Lady Gaga's not satanic, Mom (Coachella)

• VIDEO: The thrill of going to Coachella (Wknd 1)

Lady Gaga performs "Bad Romance" at Coachella on April 11, 2025, under a full pink moon

(TheMrKingAlex) Posted April 12, 2025: Lady Gaga performs her early hit song "Bad Romance" with crazy and possibly Satanic dance choreography live at Coachella for all the kids and easily influenced young people high on drugs and dying for attention as influencers, wannabees, and attn whrrs on the opening night of the Weekend 1 out in Indio, in the desert east of Los Angeles, not far from Orange County. What would mothers think of the explicit performance? Is that the way we raised you, to watch garbage like this and pay thousands to do it? You're grounded, Honey, and no more dressing us like a trans rainbow with your stupid friends.

• Lady Gaga via TheMrKingAlex, April 12, 2025; Key of Awesome; Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

LUST: Bodies are sexy and beautiful

You're, like, a total hottie and that makes me feel something gooey on, like, the inside, y'know?

.

The new fluidity aims to make us all bi, gay, NB

The body (form) is thought to be most obviously “me,” what “I” regard as the most tangible part of my “self.”

Around it therefore are constructed many views, all of them distorted and perverted to some extent, which prevent insight arising into the body as it really is.

This book, Bag of Bones, is a small Buddhist anthology relating to the body in various ways. It presents material which, if contemplated by the earnest and sincere student of the Dharma, will eventually provide fruitful insight and, thereby, freedom from the many cravings, obsessions, addictions, lusts, desires, and fears centered on the body.

Such thirst for pleasures in which the body is the instrument (though it is in the heart-mind where they dwell), awaken and intensify greed of all kinds, for instance, for food and sex and ego boosts of all kinds.

Greed (attraction, grasping, clinging, addiction, attachment) often accompanies pleasurable sensations. Therefore, desire (craving) needs a rather bitter medicine to combat it.

How can anybody say this body is unattractive?

So the number of items contained here on the unattractiveness of the body, its decay and death — all unpleasant matters — is high. Some of the material concerned with bodily unattractiveness is like a healing balm that need only be taken while the disease of greedy-lust is active. Afterwards, it may be discontinued and set aside.

It is important to understand this so as not to form the mistaken impression that the Buddha advocated viewing all beauty as loathsome. There is a great deal of beauty in this world, not all of which causes us to become obsessed with harmful things.

It is only that there is a hook hidden in beauty, an unseen danger that gets tangled with the greed in one’s heart and leads to more and more complications and difficulties.

Fears center around aging and disease, decay and death. They are never overcome by pretending they do not exist. Ostriches are said to bury their heads in the sand at the approach of enemies.

Only resolutely facing the inevitable features of life can bring insight and the dispelling of fear. The Buddha’s instructions on how to contemplate the body are addressed to those who are able, through their lifestyle, to practice them.

This means in effect monks and nuns, novices, together with dedicated lay people. The former group have this contemplation given to them by their monastic teachers at the time of going-forth from the homebound to the left-home life, which is when we might most need such a medicine to combat lust.

Gallery of the World's Ugliest Women : r/dalle2

Lust hurts and often harms anyone, but it can completely destroy the high life of someone training in monasticism.

Laypeople keeping the Five Precepts have contentment with their partners as an important part of their practice. Sex is a natural part of their life but should still be restrained and kept within the bounds of the Third Precept. If not, how much trouble might follow!

But some few may wish to live without sexual attachments, and this cannot be done in the way of Dhamma (the Buddha's Teaching or natural truth) by ignoring the power of our human sexual drive or by repressing and suppressing it.

Only when it is treated with mindfulness (nonjudgmental awareness and observation) can it be transcended. It does not last forever. It is overcome by the first meditative absorption and uprooted by the stages of enlightenment.

The aspect of mindfulness needed for this is the subject, or rather the interrelated subjects, of this book.

Bhutan: Last Himalayan Buddhist kingdom

In today's world we are subjected to a mass media bombardment of sensuality. Sex especially is used as the bait (attractant) to sell things, a titillation of sensory experience.

When this is continued, defilements of mind, notably lust, greed, and attachment, are sure to be strengthened. When this has happened, the result is not more happiness but only an increase of disappointment (dukkha, stress, ill, woe), suffering, trouble, and difficulties.

I stared until they started to look like skeletons, bags of bones, all of them. I ought to let go, become a monk, and gain enlightenment because flesh and bones are gross. I didn't tell them.

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The medicine for such over-indulgence and over-stimulation is given here. It is said that this subject of meditation is unique to the Buddha’s Teachings, the Dhamma, and that elsewhere it is not clearly taught.

This is unsurprising as we find that desire is sometimes accepted as being “natural.” Wherever desires are viewed as “natural,” that is, inherent in one’s nature or self, nothing much can be done about them.

But the Buddha analyzed desires into those which are wholesome — the zeal to practice Dhamma, for instance — and the unwholesome ones, among which are greediness and lust.

They may not be gross either, as in the case of the meditator who is greedy for bliss, or visions, psychedelic experiences, and attached to such things.

The Buddha has provided the medicine for all unwholesome desires, and according to our various ways of life we can use it to effect partial or complete cures.

When the emphasis is so much on sensuality, youth, and beauty as we find now, the darker sides of life get pushed away and attempts are made, always unsuccessful, to sweep them under the rug. Those who try to do so will not be pleased with the exercises contained in the Buddha’s contemplation of the body as it really is.

• Patikulamanasikara: Purposely focus on the unattractive (asubha)?

Look at those breasts and butt colon!

Such things will appear to them as morbid and unnatural, offensive and repulsive. Yet, they are also a part of this life and should not be ignored. And if the effort is made to ignore what is unpleasant about the body, sooner or later one will be jolted into the recognition of these things.

Such jolts are not pleasant. Rather than leave it until one is forced to know the body’s unpleasant sides, it is better to acquaint one’s emotions with this knowledge gradually. In this spirit, Bag of Bones is being published.

Unfortunately, being only a book, it cannot give person-to-person advice on special problems. It can only offer some general guidelines to people who are interested in reducing their greediness and lust.

It's only skin deep for reptilian hybridization

A word of warning: meditation on the unattractiveness of the body can be very potent and should only be practiced with moderation and care, especially if one has no personal contact with a teacher of Buddhist meditation.

If fear and anxiety, or other extreme unwholesome emotional states arise after practice of it, then it will be better to lay it down and take up loving kindness (mettā) or recollection of the Buddha (Buddhānussati) as one’s meditation instead.

This book, therefore, is not so much for beginners in Buddhism but rather for those who have already practiced for some time. May it inspire many people to practice the Dhamma more intently!

• Wheel 271, Bag of Bones: A Miscellany on the Body (Australian Theravada Buddhist monk Ven. Khantipalo, Buddhist Publication Society, Kandy, Sri Lanka; excerpt edited by Amber Larson and Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly

"Buddha Nature," Ven. Thanissaro?

In honor of Festivus, which customarily begins with the "Airing of Grievances," let's take a critical look at Tan Geoff (American translator Ven. Thanissaro, abbot of Wat Metta, California) and the Mahayana-Hindu concept of [some sort of self to cling to through the idea of an essential] "Buddha Nature." Feel free to differ in the comments section for the traditional "Feats of Strength." Happy Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us!

What is "Buddha Nature"?

Ego Podcast (Buddhism) Discover the Buddha’s profound teachings on the nature of the mind (citta) and the path (magga) to true freedom (nirvana). Learn why the mind is neither inherently good nor evil, but capable of immense transformation. This video explores the Buddha’s insights into intentional actions (karma), freedom of choice, and the process of dismantling ignorance (moha, avijja, miccha-ditthi) to achieve liberation (mokkha, moksha). Find out how understanding (panya) and training the mind leads to ultimate peace and Awakening (bodhi).

#Buddhism #BuddhaNature #Mindfulness #Freedom #Awakening #Discernment #Dhamma #TrueFreedom

COMMENTARY

I have a right to my opinion! - Yes,
venerable sir, but state it as such.

Alas, this podcast suffers from too many Ven. Thanissaro (American Geoffrey DeGraff) bad translations, using his idiosyncratic renderings of many Pali terms one might otherwise recognize as countless other Western Buddhist translators have kept them. If one gives a new rendering, it would be customary to provide either the Pali term being translated or the common rendering.

But Ven. Thanissaro doesn't care anything about that, recklessly innovating and misleading countless readers through free distribution on websites like accesstoinsight.org and his English language books. If advice from Bhikkhu Bodhi couldn't restrain him, what could?

Therefore, we try to avoid his translations altogether, opting for the much more reliable and useful work of Bhikkhu Bodhi, Maurice Walshe, Andrew Olendzki, Ajahn Sujato, the Buddhist Publication Society and the German-Jewish monks who, following in the footsteps of the British team who worked on the Pali Text Society translations, give reliable and illuminating renderings of difficult Buddhist terms and concepts.

The one-man wrecking crew that is Ven. Thanissaro (Mr. Geoffrey DeGraff) will either go down in history as the biggest English-speaking goof with poor grammar (Hire a reliable editor and don't brow beat the person into submission with your heavy-handed opinions and quirks!) or the man who saved a generation of would-be Buddhists who never read the legends of Pali-English translation.

The other less serious but equally annoying problem is the A.I. voice can't pronounce even simple words like simile, making one realize that for a podcast on ego, there doesn't seem to be anyone home, just a machine reading text that seems tailor made by Thanissaro (aka Ajaan Geoff).

• Long ago his first Western student (Ven. Mahindo or Tan Jess) was inducted to Wat Metta and had a miserable time until he quit, as many others had who visited and were brow beaten and yelled at by the know-it-all monk-in-charge who had been thrown out of Thailand, it is rumored in Thailand, for trying to break Thai law and take over a temple. If one becomes abbot, one de facto owns the property, which Thai law did not allow. We tried to warn Tan Jess to go to Thailand and ordain there or at least see the tradition there, but he was being bossed around by Ven. Thanissaro by then so only did what he was told. This was long ago, when the latter was writing Wings to Awakening. Having a look at the manuscript, we thought it was garbage -- exactly for its idiosyncratic renditions of Pali words in needless misleading ways, bad grammar, and questionable novel interpretations of things -- and urged Tan Jess to say so if he were reading it over and being asked for notes. He was seized with terror; he wouldn't dream of making an actual note, correction, comment, or criticizing his "all-knowing" teacher, thinking what he might suffer as retribution for his candor and honest evaluation. Because he was a coward, and because Ven. Thanissaro surrounded himself with cowards or yes-men to look at his manuscripts and praise him, they are of poor quality. This is the way we revere monks in the tradition. It's wonderful that Ven. Thanissaro tackled these texts. What might have been if he had done so in a peer-reviewed way or with an editor to put his jumbled writing and invented-grammar into standard English? We were shocked to be told by Bhikkhu Bodhi that he corresponded with Ven. Thanissaro because this meant it was not that help and guidance was not available to Tan Geoff but that he apparently dismissed it, rejected it, or ignored it altogether, much to the detriment of the world. If you make people fear you and you don't take anyone's advice, this is what you can expect to happen to you. He photographs his own covers, edits his own writing (which is one way of having them go unedited), gets someone to proofread the obvious errors, and viola -- a generation of readers who think he's faithfully rendering the Pali canon. It is a pity. So we are reluctant to feature this nice sounding mechanical video, which makes some good points but makes the poorly, almost certainly reading verbatim from some Tan Geoff tome.

Otherwise, a good point is being made. By relying on such post-historical Buddhist concepts -- seemingly derived from Brahminical Vedic Hindu ways of thinking, which insists there is identity, and luminous consciousness is it (and identical with Brahman), an Atman of one kind or another, a waterdrop longing to return to the ocean (samsara) and be forever at rest in an eternal heaven.

Mahayana evades the impersonal nature of all things, preferring in its philosophy to go on and on about "emptiness" without seeming to know what phenomena are empty or devoid of. Self-nature, yes, but also of self or anything belonging to a self (soul, ego, personality). The Mahayana majority reads the Heart Sutra and it never occurs to them to study it, analyze it, and see how straightforward the point is being made: shunyata = anatta.

• Ego Podcast (Buddhism), Winter Solstice, 12/21/24; Eds., Wisdom Quarterly COMMENTARY