Rainy Day Religion #24 and #42: Windowless Monads and Digitless Nomads…

So this is what it’s like, I guess, to die so alone so far from home with no crib for a bed no greatest hits from the Grateful Dead, just four walls and two sheets and an extra pillow might work I guess in a pinch in a delirious state of mind where a thing anything soft and curvy might satisfy the existential need to put hard things in soft places, beats the current rage of scurvy and influenza, dengue and consumption ravaging my body with its heartless tentacles eating my soul and leaving me alone dying trying…

so this is how it all ends, does it (?), under the weather under the gun under anything but the godforsaken sun, out there somewhere the brilliant fiery orb symbol of our existence and our insistence at certainty in the face of things that could only be described by the word God if indeed it is a real word, not just some feel-good mechanism manufactured by the conspiracy know-it-alls and designed for immediate consumption…

Religion’s Final Quarter, Tie Score: Monotheism 1, Zero-theism 0…

Statue of Buddha in Kandy, Sri Lanka

Christians and Muslims will always be at each other’s throats, because they’re both playing offense, which I find rather offensive. We Buddhists prefer to play defense. Don’t you wish the DOD did? It used to be called the Department of War, you know. Nothing’s changed. The best defense is a good offense in American football, but life is no silly game…

In real life the best offense is a good defense, all kung fu’s and eastern martial arts based on the idea of letting the enemy’s own aggression destroy him–just facilitate the matter. China was for a long time, and is arguably still today, a Buddhist country. It certainly isn’t Communist, far from what Marx or Mao envisioned, with its state-sponsored capitalism, and keeping up with the Joneses…

Buddhism, Existenz, Ego and the Three-Body Problem…

The ultimate conundrum of life is that we didn’t ask to be born. The ultimate responsibility is that we not dare to risk death, either. For that we never know the reason why, but simply that it—life—is given, and things given must be accepted in the spirit with which they are given, not without question, but definitely without fail…

Yet we do risk death, deliberately, repeatedly and with great flair, and often for no good reason. Up until less than a hundred years ago, as hard as it is to believe, people wanted to go to war, to fight, to kill, and this was the high point in many a young man’s life—or death! We look at the past with a mixture of wonder and agony at all the gratuitous violence and senseless destruction without realizing that the key to that phenomenon is right within us—and largely curable…