It is the basis of enlightenment and the nexus of ultimate and relative realities.
The Buddha spoke of enlightenment only by saying what it is not.
Even when we consider moral acts with great care, we can never be entirely certain of our judgement because there is always more that we do not and cannot understand or know.
We can be cautiously certain only that we have tried or are trying to act morally.
Do we act as if in a role? Or do we act as if in a mind stream, a stream of karma?
God’s Will implies we have a role to play. What does a karmic mind stream imply? Are we attracted to the Tathāgata or not?
The laws of the physical universe—the ones we know—do not say much about the evolution of life. And they have even less to say about the evolution of human societies and human consciousness.
Good moral behavior is essential for the scientific method to work. If many scientists lie or cheat, we won’t get good science.
On the interpersonal level, FIML practice both requires and encourages moral behavior. At first, partners may only notice that they are required to tell the truth, but as they continue practicing, they will come to want to tell the truth.
This happens for very concrete, even objective, reasons. I know that if I don’t tell my partner the truth, we will both lose. And if I do tell her the truth, we will both gain.
Morality in FIML practice—i.e. telling the truth—is not difficult because the units of a FIML discussion are typically very small, usually entailing just a few seconds of conversation/communication. The payoff for telling the truth in FIML practice, however, is huge. Partners will notice profound and beneficial changes in all aspects of their psychologies. This happens because partners’ senses of who they are will shift from a core with a secretive ego to a core with an interactive truth-telling process. Clean, clear language and a clear conscience transform human being.
FIML may prove that morality is fundamental to human consciousness. This statement is not based on feeling or wishful thinking because you have to behave morally to do FIML at all. For individual psychology, the payoff from FIML can be greater than from science in many important areas.
FIML is not perfect. Here are some of the problems or difficulties with it:
It takes at least two people to do it
These two people must care about each other deeply
It takes a good deal of time
It requires the formation of new mental skills
It is hard to learn without instruction
It requires that partners have at least some interest in language and how they communicate
It goes against much or most cultural conditioning
It requires high ethical standards
One or more of these difficulties will stop some people from doing FIML. There is not much we can do about that.
At the same time, these same difficulties can be an advantage. As is said in Buddhism, they may constitute “negative conditions that lead to progress.”
For example, FIML practice not only requires high ethical standards, it also shows us how to get those standards and why they work.
If you have at least some interest in language and communication, FIML practice will hone and increase it.
FIML does take time, but it is time well spent. You will enjoy many intriguing conversations with your partner that would not have been possible without FIML.
While FIML does require that we form some new mental skills, those skills are very beneficial and will work in many other situations.
FIML practice does pull partners away from subconscious cultural conditioning, but in doing that it also liberates them to form a subculture of their own, based on conscious choice.
Since it employs mindfulness, self-control, and rational analysis of thought and feeling, FIML practice greatly supports Buddhist practice and mental clarity in general.
The Gush Etzion Regional Council in the Israeli-occupied West Bank has publicly admitted that ritualistic sexual abuse of children occurred within its communities, a confession that marks the first time a governing body in Israel’s religious-Zionist settler sector has broken ranks with years of denial.
The extraordinary statement came on 27 May 2026 in direct response to a broadcast by Israeli public broadcaster Kan 11, whose investigative programme ‘Zman Emet’ aired accounts from five women, most of whom did not know each other, who described virtually identical patterns of multi-perpetrator ritualistic sexual abuse in the same geographic areas.
The admission did not materialise in isolation. It is the culmination of more than a year of survivor testimony, Knesset hearings, rabbinical warnings, and police investigations that have shaken Israeli society to its core, forcing a reckoning within the country’s religious communities over decades of alleged institutional silence.
Yael Shitrit, another survivor, described abuse that began when she was three years old:
‘You have no idea what ritual abuse is,’ Shitrit told committee members. ‘The human brain cannot comprehend it. You can’t imagine what it means to program a three-year-old girl through rape and sadism so they can do whatever they want without anyone knowing.’ Shitrit described being trafficked across Israel from ceremony to ceremony. ‘Naked men stood in a circle. My therapist, her husband, and her son harmed me, and there were dozens of other girls and boys who harmed me.’ She said police had known of the cases for a year but lacked the tools to act: ‘The people who will fall are very, very senior figures. These people run communities and government agencies.’
In the dawning days of social media it was one of the first clips of its kind to go globally viral – and has since been viewed many millions of times.
A very ordinary woman is seen walking down a very ordinary street when she comes upon a cat. The cat, apparently friendly and seeking attention, jumps up from the pavement to a garden wall to get closer.
The woman strokes the cat a couple of times while glancing around then suddenly grabs it by the scruff of the neck and then, with surprising dexterity, flips open the lid of an adjacent wheelie bin, throws the cat inside, shuts the bin, and continues walking as if nothing has happened….Initially, she was unrepentant, saying she did ‘not deserve to be hated’ for her moment of madness and claimed people were overreacting.
‘I really don’t see what everyone is getting so excited about. It’s just a cat,’ she said. ‘I was walking home from work and saw this cat wander out in front of me. I was playing with it, stroking it and listening to it purr as it stood on a garden wall. It was very friendly.
‘I don’t know what came over me, but I suddenly thought it would be funny to put it in the wheelie bin, which was right beside me. I did it as a joke because I thought it would be funny. I never thought it would be trapped. I expected it to wriggle out of the bin.’
Bale added: ‘People are reading too much into things. I’ve no feelings about cats one way or the other. I don’t keep pets myself, but I have no problem with people who do.
‘To think this video is being seen around the world is unbelievable. I’m a very private person and don’t want to upset any members of my family. I don’t know what my relatives will think, but to be honest I think everyone’s overreacting a bit.
‘OK, I shouldn’t have done it, but it’s just a cat at the end of the day. I don’t think I deserve to be hated by people all over the world, it was just a split second of madness.’
One of the most disgusting aspects of the apparent covid and covid-vax bioweapons paired-assault on USA and the world. War by deception is an act of war. ABN
Institutions reveal their true character in two places: in the gray zones where rules are incomplete, ambiguous, or unenforceable, and even more nakedly in broad daylight when those in authority openly violate the clearest rules without shame. In a living civilization, power is restrained by the office it occupies. In a hollowed-out order, the office becomes a license to violate. Authority exists not to uphold rules but to prove exemption from them. That is why law, bureaucracy, and policing expose the moral substrate of a society with merciless clarity.
India is the textbook case.
Even in the most civilized nations, courts decide only the tiniest sliver of human reality. The vast majority of civilization—trust, restraint, honesty, the silent agreements that make daily life possible—exists below the threshold of formal law. Verbal promises and everyday decency were never meant for judges. They rest on an internalized moral order.
In India, that moral order does not exist.
Indian bureaucracy does not administer rules. It prices access, punishes resistance, and extracts submission. Reformers claimed bureaucrats were corrupt only because their salaries were too low. This was a rationalization. When government salaries rose dramatically, the scale of bribes increased accordingly. The higher they climbed, the more entitled they became. Honesty is not a compensation problem. It is a value. A society either supplies that value to its institutions or it does not.
I cannot remember a single visit to an Indian government office that did not entail a demand for a bribe. Citizens grovel, prostrate, genuflect, and abase themselves for the most basic services. The bureaucrat does not merely want money. He wants submission. He wants to feel superior. The bribe is only part of the transaction; humiliation is the rest.
…Societies do not wake up one morning and choose virtue. They reach it—if they ever do—through centuries of accumulated wisdom and painful internalization of restraint. Or they never reach it at all.
…What happened was captured on a neighbor’s security camera.
Shaw said her father stepped from his porch in an attempt to get the vehicle’s license plate number when Turner suddenly stopped his car and got out.
The two men exchanged words for several moments before the driver is alleged to have suddenly attacked.
‘Then out of nowhere, the guy punches my father on the side of the head,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t even try to defend himself. I don’t think he saw it coming.’
Poole crashed to the pavement after being hit, suffering a devastating head injury.
‘He fell, and the guy got back in his car and drove away,’ Shaw said. ‘He just left him lying in the road.’
Police later said Turner admitted to striking Poole and leaving the scene.
Not long ago, a sucker-punch was the sign of a coward and a knave, a worthless POS. A 40 year-old man sucker punching a 74 year-old man (he died aged 75), by standards some of us still hold, is a savage crime, as bad as it gets. That’s murder with a deadly weapon. Seems the interwebs have accustomed people to seeing sucker punches, and hearing some fool go oooh, oooh in approval off camera. There may be no way to go back to the old days when men valued honor, but that single punch given without warning and killing the victim is the fundamental reason sucker-punches have traditionally always been anathema among civilized men. Same goes for men hitting women. I saw a vid just last night of some woman slapping and punching her husband in the head many times. At some point, he belted her hard several times in the head, knocking her senseless to the ground. Guys, it’s a rare woman who can throw a punch that even hurts, and this woman was not that type. She was angry, she was being stupid, but all she did was land a flurry of very weak blows on her much stronger husband. A strong man can kill a woman, or an elderly man, with one punch. That’s why men hitting women—or old men without warning—has also always been looked down on in Western societies. Yes, there are times when a woman can and should be hit by a man, but they are rare and almost never warrant a deadly punch, full-force to her head. The dude in the video landed several hard punches to her head before she crashed into the pavement. Most of the comments on his behavior were approving, a sad sign of our times. ABN
Texas officials have faulted Camp Mystic’s top medical officer for abandoning campers in the hours before 25 young girls and two camp counselors were killed in a devastating flood.
The Texas Board of Nursing announced the finding on Tuesday in an order temporarily suspending Mary Liz Eastland’s nursing license.
…the nursing board ruled that Mary Liz, who also served as the camp’s medical officer, ‘abandoned’ the campers and staff when the camp site began to flood … by evacuating herself and her children to higher ground without providing any assistance or direction to all of the other campers and staff.’
The order also faults Mary Liz for failing to develop and maintain adequate emergency plans and training protocols before the deadly July 4 floods, and failing to keep adequate shelter and evacuation protocols.
This is a complex case and there is more to it than just the flooding, but ‘abandoning’ campers to the flooding is the main reason her license has been suspended, and that we are hearing about this tragedy at all. That said, this case is analogous to the FDA and CDC combined abandonment of the American public to the unsafe and ineffective covid vaxxes, which have brought great harm to millions. I am sure many doctors and health officials did not take the vaxxes themselves, while abandoning their patients and the public, even openly coercing others to take the vaxxes. ABN
American Buddhist Net 