Category: Buddhism

What a Covert US Government UFO Program Discovered with Colm Kelleher

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The two main sides to this issue as of today are: 1) it’s realness and 2) how it is being used as a psyop, if it is being used as a psyop. Both sides can be discussed together and/or separately. Having had personal experiences with ‘aliens’, I am most interested in the realness of these phenomena and pleased to see so much mainstream acceptance. Clearly, a paradigm shift has occurred. At the same time, I am mindful that governments and IC actors will spin everything in any way they can if it advantages them.

Another level to these phenomena is the ‘aliens’ people are encountering may actually be entities from other dimensions. Dimensions that overlap ours and are not necessarily far away in terms of spatial distance. This way of looking at it fits fairly well with the Six Realms of Buddhism, which can easily be interpreted as dimensions. Time will tell how this plays out and how the Buddhist tradition will deal with new findings in this area. ABN

How to understand FIML

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The simplest way to understand FIML is it’s a form of ‘a penny for your thoughts’.

FIML has rules which focus the query and the answer.

This leads to deep insights based on real-world, real-time moments.

The sharing is awesome because you are truly sharing your thoughts, how they arise and work. Where they come from.

FIML helps us understand how complex each moment of communication is. And how easily they can be fully understood and shared, thus raising communication to a new level, a better level.

After many FIML exchanges, partners will see themselves and each other with much greater clarity and much less erroneous assumption.

FIML is a beautiful thing.

I am always willing to answer questions about it either in private email or in the comment section.

I am confident that FIML will be one of the most important and wonderful things you have ever done.

The Indo-Arya

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For millennia, in India, children have memorized, in faithful transmission, the songs of a people called the Arya.

Though long dead, they speak through those songs, their bones, and their art, giving us an intimate glimpse of a forgotten past.

Horrific translations and political agendas have distorted this great saga.

But take them at their word, and the Arya give us not only their own story – but that of their Greek, Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic cousins.

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The Buddha was Indo-Aryan. Many people in the world are descended from Indo-Aryans. ABN

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Religions are concept-ularies, vocabularies, tools to speak about spiritual subjects. In this sense, almost all religions are good and say many of the same things.

I read a passage in Epictetus’ Discourses that closely touches Buddhist thinking (as a lot of Stoicism does). He said that friendships based on ‘appearances’ (Buddhist form) are always liable to disintegration. But friendships based on a will that is good and strong can be fully relied on. ‘Appearances’ in Epictetus means external markers like status, money, looks, tribal or familial relations, etc.

The Buddha said that it takes ‘long association’ with someone to fully know them. I am not aware of a Buddhist emphasis on ‘the will’ in the way Epictetus emphasizes that word, but Buddhism does encourage Right Views, Thoughts, Speech, and Action. And it does have a concept that all sentient beings are capable of responding to the Tathagata, being attracted to the Tathagata, the enlightened logos.

I like the word logos because it bridges many apparent gaps between religions. Buddhism is 2,500 years old. The Buddha never asked to be worshipped and asked that no images be made of him. He also asked that his words never be written down and especially not in Sanskrit.

He did not want the deep power of his enlightenment to become a narrow doctrine, a sacred text that would be treated as infallible even when no one remembered any longer what he had actually meant. Buddhism is self-defined as a mind-to-mind teaching, meaning a teacher or ‘good friend’ who explains the Dharma must be sure the explanation has fully penetrated the mind of the person being taught.

This is one reason it is impossible to really get Buddhism from reading alone, though reading is good. I had two very close ‘good friends‘ who basically taught me everything I know about the part of the Dharma that is conveyed through words and concepts.

I encourage anyone who has a Buddhist friend to talk with them as often as you can about the Dharma. So why did I put an image of the Buddha at the top of this post when I know I am not supposed to? Isn’t that a charming side of this beautiful ancient tradition? For many centuries, Buddhists have been unable to resist the urge to portray and honor our original teacher. ABN

A Growing Number of Scientists Are Convinced the Future Influences the Past

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…What if forward causality could somehow be reversed in time, allowing actions in the future to influence outcomes in the past? This mind-bending idea, known as retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first glance, but it is starting to gain real traction among physicists and philosophers, among other researchers, as a possible solution to some of the most intractable riddles underlying our reality.

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Buddhist speculation: It has long seemed to me that sometimes (or maybe often, always) future life events have influenced events in the past. In Buddhist philosophy, time is cyclical. Since Buddhism is an always evolving and always deeply personal system of thought, there is no need to accept cyclical time if it does not comport well with other ideas important to you.

Time as it is generally conceived today means that the entire cosmos ‘disappears’ every moment only to ‘reappear’ in the next. In this view, time is not at all like a river since there is no river behind us and no river in front of us.

I like conceiving of the future as having a sort of ‘gravitational’ influence’ on the past, sometimes deeply particular in its details and sometimes (or always) more general. For example, are we heading toward WW3 because collectively we are the same fools we always have been or because WW3 has already happened in the future and no matter what we do it will occur?

Did what led you to Buddhist thought arise solely from past conditions or did some of it arise from what was then your future, your now current understanding of the Dharma? Maybe there is a mix of causation between past and future and something like WW3 is only probable but not definite. ABN

Science, Buddhism, and FIML

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In some ways FIML practice is a science.

Partners seek the best data available to determine what is being said and/or how they are communicating with each other. Their communication becomes highly objective in the sense that each partner trusts the other’s description of what they said more than their own subjective/emotional impression of what they think they heard. Based on this data, partners are able to continuously upgrade their understandings of each other.

FIML uses an extrinsic formula—the rules of FIML practice—to make this happen, and in this it also resembles science. FIML has an objective, clearly stateable and testable method or procedure for attaining its results. FIML results are also objective in that great satisfaction and better communication are measurable. FIML can be falsified by having many partners do it and not get good results, and in this it is also scientific.

In some ways, though, FIML is turned 180 degrees away from science. This is so because FIML does not have any extrinsic belief or value system that requires submission of the intrinsic, individual, unique mind of either partner. Partners who do FIML can only look to themselves to free themselves from the constraints of extrinsic beliefs, values, semiotics, behaviors, ideas, concepts, and so on. (This does not mean abandon the extrinsic, but rather become free of the constraints of the extrinsic. FIML practice, by paying close attention to speech moments, will help partners do this because they will see precisely where the rubber of extrinsic values meets the road of their self expression and/or listening.)

The FIML method gives partners the tools they need to perceive what Buddhists call the thusness of their unique individualities. The thusness or suchness of being cannot be apprehended through extrinsic semiotics, but can only be experienced by the individual.

Science, in general, does not give us insight into our suchness. Yet FIML practice and Buddhist practice, by using methods that are similar to those of general science, can. FIML differs from science in that it does not make any claims about what is objectively true “out there.” But FIML does claim that partners will vastly improve their communication with each other, and following that vastly improve their understanding of their existence, the  suchness of their unique being.

FIML may constitute an improvement on traditional Buddhist practices because FIML uses objective rules to unite two people in the pursuit of truthful communication. It is different from the traditional practice of one person pursuing “truth” alone in that FIML provides the means for each partner to constantly check his or her work against the other partner. An individual alone is easily subject to fantasy and illusion. FIML is also different from traditional group practices where a group is led by a master or guru. In these practices, the master may be subject to the limitations of solitary practice while the group may be misled by that. Additionally group members will have a very strong tendency to base their understanding on extrinsic semiotics provided by the master, not the true suchness of their individual being.

slightly edited, first posted NOVEMBER 18, 2012

Fish can recognize themselves in a mirror, an indication of self-awareness and complex cognition

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Atwo-year-old toddler flashes her toothy grin as she catches sight of her reflection in a mirror and watches as the image in front of her mimics her every move. Unbeknownst to her, she has passed a major developmental milestone called mirror self-recognition or MSR, which indicates an advanced level of cognitive capabilities in both human and non-human animals.  

A new study shows that in addition to other non-human animals like dolphins, elephants and several great apes, fish can recognize themselves in mirror reflections and photographs. What’s more, they can even distinguish between photographs of their own images and that of their companions. Researchers studying the cleaner fish (Labroides dimidiatus) have now added their findings to a growing body of evidence that points to fish having a sense of self, indicating a higher depth of awareness than previously known.

Mirror self-recognition has been used to study self-awareness and visual recognition in a wide range of human and non-human animals. Developed for primates in the 1970s, the test begins by allowing the individual to familiarize herself with her mirror image.

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Tired of this world

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I have to admit I am tired of this world. All three Abrahamic religions and all, or most, of their sects are fighting over how to kill or save as many Palestinians as they can, many favor killing.

American and Western neocons are vying with other top players for control of the world. Gaza and Ukraine are stepping stones in that contest.

The low-mindedness and vulgarity of this, both the dramas and the ludicrous rationalizations, are unbearably self-limiting, inexorably destructive.

As individuals we have almost no say in any of it. Social media is a dead zone for thought, truth, decency. The best ideas or inquiries are shadow-banned into a silence worse than death. It’s the neocons doing that as well.

In the Abrahamic traditions there is actually a scriptural basis for genocide dating back some 3,000 years. In this crazy world, actual fighting and killing today in Gaza and Israel is actually based on those scriptures. Doesn’t that actually refute the whole religion, all three branches of it?

Christians run and hide from that conclusion because they have no other vocabulary or conceptual network to fall back on. Faith is good but not blind faith.

Too many voices I had respected are complacent, if not complicit, with the neocon slaughter. I am not surprised. I knew they would be.

Until the MIHOP raid on October 7, they had seemed to me to be maintaining an appearance of diplomacy, preserving their ability to speak to the public as best they could.

I viewed that as a kind of Buddhist upaya, a means to a worthy end.

But when the means are grotesquely disproportionate and violate all moral standards except the most severe, I can’t take it anymore. It’s definitely not a worthy end anymore.

In Ukraine, I read another 100,000 men have been killed over the past months in the obviously futile counteroffensive forced on them by neocons. That too is genocide.

Ukraine has been destroyed by neocons. Half the population has fled forever and many hundreds of thousands, especially young men, have been killed. The neocons provoked that war too and everyone with a brain knows it.

The Gospel of Gaza: What we must learn from Netanyahu’s Bible lessons — Laurent Guyénot

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In a speech in Hebrew on October 28, Netanyahu justified the Israeli slaughter of civilians in Gaza with a biblical reference to Amalek.

You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember. And we fight. Our brave troops and combatants who are now in Gaza and in all other regions in Israel, are joining the chain of Jewish heroes, a chain that has started 3,000 years ago, from Joshua ben Nun, until the heroes of 1948, the Six-Day War, the October 73 War, and all other wars in this country. Our hero troops, they have one supreme main goal: to completely defeat the murderous enemy, and to guarantee our existence in this country.

In Netanyahu’s Holy Bible, God gives his chosen people Palestine, and the same God commands them to exterminate the Amalekites, an Arab people that stands in their way. Yahweh asks Moses to not only exterminate the Amalekites, but to “blot out the memory of Amalek under heaven” (Deuteronomy 25:19).

It was left to Saul to finish them up: “kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,” Yahweh instructs him (1Samuel 15:8). Because Saul spared the Amalekite king Agag, Yahweh withdrew the kingship from him and drove him mad: “I regret having made Saul king, since he has broken his allegiance to me and not carried out my orders” (15:11). The holy prophet Samuel, who had a direct line of communication with Yahweh, had to butcher Agag himself (“hewed Agag in pieces,” in the Revised Standard Version). Yahweh then gave the kingship to David, who proved a more obedient exterminator, for example when he put the people of Rabba “under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon” (2 Samuel 12:31).

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I hope this essay will inspire Abrahamic readers to reflect on the actual words and meanings in the Old Testament. I respect all moral religious peoples of all faiths but am also aware that for many religion is a cult, sometimes a dangerous cult of Satanic violence. The ancient Greek, then Christian, and sometimes Jewish term that most unites the Abrahamic traditions with Buddhism is logos. If we see God as logos we can also see the Buddha as logos realized on earth and the Buddhist path a kind of worship or reverence for logos. ‘Theologically’, Buddhists are sentient beings who are attracted to the Tathagata-logos. It is their good karma to be drawn toward logos. Others are blind to logos and sometimes repulsed by it.

A core Buddhist teaching is clinging to words is dangerous. The Buddha prohibited writing his teachings down because he did not want them to turn into scriptures that would be worshipped without being understood. This is why Buddhism defines itself as a mind-to-mind teaching. Buddhists who understands the Dharma well enough transmit it mind-to-mind to others who want to learn it. Buddhists do not proselytize or believe others are lost for having different practices. Buddhists respect and support all traditions and practices that encourage wholesome, ethical thoughts and behaviors because they all lead to logos. ABN