difference between using meditation to skillfully handle difficult situations as they come up and using meditation to permanently rewire the brain so these situations are never an issue, and how this distinction relates to confusion over the goals of meditation in mindfulness-based interventions
• the first two stages of insight, mind and body as well as cause and effect

See Ingram's website and download his free book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha at InteractiveBuddha.com

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Buddhist Geeks Conference (FREE video)

The Buddhist Geeks Conference 2012
August 9–11, 2012

FREE video event

Discover the emerging faces of Buddhism at the Buddhist Geeks Conference 2012 via Sounds True live video streaming.

Not Your Normal Buddhist Conference

This is an opportunity to explore the frontiers of Buddhism, technology, and global culture. This year’s gathering brings together luminaries in the fields of Buddhism, science, philosophy, education, business, politics, and more. Participants will explore how the Dharma is co-evolving with modern insights and trends to change lives -- personally and globally -- in extraordinarily unexpected ways.

  

(vincenthorn.com)

Buddhist Geeks co-founder Vincent Horn describes the conference this way:
  
“Some Buddhist events can be boring and predictable and tend to draw on the same group of speakers again and again. When we launched the conference last year, we wanted to create one with a completely fresh and innovative format [to] explore new topics in new ways. Feedback was very enthusiastic. This year’s conference in Boulder, Colorado, will build on what people liked the best from last year, while adding exciting new elements.”

   

Live video streaming is available exclusively through Sounds True. A pass gives those interested up-close coverage of all featured events. 

  

Can’t make a live session? Don't worry! Recordings from live sessions will be available by 7:00 pm Eastern Time (GMT -4), two business days after the conference concludes.

  

Featured Speakers

• SPEAKER BIOS
• Lama Surya Das: American lama 
• Amber Case: cyborg anthropologist 
• Stephen Batchelor: Buddhist author, atheist, former monk 
• Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel: teacher and author 
• Matt Flannery: Kiva.org CEO 
• Martine Batchelor: teacher, author, former nun 
• Michael Stone: Buddhist activist 
• Daniel Ingram: practical Dharma teacher (self-proclaimed enlightened master, author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha; Ingram speaks)
• Willoughby Britton: contemplative scientist 
• Ken McLeod: teacher, executive coach 
• Tami Simon: Sounds True CEO 
• Rohan Gunatillake: meditation entrepreneur 
• Stuart Davis: Bodhisattva rocker 
• Vincent Horn: Buddhist geek 
• Robert Spellman: contemplative artist

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Tips Merawat Jaringan Komputer

Jaringan komputer yang sudah terpasang dengan baik jangan sampai dibiarkan begitu saja tanpa perawatan yang memadai sehingga fungsi dari jaringan tersebut tidak berjalan dengan benar, untuk itu dibutuhkan Tips Merawat Jaringan Komputer tersebut agar jaringan tetap berfungsi dengan baik sebagai jalur kompunikasi antar beberapa unit komputer dalam jaringan. Jaringan yang dirawat di sini adalah

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"Angel Wars" (audio interview)

Space visitors (akasha devas) influencing Earth

(iHelo58) Guest host John B. Wells muddles through a classic Stephen Quayle interview (7-7-11). Quayle is an unapologetic Christian filtering his understanding through the teachings of St. Issa and ancient Jewish lore. Even if the filter and assumptions around it are wrong, there is much to be said for his core message.

A year ago Coast to Coast welcomed author and researcher Steve Quayle, author of Angel Wars, who discussed the secret forces aligned with some humans against humanity since ancient times and how genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are permanently changing the world.

  

"In every single country of the world," Quayle explains, "there are legends which tell of entities who come to Earth not only bestowing their secrets upon humans but also going to war with mankind." 

  

Quayle states emphatically that this topic is "too formidable a subject to ignore in any way, shape, or form."

He traces the root of this ongoing battle to be a "supernatural, evil hierarchy" using misguided humans to corrupt the tribal Judeo-Christian God's work on Earth. These human agents of Satan [the Christian super-Mara, an embodiment of all evil] believe they will be given greater power by yielding their freewill to malevolent forces.

  

However, Quayle warns, "that power they yield to will ultimately consume and destroy them." He points to transhumanism as one key aspect of this agenda: "The goal is not to help humanity be all we can be," he laments. Instead, Quayle contends that the aim is to create a race of quasi-gods who will supplant the human race as we know it. 

  

"If anything, the old-style human beings will be an irritation or reminder of what the transhumanists once were."
   

Quayle also revealed this bombshell: The current economic crisis is actually being orchestrated as a tool to advance this destructive agenda. Sinister power brokers are "throwing the world into a global economic meltdown in order to bring about the New World Order..."

  

The unrest in the Middle East, ongoing "weather wars" [as seen recently with the attack on Beijing, which got six months worth of rain in one day], and the increasingly obvious police state in America are additional facets of this spiritual battle that encompasses political, social, and economic arenas.

  

Quayle is "not a prophet" (with a secret means of communication with a creator god), so he is reticent to predict how things will unfold. But he does have theories. For example, the much-discussed end of the world Mayan Calendar date of December 21st, 2012 might be a target date to "launch their world program."

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Mind Revolution (B. Alan Wallace video)

AlanWallace.org; via Buddhist Geek VincentHorn.com

B. Alan Wallace (Roads to Bliss)

“…This is something that had been postponed for 300 years from the time of Copernicus. Can you imagine 300 years of the development of science -- of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology, etc., etc., 300 years before they actually started the scientific study of the mind?

“That should throw you back for a moment if you’ve not quite thought of it in those terms. This is bizarre. The mind is that with which you’re doing all the science. It would be like somebody giving you an instrument and saying, 'Use this instrument; you will discover a lot of things' then waiting 300 years before you actually look at the instrument itself.”

This video and quote come from B. Alan Wallace’s talk “Toward the First Revolution in the Mind Sciences.” 

  

The cool thing is that he is giving this talk to Google employees! Vince Horn met Alan in July and had a chance to listen to this talk in Boulder. It’s an excellent talk on the history of the physical and biological sciences in the West.

  

His theory on how the mind sciences are about to go through an equally profound revolution like the revolutions related to Galileo and Darwin in the physical and biological sciences respectively.

   

Meditation, of course, is first person introspection. So it -- refining the instrument -- has a lot to do with empirical Western sciences. Reading Wallace’s superb book The Attention Revolution goes a long way to examining the instrument as well.

Who in the world is?

Google TechTalks August 8, 2006 B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D. has been a scholar and practitioner of Buddhism since 1970. He is currently seeking ways to integrate Buddhist contemplative practices and Western science to advance the study of the mind. He is the founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies ( http://sbinstitute.com ). ABSTRACT Galileo took a seminal role in launching the first revolution in the physical sciences, and a key element in this revolution was the rigorous, sophisticated observation of physical phenomena. Darwin likewise launched a revolution in the life sciences on the basis of decades of meticulous observation of biological phenomena. Although scientists have been studying the mind for more than a century, no comparable revolution has taken place in the mind sciences, and the missing element that may account for this delayed revolution is the absence of rigorous, precise observations of mental phenomena. By integrating the third-person methodologies...all »B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D. has been a scholar-practitioner of Buddhism since 1970, at one time serving as translator for the 14th Dalai Lama. He seeks ways to integrate Buddhist contemplative practices with Western science to advance the study of the mind. He is the founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies (sbinstitute.com). 

(Think and Be Happy) How are mental wellbeing and hedonic pleasure to be

distinguished? What types of mental, verbal, physical behaviors support and/or

undermine the cultivation of mental balance?  How does it relate to wellbeing?

ABSTRACT 

Galileo and some nearby planets

Galileo played a seminal role in launching the first revolution in the hard physical sciences. A key element in this revolution was the rigorous and sophisticated observation of physical phenomena. Darwin likewise launched a revolution in the life sciences on the basis of decades of meticulous observation of biological phenomena. Although scientists have been studying the mind for more than a century, no comparable revolution has taken place in the mind sciences. The missing element that may account for this delayed revolution is the absence of rigorously precise observations of mental phenomena as established in the Buddhist Abhidharma. By integrating third-person methodologies common in the cognitive sciences with the first-person modes of examining the mind, which have been developed in Buddhism and other contemplative spiritual traditions, our present generation may bring about the first real revolution in the mind sciences

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Yogis move Off the Mat, Into the World

OffTheMatIntoTheWorld.org

OTM uses the power of yoga to inspire conscious and sustainable activism to ignite grassroots social change, moving yogis off the mat into the world. Join the movement!

  
Yogis around the world are coming together to activate big change. Join the growing movement of leaders raising funds and awareness for global causes. Join the Global Seva Challenge and come on a life-changing journey to India. GET INVOLVED

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