Mine’s in the back. Yours may show up elsewhere. Everyone is different. We can conceive of ultimate consciousness by using the metaphor of being in a room, knowing that the entire universe lies outside of the room. The only way to perceive the universe is through a window in a…

I’m passing the proverbial hat, or the plate, as the Episcopalians of my youth would say. They were kind of like soup plates. My parents would give us coins to put in wheen we were children. The Dalai Lama has stated that compassion is a primary principle of all of…

I hate doing this. I do live a somewhat monk like existence. My apartment is a very plain, one bedroom model in a slightly grungy, but safe complex, in the Vietnamese section of town, as it happens. I have no trouble honoring the five precepts because I live a pretty…

I keep thinking that I need to advertise Red State Vihara more than I do. I suck at self promotion. I hate advertising. I am still not clear on whether any research shows that it works. I could look it up, but I don’t care that much, and I’m not…

The combination of the Buddha’s teaching that we are already awake, or enlightened, or whatever you want to call it, we just don’t realize it, with the observation that realizations are about getting a new perspective on existing information rather than adding new information really does, or can, lead to…

If you stop and think about it (!), you will notice that, when you have a thought, you necessarily already knew what you were about to think before you had the thought. This is necessarily so. Unless you have a fairy or other entity inside your head that whispers to…

Buddhism is too honest to be as popular as it might be. Lots of people are happy with the Christian fairy tale of eternal life in this mythical heaven place, even after a lifetime of suffering, apparently, but they do not want to hear about how to escape the suffering…

This “new year” is a great opportunity to think about how artificial are the labels we stick on everything. Many people in northern California awoke to flooding and as much as two feet of snow this morning, but the underlying landscape is still basically the same, except for some mud…

Belatedly. Christmas, the manufactured, fictional birthday of the leading character in the Christian fairy tale, is a Christian holiday people on the Buddhist path can freely enjoy. Buddhists do not worry about other people’s religious beliefs. Since we posit no omnipotent deity, we have no need to defend the turf…