“If someone hurts our feelings, offends us, or shocks us, we can’t even name the intense emotions we feel at first. The feelings haven’t yet formed into anger or any other solid emotion. For a moment, we’re suspended in a space of pure openness, where anything is possible. If we can just stop and remain… Read More DPR: Genuine Emotional Freedom

I’m going through a series of videos by Radiohead on YT. This one is about child labour exploitation, and the differences in life experience by white children from Western countries as compared with their Asian working class counterparts. Radiohead makes videos that convey both social and spiritual themes. In fact, what they show is that… Read More All I Need: the Social Is the Spiritual

 by Brian Palmer, originally published by Onearth  | OCT 7, 2014 Photo credit: Lou Gold The Canadian tar sands industry has seen better days. Energy giant Statoil announced last week that it would postpone a major mining project in Alberta for at least three years. It was just the latest in a string of major setbacks for tar sands oil,… Read More The Tar Sands Bubble: Keep Blocking Pipelines

Ouch! Systemic Suffering and the Fourth Noble Truth by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel Many see this path as a personal improvement or as an achievement ladder in becoming (and appearing) Buddhist. However, among all the Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path in particular cannot be practiced out of relationship with others. It cannot be practiced without understanding suffering as systemic and… Read More The Flat Tire of ‘Mindfulness’

I went to the Atlantic News stand on Morris St. in Halifax today. I poked around at the Buddhist magazines, looking for something intriguing, or at least inspiring. Or just not boring. No luck. Every Buddhist journal out there is always about the same thing: “how to reduce my personal anxiety about XY and Z.”… Read More Black Buddha: Buddhism as Cultural Critique

The only way to fix the fascist capitalism system is to disturb it. ‘Fixing’ the system only tweaks it. ‘Fixing’ is the Jevon’s Paradox of social systems; by fixing the system, you only make it more efficient at absorbing, exploiting and destroying everything. The only way to get a new and better system is to disturb the… Read More

At its core, delusion is self-centredness; likewise, self-centredness is by nature, delusional. Delusion is creating a world of my imagination that is all about me, my needs, my wants, my fears, my prejudices, my beliefs, my expectations, my sense of entitlement—and believing that this self-centred world I created is “reality”. I then use that self-centred… Read More Delusion