(Historical Void) What Sen. Kennedy said about the Palestinian refugees ("Arabs") enraged and infuriated Zionist Israel when JFK became president a few years later, so they got him back.
Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926) lived until August 4, 1962. She was a sex symbol, comedic American actress, and model.
Known for playing comic "Blonde Bombshell" characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as an emblem of the era's sexual revolution. She was a top-billed actress for a decade, and her films grossed $200 million (equivalent to $2 billion in 2025) by her tragic death in 1962 [2].
Born in Los Angeles, Monroe spent most of her childhood in foster homes and an orphanage before marrying James Dougherty at the age of 16.
She was working in a factory during World War II when she met a photographer from the First Motion Picture Unit and began a successful pin-up modeling career, which led to short-lived film contracts with 20th Century Fox and Columbia Pictures.
After roles as a freelancer, she began a longer contract with Fox in 1951, becoming a popular actress with roles in several comedies... More
(Firstpost) Feb. 9, 2026: The 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy were meant to begin with celebration and spectacle, but the opening ceremony has instead triggered a storm of controversy.
Social media users accused organizers of displaying Satanic symbolism after a pentagram-like visual appeared during the show.
This comes just two years after the Paris 2024 opening ceremony faced backlash for its religious parody.
Are Olympic ceremonies drifting into unnecessary controversies? [Did Hitler ruin The Games for everyone in 1936 by having Nazi Germany host them, adding a great deal of pomp and circumstance with industrialized symbolism and grandeur worthy of ancient Rome and Greece?] And are these spectacles overshadowing the spirit of sport?
Rupha Ramani breaks down the outrage, the history of opening ceremony controversies, and explores if the opening ceremonies are setting the wrong tone for the event to follow.
Is there a Buddhist parallel to this popular Western story of a Garden, a first human couple, a Wisdom Tree, and a tricky shapeshifting Serpent? There is. One need only look at the Agganna Sutta, "A Buddhist Genesis," a discourse given by the Buddha "On Beginnings."
But first it may be better to question the Sumerian, Jewish, Christian version -- made silly by its oversimplification over the millennia. The Christian version makes next to no sense, the Jewish interpretations a little more sense, and the much older Sumerian roots from texts like the Epic of Gilgamesh the Enūma Eliš. All of these are creation myths rooted in some kind of history.
Sadly, many readers misunderstand the Buddhist version of "Genesis." The Buddha is in no way explaining how life began. It is preexisting. He is merely explaining how it came to Earth and how karma (deeds) impacts the environment. As people become so, too, the world declines. We are not evolving so much as devolving from a Golden Age (Satya Yuga), and it is all cyclical. It happens again and again.
This is an echo of the older Vedic (Hindu) and Shramanic (Jain) versions, and that is because "Buddhism" does not begin with the historical Buddha. He is constantly referring back to previous buddhas (Great Heroes or Ford-makers as Jainism calls them, avatars and sages in the Old Vedic Religion that became Brahmanism and much later Hinduism).
At their pure inner core, all beings know that they are not separate from one another. In that state of mind, it is as if they live in a Garden of Eden, where they have no need for shame, no need to differentiate friend from foe, good from evil, and no need to imagine a creator god to oversee their behavior.
They have no expectations that their lives should be other than they are.
It's all me. I created everything. - Even us?
But something in our nature likes to delude us into forgetting this oneness [or unity] of all things and into believing that life should be fairer than it is.
We give that demon a name, Mara [Death, the Obstacle to Enlightenment], to help us identify it.
Suppose that, a very long time ago, the first two human beings evolved from earlier beings. We’ll call them Adam and Eve. Their inner core, or Buddha-nature [or natural state of only dreaming and soon to awake], was pure, and they had no fear of other beings, no sense of good and evil, no self that was separate from other beings and from whatever force brought them into being.
Adam and Eve did have a sense, though, that one of the trees in their garden bore intoxicating [entheogenic] fruit that they should stay away from.
That was the Tree of Duality. Looking for an opportunity to trick Adam and Eve into believing they were distinct separate beings, Mara [the Deceiver] took the form of a snake to talk with them.
No beings had ever lied to Adam and Eve, and they had no way of knowing that the snake was not really a being, so they listened as the demon Mara told them how much fun it would be to become intoxicated on the fruit of the Tree of Duality.
Zarathustra, Iran (Persia)
So Adam and Eve ate the fruit and became drunk with duality. They began to see the world as a conflict between good and evil [as taught in the novel Near East religion of Zarathustra called Zoroastrianism].
They decided that only a cruel god would create such an unfriendly place, so they invented the god of the Old Testament and then hid from him.
Because Mara had taken the form of a snake, they feared and despised all snakes. They made distinctions everywhere: friend and foe, human and animal, smart and dumb, handsome and ugly, strong and weak, rich and poor. They began to see old age, sickness, and death as unfair, as burdens, as suffering.
Four prophets: Mani, Zoraster, Buddha, Jesus
They thought child-bearing was punishment. So that was how Mara, for thousands of years to come, deluded human beings into forgetting that they could return to the Garden of Eden.
Every parable is supposed to have a moral. I’d say the moral is: Some believe in an original sin that requires salvation. Other believe in a delusion that requires awakening. — Mel Pine (Urgyen Jigme)
The life of the Buddha is not told to commemorate Prince Siddhartha Gautama and his adventures, much as it may sound that way. The historical accounts have become an allegory, a way of telling the story of Everyone in what Houston Smith could call "the heroine's journey," which also includes heroes.
Born to luxury, kept safe and pampered, spoiled and loved, the prince comes to realize that there has to be more to it all. What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? Where are we going? And most pressing, why do living beings suffer?
Sujata saved Siddhartha from overdoing fasting
On account of needing to answer this final question, he sets off on a journey, a quest in search of the Truth. How could he be a leader of people, the Indo-Scythians (Sakas, Shakyas), if he can offer them no escape from the inevitabilities of birth, aging, sickness, death, and rebirth?
This is samsara. And somewhere is liberation (nirvana, moksha). He must set off to find it and bring it back to his family. And that he does. Only in the process, the size of his "family" grows to include all humans and devas and a goodly number of other beings.
What is "zen"? It is jhana (Sanskrit dhyana, Chinese chan) or "meditative absorption" (WQ).
The simplest and most advanced form of art
Alan Watts is a British-American Zen genius
Alan Watts is translating haiku, which is regarded as the more sophisticated for its apparent artlessness, direct and unadorned.
Haiku is not anything one wants to say in 17 syllables, as we are taught in the US, nor is it a rhyme. It is 17 on (phonetic units in Japanese) with no English equivalent. So, lacking an equivalent (of what linguists might call a phoneme or chunk), we have substituted syllables.
Why are haiku good? They are following many rules we are not told in English, where we just count syllables and chase pseudo-depth with something snappy and terse. "Brevity is the heart of wisdom." And of all the great haiku that ever came from the West, I have never heard something to rival the great American gay Jewish NAMBLA memberBeat PoetAllen Ginsberg, author of Howl, or was it one-time Buddhist Jack Kerouac, author of The Dharma Bums and On the Road, perhaps Sephardic Jew Lawrence Ferlinghetti or American humorist Kurt Vonnegut.
Someone in the 1960s wrote a genius three-word punchline (copied by droll comedian or reprehensible copycat Michael Lowenberg, who dared submit it as an original thought in 2022) that repeated Internet searches do not find. I am forced to compose a facsimile from memory:
Yoko Sakamoto (channeled by Sheron Bellio): Obstacles do not block the path; they are the path. Life isn't as serious as the mind makes it out to be. A piece of bamboo bends but does not break. Only the hand that erases can write the truth.
Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything exists in relation to everything else.
A world, a torch, and without, torch drop -- a world of trouble. A haiku a brought to you by Sue Beh'rue. I write, I erase, rewrite, erase again, and then [put a spell on you].
The past has no past.
A picture of a rice cake does not fulfill. To seek is to suffer; to seek nothing is bliss.
Tim Conway: I understand that your husband, Vic, is a worldly guy. He traveled the world. He spent a lot of time in Tibet, India, China, Vietnam, [Japan but] he said you met at Dalt's?
Yoko: Dalt's, the Dojo of the Smoothie...together we are One, filling each other up. *Gong*
Tim: You've got a little gong, too?
Yoko: A ding-dong with you, Tim Conway, a ding-dong.
Haiku lessons for American poets
Kokuu, Canterbury, UK (ARTS: How to Haiku, 1: What is not a haiku) edited by Wisdom Quarterly
(Treeleaf.org) I can’t speak for other languages, but haiku poetry taught at school in English is almost universally bad.
The basic instruction my 13-year-old daughter recently received was that a haiku is a three-line Japanese poem comprising 17 syllables in lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively.
If one is lucky, one might be told that it is usually about nature and our relationship with the natural world. Is this correct?
Well, it is not totally incorrect, but it focusses the attention in completely the wrong direction and thereby misses out several important factors.
It is true that in Japanese, a count of 17 sound units (morae) are employed in a three-line sequence.
"Quietly, quietly,/yellow mountain roses fall –sound of the rapids" (Matsuo Bashō)
However, an English syllable tends to be longer than a Japanese sound unit, so English Language Haiku (ELH) written in 17 syllables often to feel too bloated and long compared to their Japanese equivalents.
Moreover, most people writing haiku with the 5-7-5 structure in mind pay far more attention to getting the right number of syllables than forming a good poem. Few modern day ELH poets write in 5-7-5. Some do.
Most bad haiku (the plural of haiku is haiku) on the internet are written in 5-7-5. The syllable count is often achieved by adding adjectives until the magic 17 is reached.
The three-line structure is also not a good way to think about haiku. It is better understood as a poem composed of two essential parts – a phrase (two lines usually containing a verb) and a fragment (one line). This can either be fragment-phrase or phrase-fragment. More about this later.
Also a haiku isn’t a bunch of ideas and concepts. It is essentially a poetic form based on images, often coming from nature. Concepts can be included as well as images, but just concepts is far too heady and not nearly visual enough. Source: treeleaf.org
AlanWatts.org, Jan. 17, 2015; KFI racist comedy duo Producer Sheron Bellio (impersonator) as "Yoko Sakamoto," wife of Vic the Brick Jacob, in conversation with suspended radio talk show host Tim Conway Jr.; composed, abbreviated, and edited by Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
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