Sunday Sermon [Karma and Evolution]

Hola mi gente...

I haven't been writing for myself at all these past few weeks. I am immersed in my my job and it's taken all my time. Once I get my myself more grounded, I think I'll have some interesting posts to share.

When the historical Buddha asked us to examine our relationship to the elements as a path to the realization to the awareness that our body has no separate, independent existence, he was encouraging us to become scientists of the self. His instructions were based in part on one of his era’s principles known as the law of karma.

In Sanskrit, the word karma means “to do” or “to make,” and refers to the fact that every action is followed by consequences. As I have written before, in common modern usage karma has been corrupted to mean “payback” and has become synonymous with retribution. This is a faulty and misinformed concept of karma.

The Hindu law of karma, which was current when the Buddha lived, was concerned mostly with an individual’s actions in the world, and how the consequences of those actions would affect that person’s destiny, even in future lives. For example, if one person hurts another, that sets up whole series of events that ends in the first person experiencing pain. People today like to say, “Everything that goes around, comes around.” ::sigh::

The Buddha added a completely new dimension to this law by emphasizing that karma is also a psychological conditioning process that operates in this very life. He recognized that our thoughts as well as our actions have consequences and that those consequences take place in our own mind.

The Buddha advised us not to try to tease out all the specifics of the entanglement of our karma, saying it was imponderable. We could never isolate or measure all of the events and processes that have produced this particular here and now. What is important is to see the fact that nothing arises independent of causes and conditions. Equally important is that we become aware how unwholesome states such as hatred and greed create suffering. What happens when we do this is that we begin to see ourselves and each moment as embedded within all of creation.

Karma has nothing to do with other people getting their "payback."

All of this got me thinking (always a dangerous thing) and I came upon a series of photographs of the development of the human fetus. I was taken immediately at how it seems as if the development is a reflection of our evolutionary history.

Note: for the religious quacks that refuse to be convinced of evolution, please tell me you don’t believe the next time a vaccine created through the science of evolution saves your whacked out ass.

Looking at these photos, I came away thinking that the scientific story of evolution can offer a new angle on the idea of reincarnation. Life itself seems to reincarnate in form after form, with new forms of locomotion, perception, or types of consciousness. In fact, the human condition can be seen as our shared incarnation, part of common “evolutionary karma.”

Evolutionary science is even showing us some of the faces of our previous shared past. You can see, twitching away on a Petri dish, a living example of past life as a single-celled organism. In a water-breathing fish, you can imagine a version of yourself in a previous life, swimming through the single ocean that once covered the earth. You can perhaps more easily recognize yourself as a great ape, or as a Homo Habilis in the Stone Age.

But what struck me was that our shared lives could be even more easily recognized by looking at individual development in the womb. Think about it: within a nine-month period we develop from a single cell organism to a complex mammal, keeping the adaptations we might need and discarding those that are unnecessary, such as gills, and downsizing others, such as the acute olfactory region of the brain, since smell is no longer as essential to our survival as humans.

In the book, What Is Life? Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis put forward the depth of our inheritance: “We share more than 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees, sweat fluids reminiscent of seawater, and crave sugar that provided our ancestors with energy three billion years before the first space station had evolved. We carry our past with us.”

The notion that we have previous lives in the evolutionary past can extend beyond biology, into the realm of elemental forces and cycles. After all, the entire earth was once a cloud of gas, and later cooling into a molten mass. Were we not part of those too? The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in The Heart of Understanding, “As I look more deeply, I can see that in a former life I was a cloud. And I was a rock. This is not poetry; it is science. This is not a question of a belief in reincarnation. This is the history of life on earth.”

The concept of life evolving is not foreign to Buddhism, whether it be told in legends of reincarnation, or as the interconnection of all things in the universe. And perhaps most importantly it is expressed through the core belief in the possibility of transformation in this very life.

My name is Eddie and I'm in recovery from civilization... 

The Friday Sex Blog [Intelligent Sex]

¡Hola! Everybody…
I'm sorry, I'm sure Steve Jobs was a nice guy and all, but he never did shit for me, and HOW much did he pay in taxes last year? All this slobbering over Jobs' fermented taint juice is nothing but financial porn. In a sane world, someone like Steve Jobs would be properly deemed a sociopath. Even the corporate/ anti-union mainstream press understood the Steve Jobs real contribution to humankind -- which was incredibly horrific:

From the Wall Street Journal: “Measuring the Human Cost of an iPad Made in China” (here)

From Electrical Engineering Times: “Apple reveals increasing Chinese child-labor problem.” (here)

From TIME Magazine: Another Slavery Scandal in China (here). I realize some of you are treating this like the passing of your father rather than some godammed stranger you never fuckin met, but puhleeeze stop making a spectacle of yourself.

I’ll be (for the most part) at the Occupy Wall Street protests for most of today and the weekend -- just in case you feel like channeling your stalkerish tendencies.

* * *

-=[ A Smart Fuck (Not Really) ]=-

Or: Thinking Allowed

It’s been said that the most important sex organ is the brain, and if your brain jiggled as deliciously as your ass does, I would agree.

And speaking of which -- Quick! Stash away your brain. You know that gelatinous matter between your ears? I know you don’t use most of it (something like 90% goes unused, but apparently that percentage is higher for teabagger presidential candidates). However, the editors here at [un]Common Sense (me) have discovered that your brain is illegal. Yes, Virginia, The U.S. government has criminalized the chemical compounds that are found in peyote, even though one of them, dopamine, is a primary neural transmitter in the human brain. Our brains also produce anandamide, a substance that’s nearly identical to THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

::watches disdainfully as potheads set their brains on fire::

Here’s one from the “they hate us and our freedoms” file. According to my computations (not really) more than 1.2 billion Muslims live under democratically elected governments, and there is a steady movement towards democratization, civil rights, and political freedom in many other Islamic nations (click here for source)

From our “Good News/ Bad News” department: The U.S. Air force has complied with the Environmental Protection Agency’s ban on ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). It has removed CFCs from the cooling systems of ballistic missiles that carry nuclear warheads. “If they are ever fired,” Access to Energy reported, “there will be an environmentally friendly nuclear holocaust.” (here)

At last! A man I can admire. A blind German clairvoyant named Ulf Buck claims he can foretell people’s future by feeling their naked buttocks. I’ve been trying to convince women of this all my adult life! Believe me, if I can feel your naked buttocks, sweetie, I will definitely be able to tell your immediate future (“I see you experiencing a refreshing soreness and deeply felt sense of surrender in the near future.”)

From our historical department comes the following gem: More than seven centuries before a few Europeans dared to sail beyond the safe boundaries of their known world, entire Polynesian families crossed the vast expanses of the, Pacific Ocean in, yup, catamarans. The first humans to arrive in Hawaii, they were led by wayfinders. These miracle workers navigated uncharted seas by reading star positions, discerning weather patterns, and interpreting the ocean’s colors and movements. Shit! I know some families can’t make it to Disney world with a map without killing each other along the way.

I’ve been reading again, folks. Yup. In his book The Naked Woman, best-selling author/ biologist Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape), takes us beyond the G-spot. He says that in addition to the G-spot, women have three other highly sensitive erotic zones in the vagina. He calls them the A-Spot, C-Spot, and U-Spot. And here I was under the impression that the alphabet was only a guide for good cunnilingus.

From our “subversive acts” files: a few years ago, members of The Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO) sneaked into toy stores and swapped the voice boxes of 300 GI Joe and Barbie Dolls. Boys who later purchased the plastic soldiers were shocked to hear them make comments like, “I like to go shopping with you,” while the girls who came to own the mutated Barbies heard commands like, “To the front lines, men!” (click here to view a video)

Finally, our crack research team (in actuality a really brainy a DominiRican with a great ass) came up with the following morsel: Diane Ackerman observes in her book, A Natural History of the Senses, that in many cultures the word for kiss means smell. “A kiss is really a prolonged smelling of one’s beloved, relative, or friend,” she writes. “Members of a tribe in New Guinea say good-bye by putting a hand in each other’s armpit, withdrawing it, and stroking it over themselves, thus becoming coated with their loved one’s scent. Other cultures sniff each other or rub noses.” Now, before you get all culturally myopic on me, please note that my preferred manner is to put my hand in the crack of your ass while I’m kissing you and then smelling my hand.

I lurrrrve the baby powder!

Love,

Eddie