From my new read, gassho, Jack writes an elegant summary of the roots of six major religions: Lunch today with Koshin Ogui who heads Chicago’s Midwest Buddhist temple. He suggests that religion is at the root of our political and cultural worldviews and that there are two genres of religions — mountain-field religions (Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism) and desert religions (Islam, Judaism, Christianity). The ethos of desert religions is survival by resisting and opposing nature — the dualistic perspective; the ethos of mountain-field religions is survival by being in harmony with nature — the oneness perspective. Maybe, maybe not, but it …
The Human Phenomenon, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Mega-synthesis in the tangential, and therefore and thereby a leap forward of the radial energies along the principal axis of evolution: ever more complexity and thus ever more consciousness. If that is what really happens, what more do we need to convince oursleves of the vital error hidden in the depths of any doctrine of isolation? The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of ‘everyone for himself’ is false and against nature. No element could move and grow except with and by all …
The Hiri Sutta Who in the world is a man constrained by conscience, who awakens to censure like a fine stallion to the whip? Those restrained by conscience are rare — those who go through life always mindful. Having reached the end of suffering & stress, they go through what is uneven evenly; go through what is out-of-tune in tune.
A picture of earth from the edge of the solar system, by Voyager 1 Carl Sagan: Relfections on a Mote of Dust Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, …
whiskey river stares into the abyss: I pace back and forth on the edge of the abyss, looking down into the dark. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you. [Friedrich Nietzsche said that. But you knew that.] And now, feel it begin to sink. Here’s hoping everything’s okay down by the whiskey river.