I don’t know about you, but after reading Freakonomics, I felt smarter–or at least like I could discern the crazy things that people do better than I had before.
Here’s yet another way to get smarter. The discerning minds of Stephen and Steven go audio with their new Freakonomics podcast.
It looks like new episodes may come out weekly-ish.
Here’s a must read article in this week’s Time Magazine about the way employment, education, and living is changing and may play out in the near future. I’ve had many of these exact same ideas myself, so it’s intriguing to think that others are thinking along the same lines.
1) What good is a college education anymore?
2) The ways most of us are learning are different than they were just 10 or 15 years ago. What about 10 years from now?
3) It seems like we all are moving toward a smaller, more communal way of everyday living. Working out of our houses, condensing our budgets, sharing out resources with our friends and extended families. Even moving in with one another to simplify our lives. Is communal living the future?
The Dropout Economy – 10 Ideas for the Next 10 Years – TIME.
Believe nothing,
No matter where you read it,
Or who has said it,
Not even if I have said it,
Unless it agrees with your own reason
And your own common sense
-The Buddha
We are modern mystics – living in monasteries without walls. The entire planet is our heaven on earth. Instead of being overly dependent on anyone else, we must be leaders and seers. — Lama Surya Das, from Awakening the Buddha Within
Distance does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become the conscience of the free market if it’s to have any meaning in this world – and stop being its apologist. — Bono
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace. — Jimi Hendrix
Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery. — Fyodor Dostoesvsky, Crime and Punishment
Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive. — Henry Steele Commager
War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. — John F. Kennedy
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
– The Dalai Lama
…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903 in Letters to a Young Poet
In my education at a Presbyterian seminary, I took a course in Buddhism. Sort of a Buddhism 101 class, but an interesting class, nonetheless, if only because the professor was visiting from the University of Virginia and knew very little about the Christian faith that each of his students had been immersed in for most of their lives.
I along with other students in the class had been interested in the connection between my faith and Buddhism, but I simply did not yet have the vocabulary I needed to express it. But as a non-exclusivist Christian I was interested not just with learning of Buddhism but immersing myself into the ancient tradition, perhaps even blurring the lines between the two faith traditions and therefore coming to a clearer vision of Truth itself.
The parallels between Jesus and the Buddha are remarkable. Even though the two had completely separate experiences, their teachings as well as their spiritual insights seem remarkably similar. Consider these examples.
There are many parallels in their ethical teachings:
Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me. –Matthew 25:45
and
If you do not tend one another, then who is there to tend you? Whoever would tend me, he should tend to the sick. –Vinaya, Mahavagga 8.26.3
Or let’s consider their parralel wisdom on salvation:
The Kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. –Matthew 13.44
and
If by giving up limited pleasures one sees far-reaching happiness, the wise one leaves aside limited pleasures, looking to far-reaching happiness. –Dhammapada 21.1
There are many more similar ideas that the Buddha and Jesus share with one another, but rather than citing more examples, I’m much more interested in explanations of why these two religious figures seem to be concerned with the same ideas. How do we account for these intersections?
Some scholars have postulated that cultural borrowing is the logical explanation. Because the Buddha came first, Jesus then, sometime during his ministry, would have somehow had to come in direct contact with the teachings of the Buddha. These scholars say that Jesus may have traveled to the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, or that Buddhist teaching traveled up the other way and reached Galilee. Unlikely.
Some other scholars guess that maybe Jesus spent his early years traveling to India–before, say, the Gospel according to Mark picked up the Jesus story. Compelling, but probably not right either. Incidentally, a really funny and irreverent book dives into this idea. It’s called Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore.
The most satisfying explanation about why Jesus and the Buddha spoke of, seemed concerned about, and more importantly seemed to have insight into the same sort of wisdom is not because of cultural borrowing, but because both Jesus and the Buddha both knew the same sort of sacred reality.
Even though Buddha rejected the notion of a personal God–some sort of supernatural being outside of the universe, Buddha was in tune to the notion of God as a sacred presence.
Jesus knew of God in this way, too. Jesus seemed to know of God not as a separate being that one must learn about through instruction, but as an all-pervasive presence that pervades and saturates everything. For both Jesus and the Buddha, this Divine presence does not come from somewhere else but rather was experienced by both as an immanent reality. As Marcus Borg would say, a notion of the Divine as “right here and also more than right here.”
From both Jesus’ and Buddha’s knowledge of this all-pervasive sacred presence, they both are able to teach others of new and radical ways of seeing reality. Both Jesus and the Buddha asserted that the human condition suffers from blindness and grasping, letting go and what it really means to die to oneself. They both spoke about what it is to be awake, what it is the see truth and what it is to be blinded from it.
Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. –Mark 8:35
and
With the relinquishing of all thought and egotism, the enlightened one is liberated through not clinging. –Majjhima Nikaya 72.15
Both Jesus and the Buddha were tapped into the same sacred strain. They share the same divine wisdom. And we would do well to listen for their powerful voices and follow.
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations. –David Friedman
- In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.” –Anais Nin
One of the bad habits that we pick up early in our lives is separating things and people into secular and sacred. We assume that the secular is what we are more or less in charge of: our jobs, our time, our entertainment, our government, our social relations. The sacred is what God has charge of: worship and the bible, heaven and hell, church and prayers. We then contrive to set aside a sacred place for God, designed, we say, to honor God but really intended to keep God in [God's] place, leaving us free to have the final say about everything else that goes on.
Prophets will have none of this. They contend that everything, absolutely everything, takes place on sacred ground. God has something to say about every aspect of our lives: the way we feel and act in the so-called privacy of our hearts and homes, the way we make our money and the way we spend it, the politics we embrace, the wars we fight , the catastrophes we endure, the people we hurt and the people we help. Nothing is hidden from the scrutiny of God, nothing exempt from the rule of God, nothing escapes the purposes of God.” –Eugene Peterson, from the Introduction to the prophetic books in The Message
Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.” ~Eli Khamarov, The Shadow Zone
This is from Walt Whitman’s preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass–an essay, a rant, a sermon, and prophetic manifest, call it what you will. It deserves to be read, and more so, its dreams deserve to be realized.
Walt Whitman dreamed about an America that was radically egalitarian, constantly reflective, and fully democratic–not only in government, but also in our daily interactions with fellow Americans. Here’s an excerpt, reminiscent of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah.
There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait awhile … perhaps a generation or two … dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place … the gangs of kosmos and prophets en masse shall take their place. A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women. Through the divinity of themselves shall the kosmos and the new breed of poets be interpreters of men and women and of all events and things. They shall find their inspiration in real objects to-day, symptoms of the past and future… . They shall not deign to defend immortality or God or the perfection of things or liberty or the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They shall arise in America and be responded to from the remainder of the earth.
Walt Whitman knew that Democracy, if it was to come to its fullest manifestation, would demand that the ancient hierarchical structures of political power be dismantled and the Church’s top-down structure of privilege, holiness, and position as gateway-keepers to the divine be leveled to the ground.
