Buddhist Geeks received a wonderful write-up last week in the Los Angeles...
Recent Posts
What Needs No Verification?
Awakening needs no verification or validation from the outside. It stands on its own. Anytime we are looking for someone else to verify what we know, what we’re looking for is verification of experience. Experience can be verified and validated, though not always easily, because there are patterns to experience. There is what comes before [...]
The Supply and Demand of Awakening
“Being what you cannot not be is being what is.” – Karl Renz Something I’ve come to understand deeply is that awakening is no-thing. It is not a state that one achieves, a place one can go, or a position one can take. It’s not even a perspective, as it is prior to the arising [...]
Advaita and Mature Expressions of Enlightenment
When you know it is stupid to become something, this is enlightenment. – H.W.L Poonja I posted this quote from H.W.L Poonja, or “Papaji” as his students called him, on my twitter feed yesterday. The quote elicited an interesting comment from a dharma buddy, about whether this is a mature expression of enlightenment when compared [...]
The Way of Tea
If you’ve been following my tweet stream lately, you’ll see that I’ve become pretty obsessed with tea. A good friend of mine, earlier this year, invited me over to try “real tea.” At the time, I asked how real tea was different from the loose leaf tea I’d have at a coffeeshop or the tea [...]
Buddhist Geeks: Micropatronage Drive
Last week I officially launched the first Micropatronage Drive for Buddhist Geeks. A micropatron is someone who supports Buddhist Geeks financially, in a small way, but with enough micropatrons we can really garner the financial support we need to take Buddhist Geeks to another level. The other level we’re planning has to do with launching [...]
Secularizing Buddhism: Making it Accessible or Stripping the Roots?
The folks at the OneCity Blog on BeliefNet were kind enough to accept an article that I’d recently finished up on the potential downsides to making Buddhism completely secular. It’s entitled, Secularizing Buddhism: Making it Accessible or Stripping the Roots? Here’s a little snippet from the article: The problem with not seeing how Buddhism has [...]
The Buddha wasn't a Buddha
A nice fellow named Joel responded to my comment yesterday, and I decided to write another big chunk of material to try and clarify some of my current thinking around “enlightenment”. Here’s Joel’s original comment, followed by my response: I appreciate Vince Horn’s comments regarding the need to demystify enlightenment. I’d like to make a [...]
A Response to "Enlightenment?"
These questions, with my responses following, were recently posed on the Tricycle blog: How do we know what enlightenment is precisely if no one we know has reached it? Who is qualified to serve as judge to gauge whether someone is, in fact, enlightened when clearly those left to label someone as such are most [...]
