Blog
Welcome to the Infinite Smile Blog. We’ve set up shop at Substack.
Attachment Alert: Clinging to Religion
Blogger, Matthew Yglesias suggests: The map lumps the plains states in with the church belt, but if you look at the data more specifically youll see that nine of the ten churchiest states are in the south and the remaining one is Utah.
Q & A: How Can I Best Do This Practice?
Question: How does one go about dedicating their life to this practice? I'm 25 and don't have many responsibilities, so I have more flexibility and time to give to it. Answer: It's like that old Nike slogan: just do it. There are ways of going about "doing the...
Attachment Alert: When Newsanchors Proselytize…
It's hard to take much of this too seriously, but I still think two things are amazing: Brit Hume's views on what Buddhism does and doesn't offer speaks to a significant lack of understanding, and He does his best to play the martyr here even though an apology might...
Q & A: Meditation Techniques
Question: I've got a nuts-and-bolts question about meditation. There are so many varieties: following the breath, paying attention to whatever arises, focusing on something particular (like a prayer), Tonglen, etc. After years of teaching and practice, which...
When Peace is an Incomplete Response
I was asked recently after giving a talk on engaged politics, what I thought of peace as a political orientation. What came out of my mouth made me laugh. "I'm pro-peace," I said. The young man just stared. I then went off a little bit on how an attachment to peace...
Don’t Plants Deserve Life, Too?
Here's an argument that I've danced with for years: where do we draw the line on the Buddhist precept of not killing. Having just gone through a round of anti-biotics, I knowingly killed lots of things in my body. The name of the drug regimen "antibiotics" even means...
Big Sky Mind
Big Sky Mind Originally uploaded by Michael G. McAlister
Q & A: When the Fire of Awakening Burns…
Gotta' love when the earthquake of Awakening rattles and rolls everything we've ever known to be true... Question(s): As I sit, all that comes within my attention, or where I choose to turn my attention, exists because I've turned my attention on it. Then, when I turn...
Redux: Wisdom
The teachings surrounding wisdom have been popping up around Infinite Smile recently. So here's a re-posting of part of the chapter on this subject from Awake in This Life: As the audience, or Witness, of the illusory and repetitious charade of ego on the Stage of...
A Not-So-Full Enlightenment
I got an email recently that was pretty cool. In it the anonymous writer rather pointedly suggested that I was wrong to suggest that Alan Chapman's self-professed "full" enlightenment, documented over at his site, Open Enlightenment, was at best an example of a...