Or so it seems.

 Buddhism is a religion. Meditation is a practice. You  can have one without the other. Meditation is present in most of the major religious traditions. I think it was the Dalai Lama who said: "Don't become a Buddhist. The world doesn't need any more Buddhists" Yet people are out there hawking Buddhism and making money off it and spreading misinformation. I think we have to separate Buddhism from its Asian cultural accretions and develop a new, Western Buddhism based on the sutras and not on the various Asian traditions (not that there's anything wrong with them, they just don't fit our culture.) I feel that Western Buddhists wearing robes and other costumes, using foreign-language texts, and taking on funny-sounding names are rather silly. If they were really enlightened, they would know that these things are just cultural trappings and not essential to Buddhism. If Buddhism is about anything, it is about clarity and seeing things as they really are. It's about seeing myself as I really am. Or so it seems.

May the 4th Be With You

 

As amazing as it may seem, there was a time in the history of the world when nobody had put the words “star” and “wars” together. Really. I know it seems Star Wars has been around forever, but it hasn't. Prior to May 25th, 1977, the world was blissfully unaware of what was about to happen. A new Force, beyond anything we had ever seen before, was about to burst upon the scene. Our world would never be the same.

I was in the theater the day Star Wars opened. I think there were lots of people there with me. I don't know how the others found out about it, but I learned about it from a friend who went to the movies stoned one afternoon. Afterwards he described breathlessly “this movie that was coming that had swords that light up and space ships and little robots.” I had no idea what he was talking about, and suspected the fact that he was stoned at the time made him embellish what he saw in the Coming Attractions (as trailers were called back then.) But it sounded pretty good. Since we were science-fiction fans, we immediately made plans to be in the theater on opening night, even though we had heard nothing else about this film. I know I liked it. I'm not sure I loved it, at first, anyway. In fact it wasn't clear that it was a hit until at least the Monday after it opened when the ticket-sales numbers came in and it was clear that it was a block-buster. It could have gone either way. I think we assumed it was just another science-fiction film, for which we were grateful, of course. But a world-wide cultural phenomenon? No one even dreamed of that. No one even suspected it was possible. We could not have anticipated how big it would become.

The rest is history...

Bags of water

Earth is the water planet. We humans are mostly water. If you've ever seen “Solaris” you know that water could have its own consciousness. We think of Earth as ours – as belonging to us humans. But because Earth is mostly water, it really belongs to the water. If aliens from space ever notice Earth and want to communicate with it, it might not be us humans the aliens direct their messages to. It may be the water. Will the water respond? Since we are mostly water, the answer is probably yes. But will the aliens see humans as the masters of Earth, the most intelligent race on Earth? Or will they not see “us” at all? Will they just see a planetary water-intelligence? To them, will we be nothing special, merely bags of water?

Torches and Pitchforks

This whole debacle with the Clippers owner is very troubling. Not because of what he said, which was reprehensible, but because of how he's being punished for what he said. He was having a private conversation. He was expressing a point of view, however wrong we all feel it is. But he didn't actually do anything. He didn't commit a crime. He just said something we don't like. So we're vilifying him and punishing him. Is this fair? Is this 1984? Is this political correctness run amok?

Didn't a person's free speech used to be protected? Isn't a person entitled to personal privacy? What's happened to these rights? Somebody says something we don't like and he's a pariah. That shouldn't be happening. It foreshadows other situations which could occur in which someone says something somebody doesn't like and unleashes a torrent of outrage.

What if I said something people didn't like – would they have the right to punish me just for saying it? Not doing anything wrong or illegal but just expressing an opinion that others think is wrong? This is frightening. It's the way totalitarianism operates. Is that where we're headed? A dictatorship of the mob?

I hope not. But it's happening more and more frequently. The same thing happened with Paula Deen awhile back. Nobody is stopping to question the torrent of mob outrage. Where did we put those torches and pitchforks? Let's get them ready, we're gonna be needing them.