Andrew Furst's Blog, page 123
June 29, 2015
Dialectic Two-Step – What’s The One Book?
Dialectic Two-Step is an ongoing series of my thoughts on questions that come my way.
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. - Octavio Paz
If we could get everyone in the world to read one book to make the world a better place what would it be?Of course, the responses to your question will not make the world a better place. Reading about good is a fairly impotent path to realizing good. Reading one book even more fruitless.
Doing good is the path to a better world. Time spent listening to our mothers on how to behave and be considerate is evolution’s answer to your question.
Sure reading spiritual books can offer a touch point for grasping goodness, but this is very superficial. Make the world a better place by making the world a better place. Keep trying until you get it right.
Get Each Week's Dialectic Two Step in your email box.mc4wp-form input[name="_mc4wp_required_but_not_really"]{display:none !important}First Name:
Last Name:
Email address:
In addition to a monthly email you can also subscribe to the following weekly series:
One Minute Meditations
Tiny Drops (Photography series)
Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)
Dialectic Two-Step
Modern Koans (interesting questions)
Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)
Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)
Say What?
Quotes
Verse Us (Poems I Write)
The post Dialectic Two-Step – What’s The One Book? appeared on Andrew Furst.
June 28, 2015
One Minute Meditation – Labyrinth
One Minute Meditations is an ongoing series of short videos, poems, and commentary intended as a meditation. Offered as an opportunity to step back from your cyber routine and settle into a more natural rhythm, if only for a minute.
I was out in Groton, MA for the day in late April and spent a little time in the public library. As I was leaving I noticed, to my delight, a small labyrinth. I have a friend who is doing some graduate work that involves community and space. She traveled New England to all the labyrinths she could find. So when I see one, I like to photograph it, post a picture online, and let her know.
Today it dawned on me that I could shoot some video of me walking the labyrinth – and so viola. Watching the video is interesting to me, because it recreates the same sensations I remember when walking the circle. I become a little dizzy. This is interesting, because it tells us a little about how our brains work in response to certain stimuli, including replicas of real experience (a.k.a. video). It hints at how much our brains direct our inner experience independent of actual experience.
For this reason we should always apply a little doubt to our perceptions of the world. Even more so we should apply this doubt to our ideas. Not so much to cause paralysis, but enough to invoke some lasting humility.
Get Each Week's One Minute Meditation in your email box.mc4wp-form input[name="_mc4wp_required_but_not_really"]{display:none !important}
First Name:
Last Name:
Email address:
In addition to a monthly email you can also subscribe to the following weekly series:
One Minute Meditations
Tiny Drops (Photography series)
Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)
Dialectic Two-Step
Modern Koans (interesting questions)
Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)
Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)
Say What?
Quotes
Verse Us (Poems I Write)
If You Watched The One Minute Meditation, How Do You Feel? Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.
Corelli – Concerto Grosso, Op6 no4 from the 2005-2006 Season by Advent Chamber Orchestra is licensed under a Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
The post One Minute Meditation – Labyrinth appeared on Andrew Furst.
Sunday Morning Coming Down – The Hop
Sunday Morning Coming Down is an ongoing music video series. The songs fit my definition of music for a lazy couch bound Sunday morning.
Kick off your slippers and sway your hips. A little Sunday morning dancing in the kitchen might be in order when pressing play on this infectious tune. Enjoy.
Get Each Week's Sunday Morning Coming Down in your email boxFirst Name:
Last Name:
Email address:
In addition to a monthly email you can also subscribe to the following weekly series:
One Minute Meditations
Tiny Drops (Photography series)
Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)
Dialectic Two-Step
Modern Koans (interesting questions)
Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)
Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)
Say What?
Quotes
Verse Us (Poems I Write)
The Hop
by Radio Citizen
Growing in my liking in a twisted cap
And in the G’s back climbing up the coast like that
Tangerine on ice in the backseat P
Just do it rolling top down,
Ready to fly on the streets,
Ready to fly on the streets
Back in a twisted cap,
Growing in my liking in a twisted cap
And in the G’s back climbing up the coast like that
Tangerine on ice in the backseat P
Doing rolling top down,
Ready to fly on the streets,
Growing in my liking in a twisted cap
And in the G’s back climbing up the coast like that
Tangerine on ice in the backseat P
Just do it rolling top down,
Ready to fly on the streets,
Ready to fly on the streets
Back in a twisted cap,
Growing in my liking in a twisted cap
And in the G’s back climbing up the coast like that
Tangerine on ice in the backseat P
Doing rolling top down,
Ready to fly on the streets,
Growing in my liking in a twisted cap
And in the G’s back climbing up the coast like that
Tangerine on ice in the backseat P
Just do it rolling top down,
Ready to fly on the streets,
Ready to fly on the streets
I love you
The post Sunday Morning Coming Down – The Hop appeared on Andrew Furst.
June 27, 2015
One Minute Meditation – A More Perfect Union
One Minute Meditations is an ongoing series of short videos, poems, and commentary intended as a meditation. Offered as an opportunity to step back from your cyber routine and settle into a more natural rhythm, if only for a minute.
It’s nice to see this flag flying the day after SCOTUS cleared the way for marriage for all. Tantric practices teach us union with the divine. They also remind us that we have always been so. Where union is prohibited, those prohibitions cannot last. They do not jibe with reality. Perfect Union with all things is the supreme way.
My spirit is made of light,
From Tao it arises, the bright, morning sun.
In all directions it shines, there are no impediments.
My body arises from earth, five elements, in perfect embrace.
From the union of sunlight yang, and moonlight yin,
My mind arises, day and night, there is peace.
Taking all sentient beings, into my heart,
In loving embrace, dancing with the ever changing universe,
Is the breath of wisdom.
Union with all things is the supreme way.
Get Each Week's One Minute Meditation in your email box.mc4wp-form input[name="_mc4wp_required_but_not_really"]{display:none !important}
First Name:
Last Name:
Email address:
In addition to a monthly email you can also subscribe to the following weekly series:
One Minute Meditations
Tiny Drops (Photography series)
Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)
Dialectic Two-Step
Modern Koans (interesting questions)
Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)
Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)
Say What?
Quotes
Verse Us (Poems I Write)
If You Watched The One Minute Meditation, How Do You Feel? Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.
The post One Minute Meditation – A More Perfect Union appeared on Andrew Furst.
Say What? – What Is The One True Faith?
Say What? is an ongoing series of laconic exchanges on Buddhism in the format of a comic strip.
This shirt is dry clean only. Which means... it's dirty. - Mitch Hedberg
What Is The One True Faith?
A Few Words On the One True Faith.
Get Each Week's Say What? in your email box
First Name:
Last Name:
Email address:
In addition to a monthly email you can also subscribe to the following weekly series:
One Minute Meditations
Tiny Drops (Photography series)
Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)
Dialectic Two-Step
Modern Koans (interesting questions)
Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)
Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)
Say What?
Quotes
Verse Us (Poems I Write)
The post Say What? – What Is The One True Faith? appeared on Andrew Furst.
Tiny Drops – Sacred Fall
Tiny Drops is an ongoing iPhoneographic series. The images represent moments of noticing on my part. For you, they are an offer to pause, observe, and take that noticing into your life. All photos are mine unless noted otherwise.
These works by Andrew Furst are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
A cinemagraph of Brothers of Sacred Heart Dam in Andover, MA
First Name:
Last Name:
Email address:
In addition to a monthly email you can also subscribe to the following weekly series:
One Minute Meditations
Tiny Drops (Photography series)
Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)
Dialectic Two-Step
Modern Koans (interesting questions)
Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)
Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)
Say What?
Quotes
Verse Us (Poems I Write)
FIVE LIMITLESS THOUGHTS
May all living beings have happiness and its causes
May all be free from unhappiness and its causes
May all dwell in equanimity, free of attraction and aversion
May all quickly find the great happiness that lies beyond all misery
May all enjoy inner and outer peace now and forever
NAMO AMITOFOThe post Tiny Drops – Sacred Fall appeared on Andrew Furst.
June 26, 2015
Modern Koans – Spinning Our Wheels
Modern Koans is an ongoing series that recognizes that good questions are often more important then their answers.
The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man. ― G.K. Chesterton
Spinning Our Wheels
Given that we’ll be in the thick of presidential elections next year, I thought I’d discuss politics as it relates to Buddhism (Oh great – politics and religion). Partisan politics is a classic example of how we create suffering for ourselves. If you’ve ever sat back, detached yourself from your particular political slant, and watched, politics can be quite entertaining. It’s amazing how we get to spinning our wheels.
As I am prone to do, I’ve created a flow chart that might serve as a basic framework for going about implementing government policy. I’m going to use it to demonstrate how politics generates frustration. It’s pretty uncontroversial. You try something, if it works –great. If not, try something else. Of course, the devil is in the details when it comes to defining policy. But to make my point, I’m going to keep it simple. Here’s the chart:
This same process flow could apply to anything. We could apply it to our own personal way of life. That would look something like this.
Now let’s look at some examples of how party politics play out when they enact their platform. Let’s use an example – trickle-down economics. Liberals contend that the policy of providing subsidies and tax breaks to wealthy individuals has failed to provide any benefit to the poorer members of society. They point to the ever-widening gap in income inequality where the richest segment of society has steadily increased its piece of the economic pie while the rest have lost ground.
Now conservatives may argue that there are other forces at work here, but that’s not the point of the article. When we analyze the policy, we can fairly say that the wealthy have benefited greatly, but the policy has failed to provide the benefit to the rest of society.
There may be other reasons for implementing the policy – i.e. other unforeseen benefits that came about. But nonetheless, the policy failed its initial mission.
However, in the current political setting, there are strong advocates for trickle-down economics. The Koch brothers and other libertarian-leaning business leaders have poured vast sums of money into the Republican and Tea Party coffers to encourage a return to this policy.
Here’s an example of a failure loop. Political parties are in place to forward a particular political agenda – i.e. a platform. While individual politicians may have nuanced views on a particular platform item, they align themselves with a party that matches their particular constituent’s preferences.
The political party system does not look kindly on flip-floppers. So there is no way for the system to account for failure. The party’s dogma forces them into a failure loop. First, because of their commitments to their constituents, they are unable to admit a failure of a policy, and second they are unable to change course.
While there are deeper forces at work here, it’s a good demonstration of how frustrating a fixed system can be when it fails. If you can’t admit defeat, you can never win.
This is what the Buddhists call Samsara. Samsara is the bitter cycle of seeking satisfaction in ways that don’t work, but failing to see it. Nirvana, the cessation of suffering, happens when we choose to change how we do business until we get over to the other side of the loop.
Can we do anything to change how to political system works so that we can move away from this failure/repeat model of government? Can we break free from the partisan gridlock that characterizes our political system?
What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.
Get Each Week's Modern Koan in your email boxFirst Name:
Last Name:
Email address:
In addition to a monthly email you can also subscribe to the following weekly series:
One Minute Meditations
Tiny Drops (Photography series)
Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)
Dialectic Two-Step
Modern Koans (interesting questions)
Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)
Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)
Say What?
Quotes
Verse Us (Poems I Write)
The post Modern Koans – Spinning Our Wheels appeared on Andrew Furst.
June 25, 2015
One Minute Meditation – Field Pond Sunset
One Minute Meditations is an ongoing series of short videos, poems, and commentary intended as a meditation. Offered as an opportunity to step back from your cyber routine and settle into a more natural rhythm, if only for a minute.
The sun rising and setting over water holds a little secret about this world. The video shows it clearly. Why does the light make a path directly to us? Of course, the answer is perspective. If we were someone else, sitting on the other side of Field Pond, the sunshine would make another distinct path towards us? This is obvious, but also a little enigmatic. If we scratch the surface of this, it unlocks a Pandora’s box of questions and observation.
What is the nature of the sun that it can provide similar, but exclusive experiences to two different people, at two different points in space? How are the experiences different and the same for the two people? Does exploring these questions and observations lead us to anything tangible that we can learn about “things” in this world?
Plato suggested that there is an essence to things, or a form. Buddhists disagree and say that if we look deeply there is no essence to find. If you look, can you find the essence of the sun that gives both of us a similar (but different) experience?
ThingsHow does the sunset find me?
find me across the water?
It always touched me.
Get Each Week's One Minute Meditation in your email box.mc4wp-form input[name="_mc4wp_required_but_not_really"]{display:none !important}
First Name:
Last Name:
Email address:
In addition to a monthly email you can also subscribe to the following weekly series:
One Minute Meditations
Tiny Drops (Photography series)
Compass Songs (My Favorite Poems)
Dialectic Two-Step
Modern Koans (interesting questions)
Sunday Morning Coming Down (Music Videos)
Relics (Timeless Republished Articles)
Say What?
Quotes
Verse Us (Poems I Write)
If You Watched The One Minute Meditation, How Do You Feel? Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.
The post One Minute Meditation – Field Pond Sunset appeared on Andrew Furst.
