Tricycle’s Philip Ryan takes me on in relation to one of my previous posts about the Dalai Lama’s comments concerning the global economic meltdown:

… the Dalai Lama’s statement is absolutely right. What caused the bubble and all the imaginary money was indeed greed and materialism, and if there was ever a time to look materialism and consumerism in their ugly faces, it’s right now. The ones who will suffer, as always, are the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. Instead of thinking of Wall Street and worrying how the banks will survive, let’s think of those who have no extra resources even in the best of times — how will they make it through today, and the next day, and the one after that?

I then offered the comment:

…I don’t think HH is wrong. I would submit, however, that there’s more to the story than was offered.

A “lack of spirituality and culture” isn’t the problem. There’s plenty of spirituality and plenty of culture to go around even if it strikes you, and many of us, as ugly. The more inclusive truth is that we cling to our own versions of what should be. These attachments to our certitudes are what lead to ever-deepening levels of selfishness and division. War is born in this space and takes on many forms including “rampant corruption” within ourselves as well as within those whose practices we resist.

What do you think?

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In this podcast, Michael discusses the issues surrounding teachers, teaching and the mistaken belief that an Awakening experience is the end of the spiritual journey.

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Spending time as a monk shows us how the structure of our days can support our practice as much as meditation itself. An interesting component to monastic study.

So I’ve always wondered about the daily routines of people who have awakened to something deeply creative within themselves.

Update: After showing my wife the daily routine link, we both decided that Fred Rogers is still the ultra-coolest.

(Bows, to Digital Dharma)

Norman Fischer’s Nothing Holy: A Zen Primer is worth the read. It’s brief, informative, and points its readers toward what is both essential and revealing about the crash of the Zen wave in America.

(Bows to Shambhala Sun Space)

This list cracked me up. Be sure to check it out and scroll down,

(Bows to the worst horse)

Those who know me best are familiar with my appreciation of wine. I also appreciate food, too. There’s such magic and mystery to both wine and food; an infinite expression of Dharma in the glass and on the plate. Paired perfectly, Nirvana is revealed at the table. That said, each of us must be careful not to let the seduction of the senses veil Awakening from our being.

So with this disclaimer out of the way, I think Slate’s Mike Steinberger’s article on what Obama might be able to “bring to the table” is “well-done”. There’s “so much on Obama’s plate,” but I think that our president-elect has a chance to get this “bitter taste” out of our mouths… okay, I’ll stop.

Whitehouse sommelier, Daniel Shanks gets ribbed by Steinberger:

because only 55 minutes are allotted for the actual meal, it is essential that the wines served on these august occasions “have presence.” And what did he mean by “presence”? “A perfectly aged cabernet may be great in the glass,” he explained, “but it can’t stand up to the intense atmosphere of a White House state dinner. You have to have something with youth and vigor.” Delicate wines will be overlooked; only strapping, assertive ones have what it takes to be “noticed in the context of the White House experience,” as Shanks put it. In other words, the desired effect is shock and awe, achieved not with cruise missiles but fruit bombs.

On the matter of Big Bad Napa Cabs, he says:

These bruisers could also be sending an unhelpful subliminal message. Diplomacy is a subtle art, and when it is conducted à table, it requires subtle libations. Mellow wines promote conviviality, encourage reflection, and create goodwill—the very things state dinners are presumably meant to foster. A hulking cabernet that assaults the senses and flattens any food that gets in its way hardly lubricates the path to world peace. Indeed, serving such a wine might even be construed as a sign of hostile intent: Tonight we smash your palate; tomorrow your palace.

Perhaps, as Steinberger suggests, going beyond a “kinder, gentler” approach to wine service at the Whitehouse is in order. Maybe a more purposeful approach to consuming the blessing of a wine’s potential subtlety might go far in communicating differently.

Cheers.

There’s an interesting interview that k.d. lang offers over at Shambala.

k.d. lang’s album, Watershed, reflects the dramatic changes in her life since she became a committed Buddhist. Here she talks for the first time about her Buddhist teacher and practice.

(Bows, Shambhala Sun Space)

In Self Awareness: The Final Frontier by V.S. Ramachandran, we’re treated to a neuroscientists take on what he calls “One of the last remaining problems in science is the riddle of consciousness.”

Especially interesting is his treatment of qualia, and how even if we could effectively break down the function of the brain, we would still miss the transmission of the ineffable nature of things:

The qualia problem is well known. Assume I am an intellectually highly advanced, color-blind martian. I study your brain and completely figure out down to every last detail what happens in your brain—all the physico-chemical events—when you see red light of wavelength 600 and say “red”. You know that my scientific description, although complete from my point of view, leaves out something ineffable and essentially non-communicable, namely your actual experience of redness. There is no way you can communicate the ineffable quality of redness to me short of hooking up your brain directly to mine without air waves intervening (Bill Hirstein and I call this the qualia-cable; it will work only if my color blindness is caused by missing receptor pigments in my eye, with brain circuitry for color being intact.) We can define qualia as that aspect of your experience that is left out by me—the color-blind Martian. I believe this problem will never be solved or will turn out (from an empirical standpoint) to be a pseudo-problem. Qualia and so-called “purely physical” events may be like two sides of a Moebius strip that look utterly different from our ant-like perspective but are in reality a single surface.

So what might we call the “thingness of things”?

(Bows, integral praxis)