The EcoDharma Centre, Catalonia, is a retreat and training centre of the Triratna Buddhist Community. This brief documentary explains their view of the tensions and fruits of combining spirituality and activism. Advertisements

I’ve written before about defining shunyata, or ’emptiness’ as “the possibility of existence.”  The great philosophical and scientific question is, why does anything exist at all? The Buddhist answer is shunyata or “emptiness,” the possibility (space, potentiality) of something coming into existence. Even Dzogchen Ponlop once said that emptiness is “room”; Chogyam Trunpa called it “spaciousness.”… Read More Shunyata: Creation without God

I’m posting this article because it captures many of the arguments on the left for a stateless transition to a post-capitalist society, achieved not through violent revolution, but through ‘interstitial’ social transformation. “Interstitial” I understand to mean thousands of tiny social movements, in localized places, networked together. (Much of my Ph.D. work, on autonomism and horizontalism, is on this kind… Read More Autonomism: Stateless Post-Capitalism

In the Winter of Our Discontentby asenauke Nyogen Senzaki was the first Japanese Zen master to live and teach on our shores. Along with one hundred twenty thousand Americans of Japanese ancestry, he was interned as an enemy alien, confined at Heart Mountain, Wyoming during World War II. Senzaki Sensei wrote this poem on Buddha’s Enlightenment Day,… Read More Senauke: In the Winter of Our Discontent

thOur friends over at Open Culture landed another solid jab, this time at the Alt-Righists Run Amok who have taken over the US government. Most of them are at least familiar with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and her screed of hyper-individualism and anti-altruism. What I didn’t know was that at the end of her life she… Read More Ayn Rand on the Dole