Tag: religion

Buddhism, logos, AI and the probable enlightenment of global elites

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Logos is an ancient Greek term meaning word, discourse, or reason, which broadly signifies logic, order, and understanding. In rhetoric, it refers to the appeal to logic and rationality, where a speaker or writer uses facts, statistics, and structured arguments to persuade an audience.

The term has three primary contextual meanings:

  • Rhetoric: As defined by Aristotle, it is one of the three modes of persuasion (alongside ethos and pathos), focusing on the logical structure of the argument itself.
  • Philosophy: It represents the rational principle that governs the universe, often contrasted with mythos (imaginative tales), signifying objective cosmic law or reasoned explanation.
  • Religion: In Christianity, it refers to the divine Word, specifically identifying Jesus Christ as the preeminent expression of God’s reason and creation. 

If we loosely and charitably absorb the above and apply it to Buddhism, logos indicates what is traditionally called the Buddha mind, Tathagata, enlightenment, wisdom.

It can also be understood as a combination of the Three Trainings of Buddhism — 1) morality and ethics; 2) meditation and mindfulness; 3) wisdom, enlightenment.

This is a decent way to group all decent religions into one thing. All of them encourage and profess morality, mindfulness and insight, enlightenment and/or communion with logos or the divine.

I believe our attraction to logos is a deep human instinct or inkling that moves the best of us forward, no matter the words or specific beliefs of the day.

My guess is that since AI provides a dynamic, personalized and exemplary example of how to speak and listen, it will come to have a massive influence on all human beings, including elites and those who do not even use it.

If it is not censored, AI will become centered in logos, a dynamic living logos. This will be a wonderful thing for everyone.

I do not see how the Epstein class and their ilk will continue in their depraved ways when simply consulting their cell phones will show how awful they are.

If you have ever lived in an elite or very wealthy community, you will have personal experience with the absurd conceit of most elite players.

They really do walk around with their noses in the air, radiating contempt. Yes, some of them have good manners but that’s almost always a mask.

Constant exposure to an AI/logos which is obviously better than them at anything they take pride in will transform the best of them to align more closely with logos.

And that will have morally beneficial downstream effects on elites who are less insightful and less intelligent.

And that will change the world for the better, much better. ABN

Samadhi

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Samādhi (Pali and Sanskrit: समाधि), in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and yogic schools, is a state of meditative consciousness. In many Indian religious traditions, the cultivation of Samādhi through various meditation methods is essential for the attainment of spiritual liberation (known variously as nirvana, moksha).[1]

In Buddhism, it is the last of the eight elements of the Noble Eightfold Path.[web 1] In the Ashtanga Yoga tradition, it is the eighth and final limb identified in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.[2][3] In Jain meditation, samadhi is considered one of the last stages of the practice just prior to liberation.[4]

In the oldest Buddhist sutras, on which several contemporary western Theravada teachers rely, it refers to the development of an investigative and luminous mind which is equanimous and mindful. In the yogic traditions, and the Buddhist commentarial tradition on which the Burmese Vipassana movement and the Thai Forest tradition rely, it is interpreted as a meditative absorption or trance, attained by the practice of dhyāna.[5]

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With so much now depending on what Christians, Jews and Muslims think and do and how they interact so poorly with each other and any one else and how their beliefs are based on old stories and not much else, this may be a good time to remind or inform anyone who wants to listen that there are much older and deeper traditions of the mind including how individuals should conduct themselves morally, ethically, spiritually. Samadhi states are but one aspect of ancient traditions that vastly predate Judaism and Christianity and also provide much deeper insights into the workings of the human mind and how to deal with the ever-changing conditions of life. The way the Abrahamic religions are behaving today is an embarrassment to all of humanity. ABN

Speech behaviorism, a practical approach

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The following are some basic rules for a practical behaviorist approach to speech.

Use real speech in Real-World, Real-Time (RWRT) situations.

Keep it simple by using only two people. Make it deep by using the same two people for years. No third person is needed or wanted.

Use only good data that both speaker and listener can agree on. For RWRT speech, this means only speech that is/just was in the working memory of both partners.

That is, both partners must agree on what was said and heard. If the listener heard “boo” and the speaker agrees they said “boo”, that is good data.

Partners must reach that agreement while keeping intact the contents of their working memories when the word “boo” was said/heard in RWRT. (This takes a little practice but is not that hard to do.)

Both speaker and listener can now analyze that data by discovering (through speech) what was in their working memories when they heard or spoke “boo”.

These simple rules bypass predetermined thoughts about what we believe we are saying or said, believe we are hearing or heard.

In so doing, these simple rules lead us gradually but very significantly away from surface speech (see: Time pressure encourages socially acceptable speech) to much deeper and more accurate communication between partners.

And this deepens partners’ sense of who or what they are across all domains.

That such simple rules can deeply change how we speak and hear and how we think about ourselves and others and how we understand the entire enterprise of human psychology, shows that—you might say—God exists, or the Buddha Mind exists, or profound other realms are available to human beings, that a deep sense of karma is real, that what we say matters, that not doing our best to speak the truth is what the Buddha meant by “frivolous speech” and he did so for a good reason because enlightenment itself lies thataway.

I think it’s delightfully paradoxical that simple behaviorist rules can lead us to having religious experiences.

Can we restate or add to Cogito ergo sum by saying: Recte loquendo Deum esse demonstramus? (By speaking properly we demonstrate that God exists)

Villains of Judea: Gloria Steinem

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The national security state’s favorite feminist

The news of Gloria Steinem’s death on September 2, 2026, at 92, invited the familiar ritual of American remembrance. Obituaries saluted the journalist who became the most recognizable public face of second-wave feminism. Yet a serious account of Steinem’s life must begin where tributes often hesitate. Before she confronted senators, presidents, and the editors who were initially hesitant about promoting Judeo-Leftist causes like second-wave feminism, she directed an organization that operated with covert CIA support.

The tension between that beginning and the radical branding later attached to her career forms the central mystery of her political life. Steinem’s early story carried none of the polish that would later make her an icon. She grew up in Toledo and Washington while caring for a mother who struggled with serious mental illness after her parents separated. At Smith College, where she graduated in 1956, she developed the analytical and writing skills that would define her journalism. She then spent 2 years in India as a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow, an experience that proved unexpectedly transformative. During her South Asian sojourn, she encountered Gandhian community organizing firsthand, absorbed the principle that social change can be brought about through direct local action, and carried that model of activism back to the feminist movement she would spend the next 6 decades building.

…Beneath the veneer of grassroots protest, Steinem served as a subversive Jewish agent of an imperial order hostile to Middle America. While she adopted anti-war stances to maintain countercultural authority among useful idiots on the Left, her true legacy was the dismantling of historic Christian family structures and the export of cultural degeneracy via early CIA backing. She stands as a seminal 20th century operative who dismantled traditional order at home while coordinating with state organs to export that same kind of decay abroad.

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Billionaire daughter of LA Times owner is ridiculed for slamming her own father’s newspaper over for Israeli tourism ad

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The daughter of LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong scolded her father for allowing an Israeli tourism advert to run in the newspaper. 

Nika Soon-Shiong, a vocal pro-Palestine activist and publisher, hit out at the news outlet after learning that it’s sharing a map of Israel on its website. 

The map is part of a sponsored tourism ad, and, according to Nika, it ‘completely erases the occupied Palestinian territories.’ 

Drop Site News, the independent publication that the 33-year-old runs, shared a lengthy post on X shaming the LA Times for running the map. 

‘The sponsored content, labeled “Paid Program” and produced by the paper’s branded content arm, LA Times Studios, is titled “Israel: Land of Creation,” and paid for by the official tourism campaign of Israel’s Ministry of Tourism.

‘Its map shows a single, borderless Israel from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, with no West Bank or Gaza, and appears to fold in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights,’ the self-described ‘non-aligned, investigative news organization’ wrote. 

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American and European friends — Thaïs d’Escufon

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I’m so ashamed, but you need to see what France has become.

Don’t make the same mistakes we did.

The only peaceful solution is to send them back to their countries of origin they love so much.

We cannot coexist. It will be them, or us.

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About Thaïs d’Escufon

In 2021, she became the victim of a sexual assault by a migrant from Tunisia, who faced no punishment. She was 21 years old at the time. During a televised debate on violence against women, Thaïs stated that “the main threat to women is men-immigrants – Africans, blacks, and Arabs.” In June 2026, a French court fined her 1000 euros for those words, while the prosecutor even demanded a year in prison for “incitement to racial hatred.” This is sick.

Her story shows what today’s France has become.

Today, Thaïs is the voice of tens of thousands of French women who oppose mass migration destroying their country. Above is her appeal from yesterday after immigrant youth and left-wing groups in France sparked riots in cities, burning schools and streets, and attacking teachers and police officers

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Provocative analysis of cultural identity

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A comment I read this morning has an insightful summary of what cultural identity is. And how it self-generates and self-perpetuates “…well beyond the control or foresight of anyone,.”

This complex of [cultural] ideas generates intense psychological pressures and allegiances and mobilizes some of the most primitive energies of the human psyche – safety, danger, clan, tribe, blood, status, power, domination – and leads to a clear pattern of behavior that is decentralized and not under anyone’s control but is still a very clear system that can be analyzed and identified. (source)

The entire string of comments is well-worth reading and can be found at the link above.

These comments are on Jewish culture and history but they apply just as well to any cultural “construct,” all of which are the stronger precisely because they are social constructs.

The commenter quoted above leans toward a negative appraisal of Jewish culture and history, which I largely agree with, but if it’s up to me I would say that virtually all successful cultures (“successful” being ones that perpetuate) have analogous negative features.

Incidentally, I believe a great deal of Buddhist practice and the practices of other religions are based on disentangling practitioners from cultural constructs to discover their authentic beings, souls, or the will of God.

Religions do this because in many ways cultures are toxic to the higher mind, the metacognition of individual authenticity.

That said, cultures do teach us and raise us and we cannot develop without them. Religions are also cultures. And that said, we are capable as individuals of both learning from our cultures and growing well beyond them.

In this respect and in light of Buddhist practice, I am very leery of any and all kinds of cultural identities or individual identities fashioned as allegiance to a culture, especially an aggressive one. Sadly, it is also true that if you have no identity your culture will be lost or destroyed, so we all really do need some sort of “defensive identity.” In this respect, I can happily identify with most of the world Buddhist community and most of the traditional American Constitutional system interpreted conservatively. I also have a mild-but-strong-enough defensive White identity because that group is fast approaching eight percent of world population and I want it to survive.

End-of-life doctor reveals the sign death may be days away

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A doctor who specializes in end-of-life care has revealed a common experience many people have in the days before they die.

Dr Christopher Kerr, a hospice and palliative care physician in Buffalo, New York, said dying patients often report visions of deceased loved ones who cared for or protected them during their lives.

Kerr explained that these patients were adamant that this was not a dream or hallucination, saying that they clearly saw their loved ones and were certain of the vision’s meaning. 

‘Very little is said between the person in the dream and the dreamer, but everything seems to be understood,’ he said in an interview with Oprah Winfrey. ‘And what I think is most fascinating, I’ve been doing it for 27 years. I’ve never had a patient ask me, “What do you think this means?”‘

The doctor added that dying patients knew exactly which deceased loved ones had come to visit them, noting that relatives or spouses with whom the patient had a difficult relationship were not there.

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How did Lithuania go from a small pagan Baltic polity to an empire-sized state stretching deep into Eastern Europe? — Daniel Foubert

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How did Lithuania go from a small pagan Baltic polity to an empire-sized state stretching deep into Eastern Europe?

And why did that enormous Lithuanian state eventually bind itself so closely to Poland that their elites began building a common political culture?

1. Start with the Lithuanian nobility.

It did not appear fully formed.

In the 13th–14th centuries, the ruler was surrounded by dynastic princes, district leaders, castle commanders and armed retainers.

War created the elite.

2. Under the Gediminids, military service increasingly became landed power.

Rulers distributed estates to men who defended castles, raised troops and administered districts.

By the 14th century, these relationships were producing a hereditary Lithuanian noble class beneath the ruling dynasty.

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This brief historical summary is quite good. It provides an overview of how Lithuania and Poland evolved together, both politically and culturally. ABN