When I first began learning about Buddhism, I found that the psychology seemed quite advanced and the teachings were comforting/challenging to a moderately confused man in the middle of his years. But I was put off by what I regarded as the supernatural parts of the package. Things like karma and rebirth, for instance.
And then I came across a book that was perfectly suited to me at the time. It was Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs. I re-read it this month and can recommend it to anyone wrestling with similar issues.
The author deals with those unverifiable areas not by staking out a firm position such as I Believe or I Don’t Believe. Instead he puts forward the agnostic way of looking at those same items – I Don’t Know.
I find that I am extremely comfortable with saying “I don’t know” these days. There was an earlier time when I was impressed at how much I thought I knew, but that era has long since passed. For me, the change came with Buddhism’s relentless insistence on leaving illusion behind.
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President Biden is out there being Joe Biden. When he gets wound up in a speech, he begins to make stuff up, and the fact checkers of the world get right on with parsing his statements for the evening news. This is not a new behavior for him, but goes back decades.
The habit of embellishing one’s stories, as he does repeatedly, is a common failing and perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on him. The issue for me is that if I tell a whopper there is never any concern about dire consequences for anyone else and only my reputation suffers.
I wish for more sobriety of speech from the leader of our country. I think a new motto to be placed on the desk in the Oval Office might be: If you can’t say something without resorting to mendacity, for God’s sake shut up!
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I have been encouraged by several factors to eat more vegetables and fruits and less meats. While I haven’t converted entirely to vegetarianism, I’ve come a long way.
One of those factors is the increasingly high price of being a carnivore. Our local market has an armed guard at the meat counter who is ever on the lookout for some shifty shopper trying to slip a tenderloin into their pants to smuggle it out.
Yesterday I saw this same burly gentleman administer a proper whaling to a hungry larcenist. Other shoppers gathered ’round to watch, some cheering the guard on and some soberly thinking of how tasty that tenderloin would be and what was to become of it now that it had been retrieved from an unapproved location.
My gastrointestinal microbiome seems very happy with the my new dietary choices. It expresses its joy by creating the same quantities of methane (I’m guessing here) as a large Holstein grazing in a pasture.
When passing through the system this gigantic bubble of air presents a challenge to me and anyone nearby.
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Possibly overstating the case department
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It was a 77 degree after noon, and I had done my chores and thinking about rewarding myself. I decided to drive to Lake Chipeta, about 12 minutes from my home. It was a 20 mph breezy day, and there were about twenty other souls arranged around this small body of water, seeing if they could choose what the fish wanted to eat.
A great blue heron sailed to a rock thirty yards from me, giving me a great look at this remarkable bird. But as soon as it settled there, it was attacked by three red-winged blackbirds, who flew kamikaze missions within reach of that huge beak but were obviously discomfiting the much larger bird. The heron finally gave up and flew off to somewhere far from blackbird nesting areas.
I chose a tiny floating plug and tossed it out, immediately catching a small rainbow trout. Over the next half hour I caught four more, and missed as many good strikes. And then the bite stopped, just like that.
I had that happen last year in a very different location, where I stumbled onto a sort of heedless trout “feeding frenzy” where I could do no wrong, and then suddenly couldn’t do anything at all. Like you threw a switch. It’s a pleasant experience, since most of my fishing life I’ve arrived on the scene just after that switch had been thrown.
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Little Home In The Valley 