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POPSWhat Does The Red Dot On The Forehead Mean ? Worship of intellect is trusting your own intellect AND other's intellect, especially in the fields you do not have enough knowledge. Intellectual honesty and its worship have been corner stones of Hindu thought. 'Fully THINK (ponder) on what I said and then do as YOU deem fit'. Indian scriptures ask 'Drushtipootam nyasetpaadam, vastra pootam pibet jalam' - Look (think) before you leap (embark on any activity) and 'filter the water with a cloth before you drink'. Kathopanashad calls intellect as the charioteer. Body is a chariot, Indriyas (sense/connotative organs) are horses, mind is the reins to be used to control them, Atman (Self) is the rider within, and Vishay (objects of senses) are the tracks on which horses run. It asks us to overcome the ego, be selfless, yet asks to do all actions/ work/ worship with intellect.
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POPSMore Beautiful Photography. And this one's a "two-fer", featuring Babak and Oshin together. "Visiting Ayutthaya Park, Thailand" is a magnificent panorama. Click on the link to see it full size.
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POPSMonomyth Campbell and other scholars describe narratives of Buddha, Moses, and Christ in terms of the monomyth, and Campbell argues that other classic myths from many cultures follow this basic pattern.
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POPSFed Up God "To Turn Buddha" Asked whether He felt guilty for abandoning his followers who have ridgedly followed the ancient text book 'The Bible' for centuries, God replied sheepishly "I never finished reading it if I'm honest...It got a bit boring half way through so I just skipped to the end. I prefered Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code'...that was pretty cool". Whether God's decision to move on will destroy Christianity remains to be seen, but in these initial stages the Vatican, at least, seems calm. A spokesman said "To be honest, we are pretty sure we can blag our way through this, we've been making shit up to justify our attrocities for years..."
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POPSThe end of Death The psychologist Ernest Becker wrote in his pulitzer prize winning book, “The Denial of Death,” that in the face of an acute and agonizing awareness of his mortality, man has developed three main devices to sustain his sanity.These illusions act as temporary solutions to the problem of death. The Religious Solution The Religious Solution invents the concept of God and projects onto him the power to grant us what we all really want: the ability to bestow eternal life on ourselves an our loved ones; to be freed from disease, decay and death. The Romantic Solution The second illusion Becker identifies - when we no longer believe in God, we then turn our lovers into gods and goddesses.When in love, man can “forget himself in the delirium of sex, and still be marvelously quickened in the experience”. We are temporarily relieved from the drag of “the animality that haunts our victory over decay and death.” When in love, we become immortal gods.
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POPSBylakuppe Pictures from the Tibetian settlements in Bylakuppe in southern Karnataka. I had the pleasure of visiting it a little more than a year back.
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POPSSearching for Afghanistan's Third Giant Buddha I love ancient history. No matter what our present relationship with Afghanistan, we should remember that it was considered the "cradle of civilization" and there is a wealth of history, culture, and societies.
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POPSBrad Warner: "Enlightenment experiences are crap."
More: I have no problem with people making money, even if they're Buddhist teachers and even if they're earning their money by being Buddhist teachers. What I have a problem with is the way Buddhism is being turned into a commodity. Enlightenment is being sold like mouth wash. The girls aren't running after you? Try Enlightenment and you'll never be without a date on Saturday night! …It's not that hard to induce a whizz-bang experience through hypnotism or other means. If you mesmerize someone and feed their ego with the notion that they are Enlightened and that they can speak with the voice of God Himself, that person will have a pretty amazing time. If a genuine Zen Master certifies that experience as Kensho that seals the deal. Also having paid lots of money for the experience makes the person far less likely to want to admit it might not have been all it was supposed to be. This is so fucking obvious I don't even know why anyone has to point it out.
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POPSThe Rise of the Golden Rule Were that it was so easy! I couldn't agree more with the opinion that this is truly the essence of religion. Perhaps if our faith communities would spend less time defining orthodox beliefs and more time in transformational spiritual practices we'd all be better off. But alas, it is easier to turn into the thought police than to deal with our own souls.
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