The Story of Stuff - Intro

This is a 2-1/2 minute intro to The Story of STUFF video - a fast-paced look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. Great illustrations to draw out the connections between environmental and social issues, and the direction we need to go - together - to create a sustainable (for humans and many other species we are fond of). It's a funny, even delightful, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life (forever? or maybe through the Christmas shopping season?!).

Tonglen Collection: Taking and Giving

Ah, Tonglen. This is a wonderful and challenging practice - at least for me! But worth the effort...

Tonglen from Wikipedia
Tonglen is Tibetan for 'taking and giving', and it refers to a meditation practice found in Tibetan Buddhism.

In the practice, one visualizes taking onto oneself the suffering of others, and giving one's own happiness and success to others. As such it is a training in altruism in its most extreme form.

The function of the practice is to:

• reduce selfish attachment
• increase a sense of renunciation
• create positive karma by giving and helping
• develop loving-kindness and bodhicitta, which refers to all of the Six Perfections of giving, ethics, patience, joyous effort, concentration and wisdom, which are the practices of a Bodhisattva.
  

The Practice of Tonglen - Pema Chodron
Transforming Confusion into Wisdom

All-Embracing Compassion: The Heart-Practice of Tonglen

Peter Fox, Tonglen - receiving and letting go
Methodology and stages

Dalando's Favorite Dharma Delicacy
"In with the bad and out with the good" the topsy-turvy world of TONGLEN

How It All Ends

Interesting and fast-paced logic. Worth a view. It'll hone your thinking...

Crop-circles: non-human, magical, or high-tech?

I had a book in the early 80s, maybe it was the Aquarian Conspiracy, that had crop circle pictures, but I haven't seen pictures of recent ones until this morning. These are wild!

This one appeared on July 7, 1996, just across from Stonehenge and is called the "Julia set." According to the account, it was made within a 45-minute time-window in the daytime. Given the detail and size, construction of this would normally have taken hours. Stonehenge has guards and many visitors, and you can see it is adjacent to a fairly busy highway. Plus there was a farmhand working the next field - but no one saw it made.

Jonah Ohayv has compiled photos of crop circles that appear more genuine to him. Check them out, if for no other reason than the cool patterns.

Mobilize to end the war

On Saturday, October 27th there will be 11 massive demonstrations for peace throughout the United States. In Boston, Chicago, Jonesborough, Tennessee, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle, people from all walks of life will join together to express their anti-war sentiments and to call for an immediate end to the conflict in Iraq.

How about Louisville?!

Mountaintop Removal Video "Like another planet"

China holds strings on reincarnation

According to Newsweek (August 20-27, 2007 issue), "In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission."

Al Queda too issues regular pronouncements on the limits and directions of its adherent’s thoughts and behavior in this current life as well as, more importantly, on their relationship to the afterlife. Certainly their definitive offer of 72 virgins attempts to institutionalize, as does China, management of the ‘world to come’ as well as one’s ultimate resolution of mortality – suicide bombings notwithstanding. An abundance of fat was demanding the death of all disrespectful opposition, of all non-believers, of all sacrilegious iconoclasts further fine tunes their inordinate attempts to micromanage who lives, who dies and who inherits heaven or hell.

Do Christians do this?

Showering in solar hot water

The Louisville Courier-Journal featured our solar system on the front page of the St. Matthews Neighborhood section.