Dependent Co-Arising

LIVE: Buddhist Monks on 2,300-Mile Walk for Peace Visit Washington National Cathedral YouTube video by DRM News

"Inner peace is certainly an essential requirement, but we also need justice."
— Bikkhu Bodhi

One begets the other.

www.youtube.com/live/_OsBIMS...

I drove hours to see the monks walking for peace. Five minutes with them was the gift of a lifetime I glimpsed the monks on their 2,300-mile pilgrimage across America – their message of loving-kindness had me in tears

“This is the beautiful truth about peace: when you give it away, it doesn’t diminish – it multiplies. When you share joy, you don’t lose it – you create more of it.”
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

[I]t is only in retrospect that we come to understand that...the state of egoic separation chews up a lot of energy. Only once it dissolves can we see the immense amount of energy required to continue the perception of separation that most of us live with.
— Adyashanti (in The End of Your World)

Table that summarizes the findings of the 2025 Planetary Health Check: Atmospheric CO2 levels At a 15 million year high Ecological diversity In major decline Land area covered by forests Fallen below safe levels Freshwater flows Unstable, raising drought & flood risk Global nutrient cycles Disrupted, causing 'dead zones' Chemicals & plastics Too much released without testing Ocean acidification Marine organisms at risk Aerosols in atmosphere Falling within safe zone Ozone in stratopshere Safe but recovery incomplete

From www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Not a score card anyone wants to receive. What's troubling is that recovery of ozone levels—often held up as a collective success story—has been incomplete. By all measures, late-stage neoliberal capitalism creates nothing but disaster.

Jeffrey Hopkins✨️🧡

"If you understand karma, you really understand who and what you are, and you understand the rest of the universe too."

Global economy must move past GDP to avoid planetary disaster, warns UN chief Exclusive: António Guterres says world’s accounting systems should place true value on the environment

“The dominance of GDP is not an accident, it occurs because GDP measures what is valuable to capital. It is the structure of capitalism that ultimately must be overcome.”

GDP = Gross Delusional Piffle

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

We have been taught to regard ourselves as selfish, and the natural world out of which we emerge as essentially a field of ruthless competition. This has truth. But it is very much a half-truth. Its opposite is also true. We are moral beings, capable of selflessness, fulfilled through our interconnectedness with one another and the natural world at large. We are not atomistic. And the story of life on earth is not therefore one of competition only. It is at least as much, and arguably more . . . a story of co-operation and collaboration. In fact collaboration might be seen as, sensu stricto, 'one of the central characteristics of life'. — Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

Iain McGilchrist bringing much needed balance.

Western technological civilization is, thus far, man's most desperate effort to beat the game—to understand, control, and fix this will-o'-the-wisp called life, and it may be that its very strength and skill will all the more rapidly dissolve its dreams.
— Alan Watts (in The Book)

The Matrix: What a Pill

In Buddhism, . . . the main reason for investigating reality isn’t merely to get knowledge; it’s to achieve peace of mind.
—Tenzin Gyatso (the 14th Dalai Lama; cited in Waking, Dreaming, Being, by Evan Thompson)

"The perfect buddhas arise from the altruistic mind, so whatever Dharma you practice, the ultimate fruition must be an altruistic mind. It must be immeasurable love."

from 'Advice to Retreatants,'
H.E. Garchen Rinpoche

State violence against Black Americans laid the groundwork for fascism | Jason Stanley Fascism feeds on the arbitrary killings that have long plagued the US. Ending the horror starts with abolishing ICE

"[W]e cannot put the fires out one by one – the response to American fascism must necessarily involve addressing America’s longstanding legal violence directed against its Black population, chiefly in the form of mass incarceration."
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

One of the most powerful examples of socially engaged Buddhism is that of the monks walkiing peacefully from Texas to DC. Please note... Buddhism in the streets, on the roads and highways, a Buddhism that does not turn away from the social ills of our time.

No, this is just basic logic (firmly in the relative world). It's a philosophical question that straddles both metaphysics and epistemology.

At this level, there's no difference. But that's not what we're talking about here. It's about a cognitive process (the "hallucination") that constructs brains and dogs. Grounding such a process solely in the brain runs into intractable problems.

That's a bold statement. Have you read their book (The Blind Spot)?

Yes, there's no such thing as an "objective brain." An infinite regress starts if one takes the brain as the basis of perception (the brain perceives a brain, that perceives a brain, that perceives a brain...). As Frank et al. say, we're not reducible to our brains.

Hard to reach is the supreme goal of life,
Hard to describe and hard to abide in.
They alone attain samadhi who have
Mastered their senses and are free from anger,
Free from self-will and from likes and dislikes,
without selfish bonds to people and things.

― Tejobindu Upanishad (trans. E. Easwaran)

"If perception is . . . our best guess about the hidden causes of [the brain’s] sensory inputs, then this must apply equally to our perception of the brain. The physical brain, which was supposed to be objective and outside the model, . . . now turns out to be the content inside [this] model."

But this "hallucination" must then also include the brain itself. The brain-centric view creates an infinite regress (or strange loop), as Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson explain in "The Blind Spot":

Yes, but so much needs to be talked and written about what cannot be talked or written about. Mirrors gesturing wildly to other mirrors. 😅

Yes, but possibly even more so that it's evidently taking people who insist on facts/data as the sole means to knowledge a long time to absorb the fact that "facts" often don't really matter (especially not in times when the shared epistemic ground has fractured).

Many of us pathologize our nightmares as symptoms of a broken mind and so naturally try to get rid of them. In fact, nightmares are not only one of the most visceral ways to meet our shadow, but often also a sign that the mind is healing.
― Charlie Morley (in Dreaming Through Darkness)

David Sedaris satirized this (I don't remember in which of his books) by saying that when he was poor, he wandered into the parts of town where the super-wealthy lived, fantasizing about them being overthrown and stripped of their wealth but not before he could at least briefly join their ranks.

Help Minneapolis Get a Nobel Peace Prize Students protest against ICE during a walkout at the University of Minnesota, on January 26, 2026 (Brandon Bell / Getty Images) The editors of The Nation are formally nominating the city of Minneapo...

"With their resistance to violent authoritarianism, the people of Minneapolis have renewed the spirit of Dr. King’s call for 'the positive affirmation of peace.'”

actionnetwork.org/petitions/su...

*intrinsically dualistic*

Yes, AI (like everything else) is not "over there." The (typically unconsciously held) assumption that the world has a dualistic (subject-object) structure leads to even stranger assumptions (e.g., of "machine sentience").

🙏
The Middle English version is definitely more evocative and ponderous than the modern one (though, the latter makes the text a little more accessible).

Echoes with

How do bodhisattvas abandon...fundamental conceptual signs? They abandon them by not directing their minds toward what is experientially evident.
— The Dhāraṇī “Entering into Nonconceptuality” (trans. 84000)

Just as the *cloud of unknowing* lies above you, between you and your God, so you must fashion a *cloud of forgetting* beneath you, between you and every created thing.
― Anonymous (in The Cloud of Unknowing)