"The US has provided no evidence that any of the vessels were involved in drug trafficking, and legal experts and rights groups say the attacks amount to extrajudicial killings as they apparently target civilians who do not pose any immediate threat."
www.theguardian.com/global-devel...
The empirical states of consciousness (during wakefulness, dreaming, and deep sleep) in the Brihadaranyaka (Great Forest) Upanishad (ca. 700 BCE).
What do you mean by study? That means you are only trying to remember the concepts. What I am saying is that you must become concept-free. Put the ax to the concepts, including the concept "I am."
— Nisargadatta Maharaj (in Seeds of Consciousness)
Ethics is as crucial to a politician as it is to a religious practitioner. Dangerous consequences will follow when politicians and rulers forget moral principles.
—Tenzin Gyatso (the 14th Dalai Lama, cited in Nāgārjuna's Precious Garland, by McClintock & Dunne)
When you recognize who you are, you cut the root of illusion. The trouble is you never go there. You might understand the idea of who you are, but you keep going back to believing in fake reality, because the illusion of mind won’t let you recognize how it really is.
~ Jigme Losel Wangpo
Yes, one of the really sweet benefits of jhana (and shamata) practice is that it helps one realize that joy and happiness aren't "out there" (tied to certain things, persons, experiences, etc.). They're innately present and accessible.
Meditation techniques are like learning how to play music (or gain any other skill)—first learn and practice scales and harmonics (from books/teachers) and then start adjusting and improvising, make it your own. A few people are natural talents and can largely skip the first part.
But when we crave power over life—endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality—then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale.
As long as consciousness does not rest in projection only, the tendencies of grasping self and other will not cease.
— Vasubandhu (in: Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only, transl. B. Connelly and W. Teng)
Religion as a means to dominate and coerce has been the cause of untold harm and conflict, totally contrary to what it originally sets out to do (liberation from dis-ease and harmful habits).
Goes with
If you want peace and harmony in the world, you must have peace and harmony in your hearts and minds. Such change cannot be imposed; it must come from within.
― Nisargadatta
But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is known that true peace, which...is within the souls of men.
— Black Elk
Removing it:
“[W]e must inscribe ourselves back into the scientific narrative as its creators. Science rests on how we experience the world. There is no way to take ourselves out of the story and tell it from a God’s eye perspective."
—Frank, Gleiser, & Thompson (in The Blind Spot)
Yes, exactly.
Contemplatives rarely pray in words but if they do, their words are few. The fewer the better, as a matter of fact; yes, and a word of one syllable is more suited to the spiritual nature of this work than longer ones.
― Anonymous (in The Cloud of Unknowing)
Greed puts out the sun.
Here's your friendly Tax Day reminder that not only did Republicans give massive tax breaks to the rich last year, but Trump’s billionaire Cabinet also axed the IRS’s new free filing tool, so now Americans have to pay more to get their taxes done.
itep.org/trump-admini...
Today our world calls out for new types of bodhisattvas who look for ways to address suffering, dukkha, as it is institutionalized in our social and political lives.
— David Loy
🙏
One useful way to tweak the task at hand might be to realize that any sentient being is always experiencing the Dharmakaya but usually fails to recognize it (b/c various appearances make for engrossing and therefore distracting stories).
He's saying the quiet part of the modern prosperity gospel out loud: Morality is only to be considered during 1 to 2 hours of church services on Sundays. The rest of the week, feel free to behave like a selfish jerk (for which you may atone during said services). What can go wrong?
Unlike a computer, the human mind is capable of perception, or recognition. This function is the "unborn" aspect of mind.... It's this aspect of mind that can truly see Reality. Indeed, it's completely One with Reality.
—Steve Hagen (in Why the World Doesn't Seem to Make Sense)
The Trump Admin is rigging our immigration appeals process to hide the real problem in this case: Trump & Rubio's illegal crackdown on freedom of speech.
We must ensure Mahmoud’s rights are respected — if they can take away his rights, all our rights are in danger.
apnews.com/article/mahm...
When you recognize the faults of the body,
You won’t rely on the faults that the body has;
When you are mindful of the body,
You will obtain a state of faultless peace.
— Brahma's Question (trans. 84000)
One of the ways news media often fail us is by giving us the microscopic rather than the telescopic view. Everything I mention in this essay is well-documented, but the dots are mostly not connected to make visible this death by a thousand cuts our country is undergoing.
Physics does not tell us what the world is. It only describes what we can say about it.
— (Attributed to) Niels Bohr
"Brutality of business" resonates especially. The notion that money, power, and status are all that counts, no matter the cost to our innate ability and yearning for love, compassion, and connection.
"Absurd and inhuman violence is spreading ferociously through the sacred places of the Christian East. Profaned by the blasphemy of war and the brutality of business, with no regard for people’s lives, ... considered at most collateral damage of self-interest."
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...
Mind identification and thought identification are socially endorsed and upheld states of dissociation [from direct experience].
— Angelo DiLullo
Since the beginning, our mind in essence has always been—and still is—the unity of empty cognizance. All we have to do is look into our mind and recognize its originally empty and cognizant nature.
— Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche (in Crystal Clear)
