Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar. It is observed by Muslims worldwide as a month of fasting (sawm, not eating during daylight hours), communal prayer (salah), reflection, and community [5] -- and no sinning in general so "fasting" with the eyes as well. It is also the month during which the Quran is believed to have been revealed to the Islamic Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). The annual observance of Ramadan is regarded as one of the Five Pillars of Islam [6] and lasts 29 to 30 days, from the sighting of the crescent moon to the next [7, 8]. More
In Buddhism we enjoy a "Mother Mary" figure one might call "Virg Yin" (Kwan Yin, Guanyin), the Goddess of Compassion, a bodhisattva. So the best part of the Catholic faith is present. And if a Buddhist wants to love Mary (Miriam) or any other Goddess or her son, that's fine. We do not answer to the Vatican. How great the world would be if everyone were free to pick a spirituality, wisdom, faith, or path-of-practice. We can practice all of them, and that's fine with the Buddha. Good luck on your spiritual journey. We have all been cycling through samsara in search of real "salvation" (liberation, vimutti, moksha). May we all find it.
(But what if a Catholic doesn't like Catholicism, the Patriarchy, and the Church but loves Jesus Christ? - That's great. Investigate what Jesus really taught in the banned Gnostic texts the Church never wants you to know exist.)
The Buddhist Way to Give at Christmas | No stress, just pure joy
(Buddha's Wisdom)
Dec. 23, 2025: What if we could give at Christmas without stress, guilt, or keeping score?
🎁 CHRISTMAS DOESN'T HAVE TO FEEL HEAVY.
DISCOVER HOW BUDDHIST WISDOM CAN TRANSFORM GIVING.
For 2,600+ years, Buddhists have practiced dāna (letting go, giving, sharing, generosity, charity), the art of generous giving that liberates both giver and receiver.
This ancient wisdom offers a profound alternative to the anxiety, obligation, and reciprocity calculations that often shadow modern Christmas giving.
Through Buddhist teachings, human psychology, and everyday Christmas moments, this video shows how giving without attachment changes not only the holiday season…but the mind/heart behind it.
📿 DISCOVER:
The ancient practice of dāna and its three stages of joy (before, during, and after giving)
Why expecting gratitude turns giving into stress
Why the Buddha said the "gift of Dhamma [the Teaching, Doctrine, Dharma] surpasses all other gifts" and what this means for our Western pagan holiday we call Christmas (Christ's mass)
The three moods of giving: reluctant, calculated, and free (and which one we're actually practicing)
The hidden emotional contracts behind Christmas gifts
How to give, and receive, without pressure, debt, or obligation
🙏 If this changes how you experience Christmas this year, subscribe to Buddha's Wisdom for weekly explorations of ancient practices that address modern life. The next video might be exactly what someone needs
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Christmas magic meets Buddhist wisdom
01:19 The Christmas giving paradox
03:19 What is Dāna? The Buddhist art of generosity
06:13 The three moods of giving
11:01 How to practice dāna at Christmas
17:29 The ultimate Buddhist Christmas gift
19:30 The one gift experiment
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I was traveling as a vegan through India which, while mostly Hindu, at that time had about 100 million Muslims. (It now has 200 million or more).
I came to a strangely barren outdoor marketplace made of stone and clay. I watched from a distance as a bad smell of BBQ wafted through the air like an accident. Imagine the smell of burning plastic, upholstery, oil, textiles, and diesel fumes.
Men began to congregate, each at their own stall with animals, mainly sheep, lambs, or goats in tow. I blended in, holding still, just observing. And I began to realize these were butchers, killing animals by slicing their throats, beheading them, draining their blood, separating their corpses into portions, and piling bloody flesh on the stall tops for sale.
Shoppers, Muslims following their religion to eat the dead and Hindus violating theirs by buying carcasses (and therefore paying butchers to kill) for consumption, which is at odds with ahimsa ("nonharming"), were gathering.
The Dharmic religions enjoin humans to abstain from killing and from encouraging anyone else to kill. Butchers are encouraged to slaughter when people pay them to do it. Am I blameless for eating meat? It would be as if the Mafia godfather were to say, "I've never killed anybody" when he has hired and directed men to kill by paying them to do so. Is he blameless or as blameworthy as those Mafia men for all those killings? Butchers, paid for yesterday's killing, kill for tomorrow in full expectation that there is money to be made by those not doing the dirty work.
The flies. The dirty hands. The dust and pollution of uncovered stalls. The floors of stalls were a sheen of blood. There was some baying of the young sheep.
The men all seemed very nice, not yelling or argumentative, all in their workaday mode, thinking nothing wrong with slaughtering and selling in unhygienic conditions.
A modern human family walking on all fours?
Then, thinking of karma, I saw it. No one seemed to pay any mind, but I could not wrap my head around what people must be thinking they were seeing and why it was so. People probably go along to get along by not thinking.
An Ulas family member or distant relative, walking on all fours through the blood slats, was going from stall-to-stall begging. He had a Muslim cap like the others and clogs (rope and wood sandals) on his feet, which gave the appearance and sound of cloven hooves, as he ambled from butcher to butcher, who pitied him (or wanted him to move on).
They have him a few coins (backsheesh) or slivers of red flesh. To explain it to myself, I imagined that this man -- in a past life or earlier in this one -- was a butcher like them but then went crazy and decided to go on all four like a dog-duty ascetic.
But he was no ascetic, not one to do penance or tapas (fiery austerities), not Hindu or a member of one of the Dharmic religions. Yet, by his concurrent good deeds, possibly giving to beggars, he managed to gain rebirth in this world (on the human plane) rather than The Downfall (niraya), the worlds of woe that result from killing living beings and other cruelties.
Karma is such that the way it works out is not only strange but incomprehensible, one of the Four Imponderables. It is possible, particularly in this world of mixed karma (skillful and unskillful deeds), that one form of karma interferes with the other. Killers are not always immediately reborn in perdition.
It is possible by good karma (keeping the Five or Eight Precepts) that merit is made that counters unskillful actions for a time. The result of killing animals is not that one will one time be killed or reborn in hell but that it will happen again and again and those mental impulsions (javanas) formed in the doing come to fruition by conditioning a rebirth. One act (good or bad) has exponential karmic-results (vipaka, phala), ripening like fruit.
The man walked like a tall, skinny cow from booth to booth. The butchers gave charity. And he moved on to work the whole marketplace. I turned in disbelief, gobsmacked, and saw a girl selling piles of colorful powder dyes. It is not clear in what, ubiquitous plastic bags or wrapped in yesterday's newspaper. The piles were perfect and very likely synthetic and she seemed miserable to be there.
Then the smell hit me again and I saw smoke. It was a kind of hibachi, and an old Muslim man was placing something on the sooty grill. The smoke did not seem to bother the miserable salesgirl, but from a farther distance, it sure bothered me.
The man smiled at me, seeing my camera. I approached slowly and got close enough to discern what was burning. It was a pile of small heads of recently living lambs. It is the strangest thing to see a beheaded face separated from its torso, disconnected from its neck. The eyes were gently closed and I felt sure they might open at any moment. Was he cooking their brains in the skulls?
Surely, this was butcher offal (trash). What was he doing? I came to understand that he was singing the hair off to sell the heads for buyers to eat the face. Like a dog gnawing on a bone for marrow and gristle, scraps of remaining tendon, the smear of blood or scent of flesh, someone would buy this.
Price? 5 cents (It's hard to do the arithmetic conversion with moving exchange rates, and this was a long time ago when the US greenback fetched about 40 rupees). The man kindly smiled at me. All the men were nice, seemed nice, seemed well adjusted to their task, with wives and families at home, well-fed with lots of dead meat. India is a kaleidoscope. I thought that man an anomaly. But here is a whole family:
Family that walks on all fours have 'undone the last three million years of evolution'
Story by Harriet Brewis, Indy 100, 8/27/24
The skin on the palms of their hands is as thick as it is on their feet (60 Minutes AUS/Indy 100).
.
All families have their own quirks and habits, but one group of relatives has such a distinct trait that scientists have branded them a total anomaly of the human species.
I told you, Darwin. - No, Wallace, I already knew.
The Ulas family has been the subject of evolutionary fascination for years after they were discovered in a remote village in Turkey walking on all fours. Back in the early 2000s, a scientific paper was published on five of the Ulas siblings and their strange bear crawl-style of movement, with experts divided over the cause of the anomaly.
In the years following the paper’s publication, evolutionary psychologist Prof. Nicholas Humphrey of the London School of Economics (LSE) travelled to Turkey to meet with the extraordinary family.
Alfred Wallace, the unfamous father of evolution
The Ulas mother and father had a staggering 18 children. However, of these, only six were born with quadrupedalism (walking on all fours), which has never been seen before in modern adult humans.
“I never expected that even under the most extraordinary scientific fantasy that modern human beings could return to an animal state,” Prof. Humphrey told 60 Minutes Australia, which made a documentary about the family back in 2018.
“The thing which marks us off from the rest of the animal world is the fact that we’re the species which walks on two legs and holds our heads high in the air,” he added. More
Rapper Lil Yachty CALLS OUT Black Lives Matter (BLM) because Patrisse Cullors spent millions of dollars (taken from the BLM foundation) buying mansions in Los Angeles and Canada, while Blacks suffered grievously under police, state, and court oppression.
"Black lives do not matteruntil all lives matters," for anyone who thinks Blacks are being selfish to single themselves out as being in need of fair treatment as if we were not all in need of it.
Indeed, everyone needs it, but it should be obvious that everyone does not get it, and Black are among the most oppressed groups in society along with Indigenous and Hispanic folks. This is a demonstrable fact, and if anyone who points it out makes others uncomfortable, it may be necessary to look up Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, white privilege, white fragility, and most of all IMPLICIT bias.
We are becoming more aware of an inequitable system based on race, just as the Me Too Movement brought attention to the disparate treatment of women in Hollywood's movie and music industries. Awareness has not been enough. Systemic change is needed.
Reparations are needed because the same whites who say they did not own slaves and should not be blamed for the past are benefitting from the country's past system of oppression that advantaged them in the past and present and is doing so into the future. See the work of Dr. Joy DeGruy and Prof. Michelle Alexander for starters.
Maui Police Chief John Pelletier implicated in Penis Diddy Combs rape case
after his strangely coincidental involvement in the Las Vegas mass shooting
Southern California's shocking new Autofire: This is beyond normal
(JR Cuyam)
Breaking: A new fire has erupted next to Los Angeles in Ventura County, leaving devastation in its wake. This video shows the latest updates and exclusive footage sourced from international media, capturing the scale and intensity of this unfolding disaster. Stay informed as we dive into the impact on the local community and the ongoing burn.
Jon Stewart calls out GOP hypocrisy with L.A. wildfire disaster relief | The Daily Show
(The Daily Show) Jan. 13, 2025: Jon Stewart examines how Trump's finger-pointing and the GOP's (Republican Party's) threats to withhold disaster relief for the L.A. wildfires are missing the bigger picture: nature is f**ked, and helping those in pain shouldn't be a political issue. #DailyShow #LA #Wildfire #GOP
COMMENTS
(@RobinLee-kb3xj) Do you remember what happened in the Maui fires? The poor lost everything, even their land. We all know who bought the land. It sure wasn't the poor people of Maui.
(@deeprollingriver52)
I can barely stand to listen to the politicians.
(@jmldreamer)
Fires starting miles and miles apart? Like 10 and 20 miles apart is no coincidence!
(@raybrock5917) Gov. Newsom is already talking to investors. This is no accident.
What better way to move mindfully than the ancient Vedic rishi magic of "union" (yoga) with the breath (prana, spirit) and the All (advaita, our universal interconnectedness)?
The martial arts are martial, that is, related to war and fighting. Qigong and yoga are about peacefully moving energy in the body. Even a very fat, unhealthy, other-abled person could do yoga (e.g., Iyengar Yoga) or begin to move chi (qi, kyi, prana) for health and recovery.
Average Janes and Joes might even be to the point where the practice of saluting the sun (Surya Namaskar) is a good idea. We'll start the New Year doing just that:
Jimmy "Peanut Farmer" Carter just couldn't bear to see Trump become president again when he himself only got one term and lost the White House to fiendish but beloved Republican Pres. Ronnie "The Great Communicator" Reagan. After decades of good deeds for Habitat for Humanity and being called "The Antichrist" for trying to solve the very profitable "problems" in the geopolitical Middle East. These troubles, most of it with Bibi Netanyahu at the helm, have been going on for most of our lives thanks to the CIA grooming Bibi and surreptitiously supporting him. He was in hospice for a long time at the end, after the passing of wonderful wife Rosalind Carter.
Donald Trump full speech at Al Smith Dinner in New York City (Oct. 17, 2024)
(WFAA) Ex-Pres. Donny Johnny Trump delivered humorous remarks [someone else wrote for him] at the Al Smith Dinner, which benefits New York City Catholic charities, in NYC on Oct. 17, 2024.
Cringe: Kamala "I Never Said I Was a Comedian or Actress or Normie" Harris’ skit with SNL Catholic alum Molly Shannon at Al Smith dinner
(New York Post) At this year's Al Smith charity dinner, presidential hopeful VP Kamala got a little help from SNL's "Mary Catherine Gallagher." Ahead of a pre-recorded speech (because she couldn't bother to be there in person, or send liberals Jewish Doug Emhoff and Midwestern Tim Walz, like everyone else except for candidate Walt Mondale), the veep tried to perform a comedy bit alongside Molly Shannon's '90s-era Catholic school girl character from Saturday Night Live. Yikes, at least Trump proved he was not illiterate as he read haltingly and in a stilted manner of a declining senior citizen, the oldest would be prez ever, not from teleprompter screens but old-fashioned cue cards). #kamalaharris #alsmithdinner #mollyshannon
Stand up Jim Gaffigan, DJ Trump, Kamala Momala Harris, Al Smith Dinner 2024 (Forbes Breaking News); Eds., Wisdom Quarterly
Two KFI 640 AM (an iHeart station, the largest talk radio station in the country) personalities rappelled down the 25 story Hilton Universal City (Los Angeles next to Hollywood) to bring attention to the unhoused situation in L.A. The succeeded in raising funds and not dying. The Just Feed 1 event continues Saturday, 9/8/24.
Beautiful Los Angeles -- with its Hollywood Land, Santa Monica, UCLA, USC, Caltech, beaches, mountains, woods, canyons, and rivers -- is the jewel of Southern California. It's big enough, with over ten million people in the county with about 4.8 million in the City of LA. One would never imagine how much homelessness and poverty exist here. It's a Tale of Two Cities.
Wait, I can help by rappelling down a building?
Well, what can I do about it? Nothing, you're just one person. When has ONE person ever done anything? Actually, even though we all believe that, the fact of the matter is that ONE person is the only person who has ever done anything. It begins with a will, motivation, or inspiration to help. Now just find a way. Just help one. How about this?
On September 27 and 28, 2024, at the Hilton Los Angeles Universal City Hotel someone is going to get ready to go Over the Edge to fight homelessness
and help kick-off the Just Help 1 challenge!
What if everyone in Los Angeles could just help one struggling neighbor?
As (Saint) Mother Teresa famously stated,
“If you can’t feed a hundred people, then just feed one.”
Although the homeless numbers in LA feel insurmountable when we consider the total, if we break the problem down to one individual helping one other individual, one family helping one other family, things change — exponentially.
one friend to make sure one less child suffers from food insecurity
one family to ensure that another family doesn’t have to spend
one more night in their car
one church to make sure one woman can find shelter in a safe community.
By joining us and rappelling 25 stories down from the roof of the
Hilton Los Angeles/Universal City Hotel on
September 27 and September 28, 2024,
you can help get one more person, family, or child off the street for good.
I never want to stop helping others and myself.
Registration is FREE! Just raise $1,000 or more by 6:00 am on the day of your rappel, and you will qualify for this thrilling way to bring
new hope to the City of Angels.
YOU CAN Just Help 1 — and possibly many more — find their way home.
Become a sponsor, make a donation, or register for the event and start fundraising today! Every dollar will be MATCHED to have DOUBLE the IMPACT! *Match is up to $600,000.
ABOUT: Union Rescue Mission (URM) has for over 133 years provided safe shelter, meals, long-term rehabilitation programs, education, counseling, medical services, and spiritual encouragement to assist those wanting to escape the cycle of homelessness forever. Unfortunately, URM's work is far from over.
Spiritual gets physical, intention becomes deed.
As the world is changing, so has the state of homelessness in the city. People need more than just four walls, a meal, and a bed. They need what
URM is uniquely equipped for:
HOPE that lasting change and a transformed life are possible.
But URM can't do it alone. URM needs partners like YOU to join the Just Help 1 challenge -- a fresh approach to this on-going crisis.
Join Yogini Stella for the 8th Annual New Year 108 Sun Salutations event, Round 2!
Practice yoga for a cause:
50% of proceeds go to the charity Yoga Gives Back.
In Eastern philosophy (and other spiritual traditions such as Catholicism), 108 is considered an auspicious number that represents a complete cycle (an alpha and omega, an ultimate beginning or ending phenomenon).
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