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Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
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The LA stop of the Green Festival is this weekend at the LA Convention Center. Connect with local communities to find ideas and innovations to help take the next green steps. Hundreds of speakers, exhibitors, DIY workshops... It stops in downtown Nov. 17-18. See the Online Event Guide. Admission is affordable on any budget. The fest is beinh held at the LA Convention Center: 1201 Figueroa St., intersection of the Santa Monica (10) and Harbor (110) freeways. Event hours are 10:00 am-7:00 pm Saturday and 11:00 am-6:00 pm Sunday. Exhibitors have have passed the Green America screening process for leadership in social and environmental responsibility and have earned the Green America Seal of Approval for their commitment.
See Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman, radio/TV hostess for the independent global news hour Democracy Now!, will speak and sign her latest book, The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope on Saturday, Nov. 17 at 1:00 pm. Goodman goes beyond the mainstream media’s obsessive focus on poll numbers and candidate gaffes to examine how people are organizing, the impacts of restrictive voter ID laws, and the massive influx of campaign cash following the Citizens United decision. More
Buddhism has an interesting teaching. It is redeath. Time is cyclical, circular, spiraling. We imagine a straight line and do not see it bend away to come around again -- in much the same way, but not exactly the same way.
Death after death, there is life. Life keeps coming. One grows young again and again and again. What people mostly misunderstand is that it is not us. No one is reborn. What is reborn is a process. The process does not stop, so it cannot really be said to start again with each death and rebirth.
What is now? Some body, feelings, perceptions, willed formations, consciousness. They are altering every moment. They do no reoccur but utterly pass away. If we are them, we are dying. If we are something else, an owner or watcher of them, the owning and watching are dying. It's redeath, redeath, redeath.
The body passes quickly, but the mind passes much more quickly.
And with each death there is "again becoming." For all the aging, sickness, and falling away, there is rearising, health, and again-coming-to-be. What then would it be like to talk to ourselves, to say to the young ignorant version of the future that keeps reiterating?
My pets? They're all dead. My friends? Gone. My family? They wished you well. But all of these tend very strongly to come back again. They are not lost to us completely, just in this form, which utterly passes away as they hurtle toward destruction.
But what about me? Dead. My consciousness (awareness)? Gone. My feelings? They wished me well.
I'll be young again! But it isn't living "forever" if it isn't living for even two moments.
In the future I may become male or female or indeterminate (neuter or androgynous), any race, any nationality, any caste, any planet, any form (a deva, being of light, or dense), any kind of being in 31 very general "planes" of existence.
What would I say to that newborn? If it is a deva, it comes fully formed without birth parents. Similarly, if I slip into the Downfall, perdition, the Great Waste (subhuman planes of existence), rebirth is immediate, even if it is into an intermediate state, it comes fully formed. But on the human and animal planes, transformation and impermanence are very obvious.
Meditate. End all suffering.
There is no need to "meditate" to see youth fleeting. But meditation, whether as contemplation or profound stillness in non-discursive awareness, is necessary to see ourselves cyclically growing younger only to die again.
It works in our favor and can be taken for granted only so long as we have wholesome karma to exhaust. When the profitable is exhausted, we painfully face what the Buddha warned about suffering and taking the Dharma for granted as if it were always available to us.
Buddha's foundational teaching of interconnection and interdependence, or co-arising demands that we live in balance with the environment. If we are just as apart of a towering tree as it's leaves, then to recklessly destroy our forests, rivers and oceans is to slowly but exponentially kill apart of ourselves.
The Buddha's teaching on walking the middle ground between extremes of over-consumption and austerity fits perfectly into the modern, environmental practice of living in balance with nature. It's what we speak of today as "sustainability" or living within our means. It's not necessary to live like a cave man to be an environmentalist in the Buddhist sense, as that would be living out of balance in austerity. It's structuring our lives, so that when we utilize nature's resources, we do it in a balanced and sustainable way.
This "one or the other" thinking that exists in the environmentalist debate today is a less skillful approach. We don't have to choose between environmental sustainability and destructive over-consumption. The environment uses our byproducts of exhaled carbon dioxide to live, and our body waste (or that of animals) as fertilizer, so it's a symbiotic relationship of give and take. The problem comes, of course, when we take much more than is given and the entire ecosystem is throw out of balance, endangering all.
Another modern day environmental tenet is recycling, which, again fits snugly within the Dharma. Buddha's robes (and those of his fellow monks) where said to be fashioned from scraps of cloth found discarded and donated by generous families. They would even use scraps from the clothes of dead people donated by grieving families!! How many of us wear second-hand clothes made from discarded fabric?!! However, we don't have to adorn ourselves in tattered cloth in order to leave a soft footprint on the environment. It's a matter of repairing garments that are otherwise perfectly wearable, rather than throwing them in the trash.
Buddha also didn't have a fancy, extensive wardrobe to choose from, but rather only what was necessary. For us, today, that means buying less clothes than we need, which is not only in keeping with the middle path, but also the Buddhist ideal of balanced consumption. It also means donating old clothes, instead of throwing them in the garbage. And less garbage means a less polluted environment; thus, a healthier place to live.
In wrapping up the post, I want to come full circle back to interconnection. As Buddhists, we believe that all sentient beings are reborn upon death. Therefore, we should feel a strong commitment to leave a better world for those beings. To paraphrase a famous quote, the environment is on loan to us from future generations. Let's not ruin it for them--and us. Happy Earth Day everyone!!
In one sitting meditation, when I focused my attention on my heart--breathing in, I am aware of my heart, breathing out, I smile to my heart--suddenly I realized that this is not the only heart that I have. I have many other hearts. Suppose that I look at the sun in the sky. I know that it is also another heart of mine. If this heart failed I would die right away. But if the other heart, the sun, explodes or stops functioning as the sun, I would also die right away.
~Thich Nhat Hanh, The Mindfulness Bell, winter/spring issue 47, 2008.
James: Another heart is our planet Earth, it is literally alive and very much like our own bodies. For example, most of our planet consists of water just like the human body. Deep inside the Earth a constant movement of hot liquid rich in iron keeps the planet alive much like our blood (also rich in iron) keeps us in health. If this plasma like layer where to cool and harden then life would eventually cease, not unlike too much blood loss causes the heart to stop.
The Earth's ozone and magnetic field act as shields that protect life here from harmful radiation emitted from the sun. Radiation is important and helpful in some respects but in small doses just like some bacteria is helpful in our bodies but again in small doses. If too much bacteria grows within our body then our white blood cells are stimulated to neutralize the dangerous levels of bacteria to return our body back to a stable, balanced environment. In that regard the Earth's atmosphere acts as those white blood cells to maintain the right balance to enable life to flourish on this planet.
So when seen through mindful openness an intricate interconnection unfolds within this Universe from the tiniest molecules to the largest stars until it can no longer be described and becomes parinirvana which is beyond our limiting labels, concepts and knowledge.
But let's return back to the present moment as I look out the window and gaze upon the gentle breeze dancing through the branches of the mock pear tree out front. That tree is apart of me as it relies upon the same sun to grow as I do, therefore if I do not care for that tree and millions like it then I will in turn die off. Trees thrive off of the carbon dioxide that we emit from breathing oxygen which is in turn partially created by those very trees and other plants. This leads to recycling.
We humans have not existed in harmony with the other organisms that share this planet with us, we have not been good neighbors over time. We have become in many ways a parasite or a cancer on the Earth because we have taken so much and given so little back to the circle of life that is our environment. Yet all is not lost, we can heal the scars that we have inflicted and return our lovely celestial body back to a more balanced state of being by recycling and using renewable energy sources.
In our city we have a recycling program that we participate in. We save our plastic bottles and recyclable metal and plastic containers in one bin and all our newspapers and paperboard waste such as old pasta boxes go in another bin. Then once a week a truck comes along and picks it all up to be sorted through at the recycling factory who then sell the metals and paper back to companies to make more metal and plastic containers and paper products and the cycle continues. Every time I put those bins on the curb I smile in peace knowing that I am giving back to my fellow organisms that share this planet with me.
The same goes with renewable energy, we harness the abundant clean energy available to us in using solar power, wind power, water, geothermal and others to meet our needs without harming the very body (Earth) that we are apart of. Through these measures we begin to cease being the separate, destructive cancer and return to being just another variation of being on a vast and beautiful heavenly body.
It is true that we can not prevent the eventually destruction of Earth but we do not want to have the karma of speeding up that process by our less than skillful actions. Life ebbs and flows of it's own accord and it is not our right to take life away from any living being and that includes our living Earth.
I've been slowly (slowly only because of lack of money) phasing out my leather goods since becoming a "Buddhist" and becoming a vegetarian. Well, the other day I took my first step toward being "leather free." I ordered a "faux leather" belt and it is really nice. In fact, I like it more then any leather belt I've owned!! Part of it I think is the satisfaction and peace of mind knowing I'm not supporting the killing of animals. However, functionally speaking It is just as thick, pliable and supportive as any leather belt I've ownd. It appears very durable and I expect it will last a long time. My next step is getting a non-leather wallet, then non-leather, sweatshop free shoes and finally getting a new couch. Unfortunately the non-leather products tend to cost more but they are worth the peace of mind for my money. And the more people purchase these products the more the cost will inevitably go down.
We also try to buy as much organic food as possible. As well as non-toxic products. Every little bit helps. We are also big recyclers. The town we live in has a great recycling program. They sell bins for recycling. One (a blue one) for all paper products (including paperboard which includes most grocery boxes and other products. And then a green one for glass, certain plastic bottles, and tin cans. You just leave the bins out on the curb next to the garbage and they actually pick it up for you! It's really nice. Plus, we have a recycle plant near by that takes cardboard, phone books and the other products mentioned above. So it really annoys me when people around here throw glass bottles in the regular trash. We have such a great recycling program but people are too lazy to hold on to that bottle, take it home and put it where it belongs. I guess though I can only do my part and encourage others to do the same. I can't (nor should I) force people into doing it.
