| PAGE ONE Fall, 2001 Issue: Spirit & Crisis EDITOR'S NOTE BUDDHASCOPE DHARMATALK FOUNDOBJECTS GUESTCOLUMN QUOTES POETRY READING ROOM REVIEWS CONTACT US SITE INDEX SUBSCRIBE |
Spiritual Spuds
THIS PRODUCT MAY REMIND you of the Pet Rock craze of the 70s. However, with this kit (The Art of Bonsai Potato) we offer the opportunity to achieve inner peace that can take monks an entire lifetime to achieve... It's zen without the wait! ($20)
— Gift from the 2001 Flax Art & Design catalog
at www.flaxart.com
Cheap Buddhists in Berkeley?
ON TELEGRAPH AVENUE in Berkeley, near the Sather Gate entrance to the University of California campus, hawkers sell a T-Shirt adorned with a hammer and sickle and with the legend, "People's Republic of Berkeley." In the past, that seemed like a joke -- an ironic reference to the kind of fanatical 1960s radicalism that no longer held sway even in Berkeley.
But apparently, the T-shirt is a more accurate description of reality in the nation's premier university town than anyone could have imagined. It is a satirist's dream and must be any sensible Berkeleyite's nightmare: Five weeks after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and little more than a week after the United States began its retaliatory attacks on Afghanistan and on Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, the Berkeley City Council called for the United States to stop fighting.
Enough ill can never be said about the depraved rationalizations of the antiwar faction with regard to the Sept. 11 attacks -- rationalizations that can be summed up as arguing that while the U.S. did not deserve to be struck so horribly by terrorism, the complaints that terrorists have about U.S. policy are absolutely correct.
But Berkeley knows otherwise. It knows that violence solves nothing; it is sure, as a student I met on campus put it to me, that the only proper response to the terrorist attacks would be to build, as she put it, "bridges of love" to the future. And it is resolute in its cheap Buddhist certainties that the problem is one of the anger that resides in all of us, when in reality the essential fact is that the United States has been attacked, continues to be attacked with biological weapons, and has every right in both international law and commonplace morality to defend itself against the terrorists.
---from an article by David Rieff
titled "Love-bombing bin-Laden,"
in the Oct. 19, 2001 Salon
A Good Point—They're All Good
"THE MOST WIDESPREAD use of "It's all good" seems to be among people who have recently discovered yoga and meditation. For this demographic, "It's all good" has become a kind of New Age, neo-Buddhist mantra, one with a peculiarly American flavor of optimism. (As Mark Epstein, the author of "Going on Being: Buddhism and the Way of Change" points out, a truly Buddhist view would be "It's all suffering.")
It means that every reversal—breaking up with your boyfriend, getting downsized from your dot-com—is also an opportunity for personal growth. Admittedly, this usage has greater appeal if you are a laid-off, newly single dot-commer than it might be if you were, say, an Afghani refugee or a resident of southern Sudan..."
---From a "Talk of the Town" item by Rebecca Mead
in the June 11, 2001, edition of The New Yorker
Intro to Buddhist Leeriness
"WE DON'T HAVE MUSLIM STUDIES, but we're going to be teaching Hindi-Urdu for the first time next fall," Poston said, reciting the college's religious offerings. He came upon a deficit, and made an apologetic face. "We don't have anyone in Christian reform traditions."
"Paul Griffiths," Fish interrupted. "He can only do Catholics? He can't do Christians in general?"
"Oh, he can," Poston corrected. "He'll even do Buddhists, though he's been very leery when I've asked him."
---Excerpt from a profile of the academic and scholar Stanley Fish,
by Larissa MacFarquhar in the June 11, 2001 New Yorker.
They are discussing plans for more religious studies
at the University of Illinois at Chicago
Buddha, Call Home
ANYONE CAN NOW BEGIN to synchronize his/her mental abilities with other members of humanity seeking to contact advanced planetary intelligence. Understanding why this approach will work is fundamental to contact in the first place. Wormholes in Consciousness (WIC) show why past spiritual effort has been only partly successful. It demonstrates the role of great spiritual teachers like Christ, the Buddha, Sri Krishna, Mohammed, etc., as simply messengers from HOPI (Higher Order Planetary Intelligences).
It also indicates how some individuals have achieved contact. WIC gives new hope that we are truly not alone, especially on this planet, and offers the opportunity for two great ways of knowing, science and religion, to come together in the culmination of their search and integrate humanity as never before. WIC therefore extends broad hope to humanity by indicating the essential correctness—albeit incompleteness—of all basic religious systems.
---From "The Aquarian Hypothesis:
Spiritual Security in a Dot-com World," by Wayne Sterba,
published by First Books at www.1stbooks.com
No, really—the Buddha WAS an Alien
WITH INTERNATIONAL HEADQUARTERS in Geneva, Switzerland, the Raelian movement claims 55,000 members in 84 countries... Their group is among the last survivors of a dozen UFO-based faiths, according to J. Gordon Melton of Santa Barbara, Calif., a specialist in new religious movements. "(UFO religions) peaked at the height of the New Age movement in the 1980s,'' said Melton. "They're always oriented around a single person.''
In the Raelians' case, the person was Claude Vorilhon, known as The Prophet by his followers. Vorilhon says he was visited twice in the 1970s by beings about four feet tall, with olive skin, long dark hair and almond-shaped eyes. The creatures said they had created the human race in their laboratories, and that they had kept in touch via messengers including Buddha, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.
Although the story sounds like the plots of popular science fiction tales -- such as the Steven Spielberg film "Close Encounters'' and the Arthur C. Clarke novel "Childhood's End'' -- publicist Nadine Gary defends the tenets. "The Bible can look like science fiction, too; it's the record of contact between very advanced people and very primitive people,'' she said.
— From an August, 2001 article
in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Then, too, there's Sausage Samsara
"THIS IS doughnut Nirvana."
— Remark by Food TV host after taking
a huge bite of a multicolored doughnut during
a feature on Randy’s Donut Shop in Los Angeles,
broadcast Aug. 21, 2001.
Bad Vibrations
"I DON'T THINK THIS IS good for my karma, your always wishing me dead, Bernie."
— radio talk-show host Don Imus
to his show's producer, Bernard McGuirk,
during a July 11,2001 MSNBC simulcast of
"Imus in the Morning."
Zen Method Acting
AFFLECK, HARTNETT and Beckinsale give performances of such somnambulist awfulness that the three of them achieve an almost zen-like state of woodenness. This is bad acting above and beyond the call of duty; this is Purple Heart bad acting.
— From a June 1, 2001 review of "Pearl Harbor"
in the Daily Mail & Guardian
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