About to hear Roger Walsh talk about Integral Ethics, which differ from regular ethics because they’re more… uh… integral.

Listening to Dr. Elke Fein talk about history from an integral perspective.

She argues that collective traumatic experience has more of a social, cultural, and political development than we’ve imagined. This and how a society relates to its past work to determine behavior on the world stage.

Sensors up, heart open.

Even if these people did “scuttle” his meditation, imprisoning and beating visitors is not the most Buddhist of behaviors. Maybe he’s rebranding as Nepal’s “Buddha Bad Boy.”

PATHLAIYA: Ram Bahadur Bamjan, 20, popularly known as Buddha boy, thrashed 17 locals after holding them for nearly 24 hours in Bara district on Friday.

The injured locals from Manaharwa VDC said they were thrashed at Ratanpuri forest where they had gone to collect wild vegetables on Thursday afternoon.

via The Himalayan Times – Buddha boy shows wrath – Nepal News

I can’t quite do this as well as Bruce Lee did, back in the day. Give me a few more decades… and some nunchucks.

Hat tip: elephant journal

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In this talk, Michael talks about the issue of accountability as it relates to our lives. If we can take full responsibility for our lives and full responsibility for our reactions to whatever comes up, we get into a space of perpetual forgiveness and openness. This is part of his PASSAGE series.

ISmile257 - Accountability [ 42:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (66)

I’m always appreciative of empirical explorations of the things I yammer on about from the cushion. I also like that for any of Brooks’ perceived failings he’s intellectually curious; something refreshing among the punditocracy.  We are, it appears, moral animals. But when we attach to our morality, we lose its offering.

By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.

Paul Bloom of Yale noted that this moral sense can be observed early in life. Bloom and his colleagues conducted an experiment in which they showed babies a scene featuring one figure struggling to climb a hill, another figure trying to help it, and a third trying to hinder it.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The Moral Naturalists – NYTimes.com.

The most recent flap over whether or not to put a mosque near NYC’s ground zero has struck a chord for many. Although its okay for a strip club to be located nearby, a mosque crosses the line.

Robert Wright does a nice job in his essay on the topic for the NYT, and Shambala picks it up here:

The irony is that the mosque project is spearheaded by one of the most liberal and ecumenical Muslim clerics in the US, Feisel Abdul Rauf (pictured), a good friend to many Buddhist, Christian, and Jewish progressives and contemplatives.

The irony, of course, is that he is exactly the kind of person that those who oppose religious extremism should be supporting. But in this age of neo-McCarthyism, the cynical find it useful to tar all Muslims with the same brush.

via Shambhala SunSpace » What’s Right—and Wrong—with Islam.