Thursday 14 March 2024

Street Level Zen: Diversity













"What makes you different makes you valuable."

Terry O'Reilly







(Painting of Japanese long-tailed rooster courtesy of Shibata Zeshin and Rawpixel.com.)

Wednesday 13 March 2024

WW: Big fudo rings



(Here are a few of the largest rings I've collected for making fudos. [Among those not yet deployed, of course.] Most of the malleable washers came off the beach, wrenched from the wreckage of docks and shoreworks cast up by storms over the years. Their condition betrays particular power. Note as well a rare wooden ring.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Thursday 7 March 2024

Chemistry

Chemistry Experiment 3D

Here's a brief rumination from an anonymous blogger about a topic I've raised here before:

https://przxqgl.hybridelephant.com/2017/04/21/depression-4/

Reading this, I'm reminded that my own depression never "just happens". It's a response to targeted violence from others around me, and common among those who take refuge in a spiritual path. Because when we pill depression away, we green-light further abuse, typically on grounds that our society profits in some way from the consequences.

I'm on record as endorsing the treatment of depression with meds. I also endorse plaster casts for broken arms, but I don't pretend broken arms are the result of an innate cerebral dysfunction; even less that the occasional need for a cast indicates disability.

Yet the medicalisation of depression implies both. When I question this, I often hear that depression patients are a kind of evolutionary beta release; we're just not bundled with the latest DNA upgrade that allows us to function productively in a society whose survival relies on toughness and insensitivity.

This in spite of the fact that it's the animalistic members of the human family who are by definition the atavists.

Thus my various intellectual reactions to objections that the nation will fall unless citizens are permitted to abuse one another, none of which are, "Oh, I see – carry on, then."

So check out the post linked above. My brother's two paragraphs are short and to the point. At minimum, they prove I'm not the only one who's noted a touch of self-service in our culture's take on this matter.


(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

Wednesday 6 March 2024

WW: Magic beads



(Last Christmas I got a tiny cellophane envelope containing half a teaspoon of hard, opaque, plastic-looking multicoloured beads, about the size of pinheads. Amidst a certain amount of Chinese text, the only English was two brief directions.

Make that "English", because the best I could decipher was:

1. Pour water on these.
2. Don't eat what happens.

Not a word about what these things were, or what the water was going to make them do.

So I poured water over them, and next morning found this.

Apparently all they do is sit there being miraculous.

Which is sufficient.)


Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

Thursday 29 February 2024

Good Video: A Disquistion On The Nature Of Idiocy


"Whenever I'm about to do something, I think, 'Would an idiot do that?', and if they would, I do not do that thing."

This is the opening statement in the above-embedded excerpt from a Northwestern commencement address by Illinois governor JB Pritzer. It caught my ear because it reminded me of my own rule of thumb: Nothing stupid is Buddhist. Listening further, I found similar agreement with several more of the governor's insights. Take this one:

"The best way to spot an idiot: look for the person who is cruel."

Been relying on this one since childhood. Beware: it's not just for those you dislike. For example, though I long binned ideology as the only thing dumber than dogma, I live mostly on the left. And these days, I'm surrounded by fellow travellers who believe focussed cruelty is an effective retort to racism, classism, homophobia, sexism, religious bigotry, sexual predation, a catch-all crime called "insensitivity", and literally any other arrogance conceivable by monkeys. And so they ramp about, rightwinging anybody they can spin into a target.

Which is why I'm uneasy in their company. Because without you're an idiot, you know that sooner or later, by that standard, we all hang.

The governor does have a somewhat outdated view of our evolution, however. As I recently explained, far from securing our survival, we had to skim our ancestors' reptilian instincts off the gene pool to avoid them scrubbing us. But Pritzer is exact when he points out that empathy and compassion are evolved states. They are in fact seminal to our extraordinary run on this planet.

So the cruelty so fashionable to this era can't be forgiven as innate. The vicious make a conscious human choice.

No natural selection there. Just a mountain of karma.

Anyhow, I won't spoil the rest of the video for you. It's an excellent – one might say, prophetic – 3 minutes, that quite stands on its own.

Be sure to note Governor Pritzer's closing declaration. That we've so long allowed cultural authorities to teach us and our children the opposite reflects poorly on our own selective fitness.

I respectfully propose that reversing this trend is the essence of engaged Zen.

Wednesday 28 February 2024

Thursday 22 February 2024

Hermit Sutra























Eschew temples.
Abandon theology.
Ignore priests.
Walk the path.
Don't waste time.


(Photo courtesy of Unsplash.com and a generous photographer.)