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Not a pic of the author. Just his favorite primate. Image via Wikipedia.

I have material from as far back as December 30th that is virtually ready to go up as well as a lot of new material not even started, but this site is a hobby for me since my mind likes to keep working on puzzles, creating new visions from the familiar, and explaining complex or obscure things. However, this hobby is on the back burner because my current position at my employer is being eliminated.

If you know of anyone who might be interested in employing someone with a graduate degree, extensive knowledge of anthropology, human anatomy, science (especially evolutionary theory) and contemporary issues in politics and religion, or perhaps someone with great writing and editing skills and a talent for researching and learning new things rapidly, or perhaps someone who can act as a catalyst for new ideas and finding patterns that others miss, then feel free to leave your information and relevant internet links in the comments below or to use the contact information at the bottom of the side column.

I prefer work that helps to educate, inform and inspire, so that would be a definite plus. Relocation is no problem. Starting off in a lower level position to gain additional experience in a particular sector of the economy outside of academia is also on the table. However, spammers and scammers are not welcome and without some kind of ability to verify the legitimacy of any suggested contacts or employers such comments will be ignored or deleted.

You are dust and to dust you will return

Image via Wikipedia

These are the words many heard today as ashes were placed on their foreheads to mark the first day of Lent in Roman Catholic, Anglican and a few additional Protestant denominations today (the Orthodox Churches have slightly different calendars).

Lent is a period marked by introspection and penance, and its liturgy and prayers emphasize an awareness of mistakes and failings of the past year as well as a renewed attention on seeking and living a more substantial life. A focus on things beyond our own self-centered perspective and the instant gratification of our whims, an antidote to a myopic view that allows others to be less than precious fellow human beings in our economics and politics.

It is a recognition that the degrading and dehumanizing tendencies that plague humanity are still with us, and within us specifically. That we retain this capacity to become lost to ourselves and others. In a word, we remember the reality of sin.

The discussion of sin is highly unpopular in contemporary Western culture because of the rampant legalism in the Abrahamic traditions and its association with moral imperatives couched in what are often archaic sounding cultural norms. It is a term too often used not to heal and reconcile, as it can be, but rather to harm and condemn.

You are star dust, born in an age before the Earth was formed, an amazing and fearfully formed being with a potential to live in a way that few other species we know of can ever hope to experience. And to dust you will return. Take this opportunity reflect on what you plan to do with the time you have left, with what is worthy of such a being.

The perils of idolatry in a religiously plural society

You sometimes here people warn against chasing after false idols, or being idolatrous, and the like. Yet idolatry is limiting the divine to a particular form and raising up that form as an icon of exclusion and ultimately intolerance. The idols become overly elaborate and demanding, serving to reinforce the existing views and prejudices of their creators. Those who can only see the divine in their own holy symbols, which they then guard jealously, are the actual idolaters. How many of us can claim to be open to the Spirit, to Buddha-nature, to Brahman, however it may call? Or in more flowery language, to delight in it at all times?      

God is emptiness (the transcendence of God)

This is part of a series reflecting on God-talk and Buddhist terminology. It is an opening to dialogue, not a final word on the subject.

Emptiness. If you are ever going to get tired of hearing people talk about a Buddhist concept this has to be a front runner.

If you spend time reading about emptiness in popular magazines and books or popular websites, you will learn that some older translations into English included "void", and that this negative impression still remains with emptiness.

In attempting to correct this, other images are sometimes suggested. Emptiness refers to a lack of something, but what? One expression popularized by Tibetan Buddhists is that things don't exist "on their own side". Chan/Zen Buddhists favor "lack of intrinsic existence". Pure Land Buddhists, Nichiren Buddhists, and others have similar variations on this theme.

Another way to approach the matter is to turn the negative into a positive. If something does not exist under its own power or will (emptiness), but is instead made up of and connected to other things (dependent co-arising), then everything must be subject to change (impermanence) and hence can only exist because they are not permanent and independent objects (no-self). The capacity for change, the formless ground from which phenomena emerges, can be thought of as the essence of potential itself. The power of possibility. 

That sounds much more affirming and exciting than talking about what things are not. Yet it is precisely in emphasizing what things, including our basic categories of perception and thought, are not that emptiness does its best work. This is probably because emptiness itself is not a thing at all, but an insight about things.

Simple, right?

Is Buddha a better Jesus?

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There are many complex psychological, cultural and historical forces at work influencing why a segment one society adopts the religious narratives and symbols of another: the new cultural form is appealing to those disenfranchised by or disillusioned with the traditional form, it fills a gap that societal changes have created, etc.

Any single explanation of the appeal of Buddhism in the West, then, would be as incomplete as any single explanation for the appeal of Christianity in the East. But that doesn't make adding something new to the list of reasons for such a shift isn't worthwhile.

Here is a candidate for the list of reasons why people in the West find Buddhism appealing: Buddha is a better Jesus.

That is to say, the Buddha offers many of the things people who grew up in or around Christianity like about Jesus but without many of things they don't want.

Or another way to put it is that people may have an image of the kinds of things Jesus represents, such as peace, non-violence, suffering for the welfare of others, conscious union with the deepest aspect of reality, which they find appealing or compelling, but which is connected to a larger Biblical narrative and associated imagery that the find offensive or that just doesn't ring true for them.

Here are a few examples:

Left Brain, Right Brain -- Doubt and Opening the Heart

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Have you ever wondered why some people seem to have no sense of "depth" to reality beyond the general appearance of phenomena? This depth is sometimes referred to spirituality, or a sense of the numinous, or by some similar terminology, including cosmic awareness or mysticism or transcendent consciousness.


Those who work in the religion of psychology, a field I confess to not being well acquainted with, have as I understand it tried to come up with scales and measures based on self-reporting and self-scoring of experiences which are associated culturally with transcendent phenomena, including what are known as peak experiences, and the effects of those who have such experiences. Ralph Hood at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga and his M-scale come to mind.

There are also students of the brain such as Andrew Newberg who have tried to identify the neurological structures and processes related to such experiences, not to mention the accounts of trained neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor and her shift in consciousness after having a stroke. Dr. Taylor's stroke impaired activity on the left side of her brain, in particular the areas that discriminate and label experience as a part of our capacity for language.

While none of the work or insights by these and other researchers has come to any firm conclusions about the nature of the spiritual experience, and while the left-brain vs. right-brain dichotomy may be over-generalized, over-exploited, and potentially misleading, there does seem to be evidence for distinct ways of shaping conscious experience corresponding to neural process and structure.

And this does match some accounts by contemplatives and mystics about the nature of transcendent consciousness. Not only does this have the potential to validate the experiences of such spiritually oriented people as healthy brain function rather than delusion, it may also help shed light on why some people seem to have difficulty in recognizing, generating, or maintaining such states.

The two-truths model applied to Jesus and the Cross

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The two-truths model in Buddhism suggests that we must look at any spiritual reading and discern whether it is referring to an ahistorical, or timeless, truth which is only approached indirectly through mythic language and metaphor or whether it is referring to a more mundane truth about particular events as seen with ordinary eyes. The former is sometimes referred to as belonging to a deeper and more inclusive view of reality, while the latter is confined to a narrower empirical view reinforced by our general understanding of how things are supposed to be.

This does not mean that a religious view is always on the level of the mythical/mystical level of understanding or that secular views are always generic/mundane. Someone who takes miraculous language literally (it says Jesus turned water into wine and therefore actual water became actual wine) is rendering that teaching in an ordinary mode of perception, while someone who takes everyday language poetically (such as someone who feels a new sense of depth and interconnectedness upon hearing that we are all made of star dust) is rendering that teaching in an extraordinary mode of perception.

The more inclusive mode has been referred to by teachers such as Thich Nhat Hahn as the ultimate perspective and the more restrictive mode has been dubbed the relative perspective. The challenge for interpreting Biblical texts with this approach to determine which passages and images should be taken from the ultimate perspective and which from the relative.

Take the figure of Jesus and the symbolism of his Cross, for example.