Throughout my life, world leaders with developmentally-challenged minds stuck in toddlerhood, pre-teen, or adolescence have wrought incalculable death and suffering on the people of Earth, and destruction to the planetary body. Western media have mostly cheered for them, repeated their lies as truth, and demonized any who dared to question the cults of violence built…
Author: brian
Tamed By the Small
“…the object of your inquiry is blocked by a small yet permanent influence. Nothing can be done externally. Salvation, if it exists, lies in work on the Self.” — R.L. Wing, The I Ching Workbook It is a personal tradition of mine to cast a yearend I Ching hexagram, and today’s could not have hit…
Alan Watts on Christ
I picked off just over 6 minutes of audio from a ca. 1965 talk by Watts on Jesus as a revolutionary: someone who challenged the monarchical tradition of Judaism and introduced democracy to the kingdom of heaven. But as Watts points out, his revolutionary act was suppressed via a trick of translation on the part…
YouTube and the Elements of Desire
You can learn anything you want in Alphabet-Google’s video labyrinth, YouTube. You can get tips on making Word, Excel, or Powerpoint work better for you, or you can dive into C++ or Java programming. You can learn anything from basic arithmetic to quantum mechanics. You can study office etiquette or political activism. But YouTube can…
A Love Song for Carol
“The master potter leaves no trace.” — Taoist proverb 9/12/2020 The goal of any genuine spiritual practice is the same as that of any effective psychotherapy: to draw unconscious and preconscious content into awareness, through a gradual and naturally measured process of opening, realization, and release. In the literature of psychotherapy, I learned much that…
The Masks of Neurosis
“Who are you?” It’s another of those questions addressed, with varying degrees of urgency, by spiritual practice and psychotherapy. It’s a question that deserves attention before its answer becomes a weak inscription, fading on a stone worn down by decades or centuries of weather, above the debris that was once your physical body on this…
Meditation Practice, Stage One: Listening
February 9, 2014 Forced or manufactured sound is everywhere. Music, traffic, video, phones, web noise, advertising, small talk, argument, television. When sound becomes compulsion or consumption — the expression of some deep-seated but displaced emotional need — it turns into noise. But a life grounded in silence actually makes better use of sound, in the…
Zuccotti Park: A Sacred Space
November 3, 2011 Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to the revolution, to the great renewal, to the natural social order. Welcome to the America that you were taught as a child to love, to revere, to treasure, and, if necessary, to die for. Welcome to Democracy… _____________________________________ These are some notes I scribbled down after visiting…
Drinking Water with a Fork
Perhaps you’ve encountered this headline in some of your recent World Weird Web wanderings: Scientists find that consciousness continues after death. If not, click, read, and make of it what you will (or won’t). I have no particular conclusion to draw from that research; first, because it’s founded on the same flawed probability theories that I’ve criticized…
The Rain of Yellow Flowers
April 19, 2014 Alan Watts taught that our consciousness — thoughts, memories, feelings, actions — do not survive our physical deaths. Yet he also taught that something does; the aspect of ourselves that Lao Tzu called “the nameless essence,” the inviolable connection and identity with the All. Therefore, to die well requires the same inner action as…