Crossing Nebraska

One of the highlights of my work is that it allows me to meet people from all over the world right here in my hometown. A few days a month I help out with an organization that provides assistance to immigrants and refugees who are new to the St. Louis area. I try not to pry or ask unnecessary questions, but often enough I become privy to stories of great pain and hardship. Youths from Sudan and Somalia, women from war-torn Congo, victims of Bhutanese and Bosnian ethnic cleansing, endangered translators from Iraq and Afghanistan – I feel honored and privileged to be a part of their lives. Hopefully I’m able to provide some measure of hope and healing to them after having experienced far too much of the darkness of this troubled and chaotic world. The other day I was speaking with a young man whose entire family still remains back in one of the cities most devastated by the Syrian civil war. He fled there without many of the documents that all of us here in the U.S. woul...

How many mass shootings have occurred since the one in the Aurora, Colorado movie theater that first inspired this post some five and a half years ago? How many lives have been violently snuffed out? How many families have been destroyed? How many people have been forever scarred by the trauma that they were lucky enough to have survived, but not so lucky as to have avoided altogether? Some brave individuals are counting, and trying to do what they can to persuade hearts and minds to embrace meaningful change. Many others seem to have just grown weary of the reality of massacre after massacre, and the repetitive and ineffectual discussion that ensues. I'm updating this post in the aftermath of the Parkland, Florida school shooting. Perhaps I want to ascertain which group I still belong to, the one trying to affect change, or the one that has grown numb. Has the worldview that I articulated below changed at all? Do I have anything to add? God, The Buddha, and The Joker I’m ...

As of the close of the previous post we’d made it all the way through the twelve links of what is generally considered to be the standard representation of the teaching of dependent origination . I’m sure that questions still remain, and I expect that some of them will linger for quite some time. I do hope, however, that there is no question in anybody’s mind that there is something important being conveyed within these links with respect to how we can live our lives with greater awareness. Perhaps many of the questions that remain relate in some way to the linear presentation of the concepts. “Just how exactly is it that this arises from that ?” you might be asking. Perhaps other questions relate to the expectation that this twelve-fold chain should be able to answer far more than it actually does – as if it were a blueprint of metaphysical reality, for instance. I hope that the remainder of this post helps with questions of the first variety. However, as far as those of the se...