Barbara O’Brien posts a great piece on Fritz Schumacher’s paper, Buddhist Economics:

The economic models and theories that prevailed through the 20th century are rapidly falling apart. Economists scramble to offer explanations and solutions. However, much of what has gone wrong was anticipated years ago by E. F. Schumacher, who proposed a theory of “Buddhist Economics.”

The actual text is worth the read. One of my favorite assertions:

While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is “The Middle Way” and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern—amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.

May all beings enjoy “extraordinarily satisfactory results.”

There has been an aspect to dialogs within the Infinite Smile Sangha recently about how much of this work is about “going it alone.” While this phrase is fairly inaccurate, at least in the ultimate sense, no one will do any of this spiritual heavy lifting for any of us. It is up to us to do the work. There are no shortcuts, other than a committed practice of stillness and a fearless, and continual, study of what is True.

I’ve mentioned that I began my meditation practice asking teachers if there might be a shortcut to any of this work. The answers I got all came down to what I’ve so often repeated in these pages: simply practice a deep surrender into stillness and then let your activity consciously arise from this place. The thing in me that wanted the shortcut is the thing in all of us that wants to manage the experience of Awakening. No matter how great our teacher, how extensive our reading list, or how supportive our spiritual friends, no one can do any of this work for us. This means that we must orient all of our choices around the generous intention of letting go of everything, including whatever spiritual flavor we like the most. This takes courage, fortitude, and discipline.

If we find ourselves in situations where we just can’t let go, we’re in good company. Even the Buddha himself went through a rather significant process of clinging when he began to deny his body through extreme asceticism as a way of reaching what his ego defined as Awakening to Truth. His intention was to get past the desires of the flesh by starving it into submission. The problem was that his choices were killing him, thereby undoing his intention of becoming Awake in this life. Over time, a realization arose pointing out that this denial was yet another attachment, and as such, it was an inappropriate response to what was being offered. He chose to let go of his attachment to this particular view, and the surrender of this view allowed for an even deeper opening within. The Buddha’s experience offers each of us a great lesson on how we are led astray when the process of spiritual evolution becomes ego driven. Whenever we think that some activity, vow, or choice will show us a shortcut to Spirit, we will perpetually miss the mark, or “sin,” as the archers of old used to say. All spiritual work, be it meditation, chanting, prayer, silence, or anything else, is offered to us so that we can ultimately see that we are not separate from God, nor have we ever been. God, like the present moment, like our breath, like our beating heart, like Infinity, is always right here.

And yet there is such blindness regarding this point. Truth, in other words, is always at the core of all things. Truth is never apart from what is happening right now, as you read this. In fact it is what is prior to the reading; prior to the cognition; prior to the sense of Being. Realizing this, we realize Freedom.

Then again, we can screw it up pretty easily:

If there is any attachment to the idea that freedom exists as any external circumstantial form instead of as an internal release, then enlightened awareness will be profoundly hindered by ego. This hindrance is exactly what forces us into the role of seeking. As long as we perceive enlightenment—God, Allah, Brahman, or Spirit—as existing outside of our experience, we will never Awaken to the Truth from which our experience originates. Similarly, if our intentions and corresponding choices are driven by anything other than deep generosity for all beings, we are hindering everyone’s potential for this very realization. If there is a deep longing to Awaken arising within you, this is wonderful. But do not get caught by this longing. Don’t deny it and don’t look for shortcuts, but rather choose to become intimate with the wanting. Then vow to live a life from that open, surrendered observation. Living in this way, of course, is infinitely supported when we sit still with a committed generosity of purposeful choosing, when we don’t harm, and when we can allow ourselves to be deeply curious about every circumstance that we meet.

To the curious… Cheers! Gulp.

Click HERE, or on the player below, in order to listen to Michael’s talk.
Get the new iTunes software and subscribe to this podcast from the Buddhist and/or Philosophy sections of the Religion & Spirituality list.
____

What does it mean to Be? In this podcast, Michael suggests that thinking has nothing to do with Being and that giving, as well as receiving are enhanced by our apprehension of the deep connection we get when we can simply rest… simply be. Ultimately, this process is about “not flinching” in the white hot fire of whatever intensity arises. Whatever our want or desire might be, practicing stillness in the face of this desire speeds up our realization of Awakening.

ISmile215 - Just Being [ 34:15 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (13)

Jurrian Kamp at Ode Magazine offers an interview with Ken Wilber that addresses, among other things, how to use the most effective language in dealing with the issue of global warming:

Other cultures, Wilber argues, may respond to the threat of global warming from different values. African cultures are dominated by feudal clans, he says, so they may adopt environmental and energy policies when these are phrased in a language that relates to how they may benefit their clans. Similarly, Hindus may change their behavior to honor Gaia rather than in response to rational self-interest. “Al Gore has to ‘language’ his message in at least four different value structures to get, say, 80 percent of the world behind him,” Wilber says. “Anything less than that will simply not work.”

Wilber’s integral approach can also be used to address political issues:

Take the classic conflict between conservatives and liberals over welfare. Liberals argue that people are poor because of lack of government support; conservatives argue that people are poor because of lack of family values and work ethic. In Wilber’s vision, both are right. It isn’t “either/or” but “both/and.” His ideal government approach: “‘We will do everything to help you but at the same time we want you to do everything to help yourselves.’ We need to find the way to reach out to touch all dimensions, interior capacity and external capacity. We need to recognize where you can help yourselves and where you need help.”

Readers of this blog will probably find this entry to be ultra-familiar stuff. But the fact remains that using skillful means, or upaya as Buddhists might say, in order to effectively communicate with others is perhaps one of the greatest gifts we might ever offer to human kind. Of course practicing this kind of expression is no easy task. And yet it might be easier than clinging to our personal notions of what is right and what is wrong.

Bows, elephant journal.

Here’s a very thoughtful post by James Wellman on Christianity’s misplaced cheerleading:

One of the questions that plagues my study of American religion is why there is such a frequent close correspondence between American Christianity and war making. This question displays my own liberal Protestant belief that violence should always be a last resort, and that churches and religious leaders should not be in the business of cheerleading for war. After studying American religion for two decades, I should know better—liberal, mainline, and conservative Protestants have all done it, and yet, I keep asking why.

Read on.

Matthew Yglesias offers an interesting find. It seems that Republican political operative and former Press Secretary to U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) Matt Mackowiak says in an op-ed for the Austin American-Statesman:

The coming revolution is akin to “Fight Club,” the 1999 film that follows the struggles of day to day life for a regular guy who starts an underground fight club as radical and not terribly productive psychotherapy.

As Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, says in the movie, “Fight Club was the beginning, now it’s moved out of the basement, it’s called Project Mayhem.”

I find “Fight Club” to be a great film. But in it, Dissociative Identity Disorder combined with charisma and confusion result in a terrorist organization… called Project Mahem. Are we to assume that Mr. Mackowiak’s idea of a new, reinvented Republican Revolution will be the development of misdirected and fragmented terrorist cells? Will the New Right be a collection of people attached to non-attachment?

Sounds a little fundamentalist to me, but it would be interesting to see guys like Senators McCain and Hatch rip off their shirts and start beating on each other until someone taps out.

I recently had a conversation with a person about the practice of stillness and how one reconciles non-attachment with things like, say, personal wealth.

It only took a few words to provoke an interestingly vehement response from this person. He argued that despite abundant wealth, he and others like him, were paying too much in taxes; carrying too much of the burden.

His sentiments were echoed yesterday in the WSJ by former Bush press secretary, Ari Fleischer, and while I tend to leave political and economic blogging to professionals, I thought it might be a nice stretch to offer something about this here.

Anyway, so I let this person rant a little. Then after he stopped for air I countered that as a proportion of income, his argument falls flat if we divide a household’s federal tax liability by its income. Doing so we get the following graph:

Ezra Klein writes about this in The American Prospect:

When you look at percentage of total tax liabilities, the rich do in fact bear a heavier burden. But it’s because they have so much more money. They are not bearing a heavier burden as a percentage of their incomes. They’re bearing it in relation to everyone else’s incomes. Indeed, it’s only because the sheer levels of income inequality in this country are frankly unintuitive that Fleischer can even write this sort of dreck. People hear that the top 20 percent pay almost 70 percent of the country’s income taxes and nod their head. That’s unfair! But it mainly seems unfair because people don’t know the top 20 percent accounts for almost 60 percent of the national income.

More time on the cushion. Breathe in, breathe out. Money in, money out.

___

Update: My old friend, Justin Fox (aka: the Curious Capitalist), has offered a far more sophisticated (and interesting) slam of Ari Fleischer’s argument. Like I said, I should leave the econo-blogging to the professionals.

Damon Linker makes an interesting series of observations regarding the dominance of Christianity in America:

Somewhat fewer Americans are identifying as Christians; somewhat more are identifying as secular. And even those who remain religiously traditionalist are a bit less likely to believe that they should work for the transformation of the nation through the medium of electoral politics.

On the face of it, this is something we should welcome. Granted, as he points out, these are only trends, and it’s likely that a resurgence of collective fear might push things in another direction. Still, he asks a great question:

What will provide the theological content of the nation’s civil religion now that the “mere orthodoxy” of the evangelical-Catholic alliance has proven unsuitable for a pluralistic nation of 300 million people? To my mind, the most likely and salutary option is moralistic therapeutic deism. Here is the core of its (Rousseauian) catechism, in the words of sociologist Christian Smith:

1. “A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.”

2. “God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.”

3. “The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.”

4. “God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.”

5. “Good people go to heaven when they die.”

Assuming Smith’s kind of Christianity were to reestablish a foothold in our constitutional democracy, whether you subscribe to it or not, we might be in far better shape. I say this because it would allow for a deeper tolerance and more accurately reflect Christ’s teachings.

Of course Smith’s Christianity doesn’t do much to integrate the various teachings of enlightenment, nor does it come close to uprooting the seeds of egoic attachment. But it does offer a chance for deeper listening.