God does not exist. Nor has God ever existed, and nor will God ever fully come into existence. God is neither the efficient nor the final cause independent of the actual world. God can never be found and never will be found. God does not exist, but it can be said that God persists in action to [...]
a great adaptation of a central notion in Buddhist thought for the modern situation
Dukkha as ‘triggering’, and the Twelve Nidhanas as a Social process involving multiple individuals, not multiple lifetimes.
I now translate dukkha (Pali, ‘suffering’) as ‘trigger’, as the traumatic conditioning of the nervous system that triggers distress. That our bodies and senses, as they encounter certain stimuli, trigger stress, trauma, physical and emotional suffering. Thus, to get ‘relief from suffering’ is to get to the point where such stimuli no longer triggers distress or suffering. Then one’s body, senses and mind are able to receive stimuli without being triggered. This is achieved through meditation and investigation into the causes of suffering.
This is not a linguistic translation, but a cultural translation; a translation to a culturally equivalent and culturally relevant term that a modern western person can understand.
All of this can be dovetailed neatly into dozens of passages from the early suttas that discuss the 12 Nidhanas and the five…
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Does thinking approach reality as a problem? To think is to think about something, and to think about something is to think about this rather than that. The presupposition of a this-or-that dichotomy seems to be the operative condition of thought, a presupposition that may be an effect of (or perhaps is the same as, [...]
There is no essential difference between Ultimate Reality and Conventional Existence; between Noumenal Emptiness and Phenomenal Appearance; between Being and Becoming; between Universal and Particular; between Feminine and Masculine. While they can be logically independent, in actuality they are interdependent, with their cooperative interplay creating this fantastical flux that we call life. It [...]
“If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution” —Emma Goldman Power is always a relationship, and it is a force of change—the capacity to actualize potential. A relationship implies a difference, and this difference implies at minimum two parties with different set of elements. There is the One and [...]
Even in stoic perseverance do mountains erode and cascade into the temporal flux of change... Only in this beautiful life is the ceasing forever ceaseless, is the resting forever restless, by which Being is forever Becoming. Only in this beautiful life does the ceaseless come to cease, does the restless come to rest, from which [...]
Inspired by the smith chart graphical aid used by electrical engineers to solve problems in radio frequency engineering, this nomograph uses a dipolar axis (constituted by the poles of Self and Other) to contract the extremes of the standard Cartesian coordinate system (with only quadrants 1 and 2 included) into a [...]
