The Dharma, sutras, and commentarial interpretations of interest to American Buddhists of all traditions with news that not only informs but transforms. Emphasis on meditation, enlightenment, karma, social evolution, and nonharming.
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Catholic Irish girl gets tattoo without parents' permission (or St. Paddy's blessing)
Me tit hurts now, Penny. Where's Sean?
(pennzter) Oops... please pray or send positive vibes my way so I hopefully get that footage back [after a fine day of craic/crack and tramping with me mates, Sean and Abby, a male lesbian and me vegan bestie with her tipple pierced eatin a packet of crisps and a gallon of mash with...
Fast forward 10 years to when Penny's a mom
Abby, quit bellyaching. It's time to party!
Mexicanish salsuh, but not too spicey because anythink hotter than a tater burns me bum even tho I, Penny, look Spanish, and I'm so sorry, Mum, for bein a rebel and gettin a light brown trinity of dots behind me ear to show everyone wut a wild child me is. We want nuthin more than to be like our American models of behavior from the telly and theatre via Hollywood.]
This is how we live: A Day in the Life of the National Youth Theatre
(RTÉ News) In this week's Doors Open series, RTÉ's Morning Edition reporter Aisling Riordan visits the Dublin Buddhist Centre, where Dubliners go to meditate and purify their minds.
They do this not necessarily to become "Buddhists" but to learn to strengthen their attentiveness, develop peace, bubble up happiness from within, and get a taste of the Dharma (Teachings) that drew Irish Buddhists like Laurence O'Connell (U Dhammaloka, the first Westerner in history to ordain as a Buddhist monk) and Maura O'Halloran (Zen Master Soshin or Daigo Soshin Bikuni) to Theravada Buddhist Burma and Zen Buddhist Japan to full-time practice.
The center is not about conversions or ordinations. Rather, it teaches practitioners in an urban, secular, industrialized environment. Some train to be Dhammacharis (Dharma-acharyas).
Either may marry, be single, have sex, be celibate, practice intensively on retreat or as they get the opportunity with their children and family responsibilities.
Why do punk rockers like Buddhism?
Unlike the lives of Catholic and Protestant officials, who are often seen to lead to hypocrisy and bad behavior completely at odds with Churchly vows, these practitioners use the Dharma to uplift themselves and those around them by their mindfulness, peace, virtue, wakefulness, and clarity.
It's not "religious" so much as ordinary life but spiritual, following examples from the Wisdom of the East like the Buddha (the "Awakened One") and Avalokita/Kwan Yin (the "Goddess of Compassion"), a kind of "Jesus and Mary Chain" that existed centuries before Christianity.
ABOUT: RTEis an Irish public broadcast service. Keep up to date with all the latest Irish and international news and current affairs with rte.ie/newsnow. Follow on twitter @rtenewsnow and on Facebook rtenewsnow.
Penny goes wild (Pentzer on YouTube, Aug. 30, 2019); Dublin Buddhist Centre featured on RTE News, 9/16/13; Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, Pat Macpherson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
Hollywood's Addiction Problem | documentary (Parts 1 & 2)
(DOCU) July 19, 2024: Hollywood has a problem, just like Nashville and other fame factories. DOCU is a documentary channel that creates a variety of modern documentaries about humanity. The maker's name is UNWENE. Thanks for watching. Make sure to like, share, and subscribe for more videos. This documentary is about the history of addiction in Hollywood and why so many stars become addicts.
Rainbow, "Lost in Hollywood"
System of a Down "Lost in Hollywood" (Rock in Rio) de Janeiro
Euro Eddie Vedder, the great Yngwie Malmsteen, unplugging himself
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James F. O’Connell, the “Tattooed Man,” arrived in New York City in 1835, causing much consternation. If a lady so much as glanced at him, her future children would be born just as hideously inked as he was — covered in thick, patterned black bands that curved down and around their hands, arms, legs, and backs. Or so the churchmen told their flocks.
O’Connell, an Irish sailor, acquired his full-body tattoo during a stint as a castaway in the South Pacific’s Caroline Islands during the late 1820s and early 1830s.
After their ship sunk, Irishman O’Connell and his shipmate, George Keenan, were taken in by inhabitants of the island of Pohnpei — who were not cannibals, O’Connell emphatically states in his memoir.
Within a few days, the two were bustled off to an isolated hut, where five or six women, “savage printers” armed with ink and thorns, set about providing the newcomers with the markings that would smooth their way into the community.
The resulting tattoo, called pelipel, made O’Connell “fully human” in the world of the South Pacific, writes Juniper Ellis in her book Tattooing the World (Columbia University Press, 2008), for which the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) provided research support. More: neh.gov
The Dharma Bum
There's something about the Irish, going from a tiny island under the thumb of a neighboring island, pushed out into the world as a diaspora that saw the sidhe, Tuatha de Danan, the wee people, the spirits, and creatures of the Emerald Isle spread out into all corners of the world and the public imagination. The neighboring island forced itself on everyone, like the last militant vestige of the Roman Empire (the remaining force in Rome slipping on a sheep's disguise in an exhibition of soft power that conquered the planet or plane more deeply than British weapons and forces.
U Dhammaloka (right) with Burmese monks
How did the Irish win their way into the hearts of all, particularly with so many redheads? One of the most prominent and important of the Irish was named O'Connell (Laurence), who became the first Westerner to ordain as a Theravada Buddhist monk, Ven. U Dhammaloka(pronounced \ooh-dah-mah-low-kuh\), the "U" being an Burmese honorific.
He traveled by boat to California then by ship to Asia, where he made a name for himself as a freethinker and Buddhist, opposing Christian missionaries, ended up all the way in Mandalay, Burma, in a Buddhist monastery.
Another O'Connell (James F.), not JFO, also made a splash in the Pacific among the people of Pohnpei among the Caroline Islands. He was a sailor on a boat that wrecked, landing him in Micronesia and this adventure.
(Rare Earth) James O'Connell, 18, survived a shipwreck along with seven others only to become the most famous Western man in Pohnpei. Ah, coming home after being enslaved since your late teens only to have your own society condemn you as Satanic for what they did to you and then be forced to headline a traveling circus freakshow until you died. No matter where you go, the tattoos always speak first.
This is the (self-told, probably exaggerated for circus reasons) story of P.T. Barnum's original freak success story, "James O'Connell, America's first tattooed man."
The Circus You Never Knew: The naughty 19th-century circus
Put me in the center of the three rings, PT!
“In the 1850s, the circus overlapped with theater, minstrelsy, and lectures in a bubbling stew of adult fare, full of near-nudity and racy jokes, of violence, and public affairs,” writes David Carlyon, author of the book, Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You’ve Never Heard Of.
Carlyon’s lectures on the subject, presented through the Speakers Bureau for the New York Council for the Humanities, expose this unseemly underbelly of the 19th-century circus.
NEW YORK
"Elect a clown, expect a circus." What else did anyone think Trump was going to bring?
.
I would fit right in, like my rallies today.
“Violence was one of America’s favorite sports,” Carlyon writes, and the circus was one of its favorite venues. Local ruffians waited to stew up trouble in each new town as eyes looked on with suspicion and excitement.
There was gambling outside the tents and plenty of alcohol. It was rare if there was a show without a fight.
“A circus had to be,” says Carlyon, in the words of one circus veteran, “an efficient fighting unit.” Performers were hired for their talent, but also for their ability to brawl.
One extreme incident was the Hippodrome War in 1853, in which a circus outfit was unable to leave Somerset, Ohio, for two days because of ongoing fighting with locals. Many people were seriously injured, and some were killed.
Audiences felt that they could freely participate during performances. As with other forms of entertainment during the time, they proclaimed “the right to hiss,” to yell out, demand a monolog be repeated, enter the ring, or even drown out an entire show with their own noise.
“Audiences considered themselves a partner with performers,” Carlyon says. Crowds could shape the success or failure of each show, and the performers had to learn how to effectively manage them.
This is dramatically different from the circus we are familiar with today and the one Carlyon experienced firsthand, performing as a clown for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
The 19th-century version was a show catering to adults and immensely popular. It was an American institution, says Carlyon: “Everyone saw the circus.”
It was also a show teeming with sex. Acrobats and other performers wore tight, skin-colored clothing called fleshings. You could go to the circus and see near-nude men and women and claim you were merely admiring the human form.
Aside from off-color jokes and scantily clothed bodies, there were stories and songs about people who had run off with circus performers, which newspapers freely commented on. And though there are no records proving it, suggestions of prostitution at the circus “must have some basis in fact,” says Carlyon. “For all its cotton-candy image,” he adds, “the circus has always peddled sexual allure.”
The freak Dan Rice
Dan Rice in Uncle-Sam-like costume, 1859
Everyone who saw the circus (and that was almost everyone) saw Dan Rice, one of the most famous men in America in the mid-19th century — “a talking clown, quipping spontaneously, booming out Shakespeare, singing about bloomers, feuding with Horace Greeley — and running for president.”
PHOTO: Maria Ward Brown, Life of Dan Rice, Long Branch, N.J., 1901, pg. 54
He traveled the country commenting on politics, popular issues, and the big names of the times. Rice was a man surrounded by fictions, like the one claiming he was the model for Uncle Sam. He wasn’t, but wearing a goatee and top hat, Rice struck a strong resemblance. That Zachary Taylor had named him “Colonel” Rice and that he and Abraham Lincoln were good friends were legends Rice created himself.
His circus was the first one called “the greatest show on earth.” He was the “Great American Humorist” before Mark Twain, whose circus scene in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was most likely inspired by Rice’s visit to Hannibal, Missouri.
Rice even made earnest runs for political office, including one for the presidency in 1867. Carlyon credits Rice’s popularity with his ability to connect and interact with his audience, “to boom out words and ideas and jokes and songs, while thousands of human imaginations bounced them back.”
Toward the end of the century, the circus was disparaged as a crude, low form of entertainment.
I'm tired. I just want to cheat at golf now.
It began to soften its image and cater to children. So too, did Rice’s image soften as he became known as Old Uncle Dan. His shows lost their rough edge in the collective memory, his feuds and fights disregarded as mere run-ins.
In Carlyon’s lecture, “19th-Century Circus: Sex, Violence, and Politics,” he strips the circus of the “rosy glow” it has acquired in more recent years and shows audiences what it really was — “a combination of rodeo, burlesque, and Jon Stewart.”
Not on my watch. I'll prosecute that felon.
Imitating the crowd-performer relationship in antebellum America, Carlyon says that during his talks, “I’m not simply a talking head spouting facts, but rather I’m engaged in conversation with my fellow New Yorkers.”
(The Jimmy Dore Show) July 26, 2024: #TheJimmyDoreShow
For decades we’ve been hearing from Israeli politicians and their Zionist apologists that they would love to make a deal but, sadly, they just don’t have a sincere negotiating partner among the Palestinians. The subtext being that Palestinians all want to wipe Israel off the map, so how do you negotiate with them? But now Donald Trump comes along, and he realizes the truth, which is that Benjamin Netanyahu clearly has no interest in making peace with the Palestinians, and his Israeli government is the one looking to seize all of “greater Israel” as the completion of the Zionist project.
Jimmy Dore discusses why it makes sense that Trump would want to make a deal and what his promises of bringing peace to the Middle East suggest for what he will do as president.
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Not much has really happened over the past week... Nothing to see here!
How could we combine all the jazz of Barack with Hillary pantsuits?
While we do not support JP, who has gone off the rails into MAGAville and Trump sycophantism, he's got a point here. Who's worse, Donny or Kami? Donny, probably, but Kami gives us chills of disgust. So like BLM, we will not back an authoritarian self-described "top cop" Establishment selection. We never backed her as VP over Tulsi or the others.
QUESTION: When I meditate, which has both the words "me" and "I," I feel so selfish and self-absorbed, like it's all about me. So shouldn't I stop? I would rather be an explorer [astronaut] than a selfish seeker [psychonaut]. You can't argue with my logic, admit it, and let me get off this mat.
We've just scratched the surface in this direction.
Space cadet gets bored with own distractions
ANSWER: Well, Doggone, with logic like that, you really have us in a bind. I mean, we don't want you to be selfish or self-absorbed. In fact, it would be good to be selfless and fully absorbed [in the object of meditation]. With killer logic like you've laid out, we realize that we are wrong, and by "we" we mean all of us -- the Buddha, the sages, the arhats, the sadhus and sadhvis (godmen and godwomen), the rishis (seers), the jinas (pathfinders), the shamans (wandering ascetics or shramanas). We've been doing this all wrong. So what you propose is that we launch our own Asian space program out in Afghanistan or Northwest India, maybe in Mohenjo-Daro or in any case somewhere near Gandhara?
Q: I don't know what those places are.
A: Of course not, yet you're sure of which direction to head, out not in?
Q: Well, no, but...
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, lift off
A: So without knowing even the general direction, you've let your mind talk you into doubt, skepticism, and more discursive thinking?
Q: Discursive?
A: Monkey Mind, going from branch to branch to branch, ceaselessly jumping around.
Q: Oh yeah, that.
A: Yet without knowing, you've never noticed how enlightened scientists are? Everyone who comes back from "space" is awake. Everyone who spends her time drinking coffee, reading data printouts, fashioning explanations is well behaved, serene, in control of their minds, inspiring, happy...
Q: No, they're none of that. They're the opposite!
A: Of course, what else would they be? Neither purifying their own minds nor encouraging others to purify theirs, they strengthen their rational powers and let everything else go to pot. They use the power of a streetlamp the way a drunk does, for support rather than illumination. They debate, they argue, they aggrandize their own theories while belittling others'. What a way to go about in search of wisdom.
Q: Yeah, well.
Calm down, Monkey. - Play with me, Homer!
A: Yeah well, what? They're harried, confused, leading others to confusion, cantankerous, amenable to nothing but argument and besting others in debates, to more and more data, rarely recognizing the biases that secretly guide their (mis-)interpretations of that "data." There is this world. Look around. Loot at it. Your lenses (all three eyes) are covered in dust, but you hope to accurately discern and make sense of what you're seeing. You have no conception of the assumptions you arrive with, like that of a "seer." That you take for granted and leave unquestioned. The suitability of the apparatus (the eye and its focus), that you leave unquestioned, with no access to assessing it.
Q: I'm starting to see.
A: Sit, turn inward, and the next time the mind misleads you to look the other direction, the direction you spent your whole life looking and trying to make sense of, note it and remain with the subject.
Q: What subject?
"Space" like dinosaurs is for kids.
A: Your subject of meditation, like the breath, or if that has been mastered (and it has not), the Elements, or the others laid out in the Four Foundations of Mindfulness Sutra. Trust that the Buddha and the arhats who confirmed his findings had something useful to say about the way to peace and enlightenment. It isn't by thinking, for if it were, all the thinkers would already be there and, by their thinking, would have talked others into seeing things their way. "Thinking" is not the way. We are really going from the ground up (rather than the top down, from experience to knowledge rather than thinking and theorizing to knowledge). It's already been done. Follow the Path.
Q: But how? It doesn't work no matter how I try!
A: Stop "trying." Start doing. Leave expectations and angst behind. The very problem you are running into is efforting, attempting to muscle it. Relax. LET GO. Let it be. You're only task is to watch. Don't think about it. See it. There it is. That is reality. Watch it unfold. What happens to a thought?
Q: It comes.
A: What else?
Q: It makes me think.
A: It makes you think? Isn't it a byproduct of your thinking?
Q: Well, yeah, but...
A: You said, "it comes." Have you ever noticed that "it goes"?
Q: Well, sure, after it hangs out a while.
Oh, this is easy. Now what? What else?
A: So don't welcome it. Simply see it. And you will see that although it comes whenever it wants to, it also goes whenever it wants to. You're not in control. When you're sitting, you're full of thoughts. But when you stand up to make sense of them, where are they? They are hardly dependable or useful. They've ruined your meditation (that is, welcoming them, conversing with them, and following them has ruined it) and then, their job done, they go away. You can't even account for them, find them now, or get back your peaceful meditation. You created this great argument against sitting and did no sitting still. The theory immediately fell apart when you ask about it, yet you cling to it as a "really good thought."
Q: I see now it wasn't.
A: And the next one won't be either. Billions have thought these thoughts, made these assumptions, thoughtlessly followed thought. Stop all that. Let it go. There's something better on the other side of confidence (the faith to believe this is not all for naught). In Zen some say, "Just be." Sort of be like that. Be content in the moment, be with the moment, just be (with it). Stop abandoning yourself. If you need inspiration for sitting, reading the lives of those who previously succeeded is inspiring, although those stories can set up expectations, hopes, and lead to frustration and a sense of futility if magic doesn't happen. Let magic happen, let it not happen, let it be.
Q: So like the Beatles.
Let's make more songs to distract everyone.
A: No, but okay. Like anything. It is. Let it be. Let it be just as it is. Don't fix it. Observe it. Your strength of observation will strengthen. Beyond sitting, there are practices the whole rest of the time to make the next sit more solid. Ever be mindful. Stay with the moment. Stop abandoning this moment and attention to it. Then, when sitting, that can be done much better. Exhale. Let the inhale happen all by itself. Just watch it. Don't "do" it.
Q: I might suffocate!
A: You won't if you relax. Most of "your" breathing is being done without you most of the time. When you notice it at the beginning of the sit, it should occur to you that "you" haven't been breathing yet breathing has been happening just fine, in fact, better than if you had.
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