| PAGE ONE Fall, 2001 Issue: Spirit & Crisis EDITOR'S NOTE BUDDHASCOPE DHARMATALK FOUNDOBJECTS GUESTCOLUMN QUOTES POETRY READING ROOM REVIEWS CONTACT US SITE INDEX SUBSCRIBE |
Go Direct to Enlightenment
---From a magazine ad in the Sept. 18, 2000 E&P Interactive
touting the benefits of direct deposits and direct payments
Crash Course in the Afterlife
"PAST LIFE REINCARNATION Orientation and Workshop: Frank Munkel is a retired Unity minister, Past Life Researcher and Therapist. After much study, advanced training and experience, he has become proficient with regression and associated techniques... He will briefly discuss what happens following death, between lifetimes and the Books of Life. There will also be time for questions..."
---From a flyer promoting a May 2001 workshop
at a Unity church in Charleston, West Virginia
Zafu Davening?
"THE ONE BIG IDEA HE ACTUALLY liked was the discipline of Zen, and his ideal was what Zen masters call 'beginner's mind,' a state of naive or unmediated sight. He said once, "Zen is basically a form of davening, in the Hasidic spirit. In Saratoga, sometime in the nineteen-forties, I watched a colony of Hasidim come during the races, and I liked to watch them as they sat on those gargantuan porches of these old, ninetheenth-century hotels. And all the Hasidim were rocking, davening on the rocking chairs, in synchronized motion, like the Rockettes at Radio City."
---From a profile of cartoonist Saul Steinberg,
by Adam Gopnik in the Nov. 13, 2000 New Yorker
Al "Groundhog" Gore
"POOR AL GORE. He woke up on Nov. 8 and instead of being the president, he'd become Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day." Every morning, CNN's eternal "Election 2000" coverage must seem the nightmarish equivalent of Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe," which Murray woke up to each morning, it's still-no-president-elect refrain as grating as Sonny's whine... But in the movie, the secret of enduring the same endless day is to finally surrender, to stop trying to move into the future or rig the day you're stuck with to get everything just right—just that old Zen trick of living in the moment. If only Gore had taken a page from the movie when he went on TV Monday night to win support for his uphill battle to keep Gov. George Bush from seizing the presidency... If only he'd said a single, unrehearsed, from the heart, spontaneous, risky thing."
---From May 9, 2001 article in Salon by Joan Walsh
Milosz's Mindfulness
"ONE MIGHT SAY THAT that he counters what is violent and deathward-leaning in our natures by meditating on such alternative subjects as admiration, curiosity ("I respect and feel sympathy for those thinkers and poets whose hunger for knowledge reaches beyond the borders of death"), edifying readings ("Everything that enlarges man fortifies us") and mindfulness, which he defines as "a stance of attentive good will toward nature and people."
---from a review of 89-year-old Polish poet
Czeslaw Milosz's new book "Milosz's ABC's"
by Edward Hirsch in the Feb. 18 2001
New York Review of Books
The Playboy Book of the Dead
"WHEN I DIE, I would like to be born again as me."
---Playboy Editor Hugh Heffner,
speaking at Oxford
Bathroom Buddhism
IF YOU HAVEN"T SUFFERED through the most embarrassing medical condition on Earth, odds are you will. Up to 75 percent of us will get it, according to the Mayo Clinic. Half of all people over 50 will seek treatment for it. And none of us want to know the first thing about it....
Three days after my surgery, I sneezed. I thought my sphincter had flown out of my ass. The good thing about a hemorrhoidectomy is that you don't really need pain killers after the surgery -- the mortification masks most of it....
My surgery could have been avoided if I had been properly schooled in the toilet arts. Never hold your breath when you're on the bowl. It means you're trying too hard. Breathe. Don't strain. Be at one with the bowl. There is no place for struggle in the art of the Zen dump.
---from a Jan. 5, 2000 article in Salon by Michael Alvear
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BUDDHASCOPE, WINTER/01:
Filthy Rich Meditation; Ozone Enlightenment:
101 Dalai Lamas; To Sit, Perchance to Dream and more...
BUDDHASCOPE, FALL/00:
Spiritual Dustbusting; Becoming One With Customers; Buddha Records; Karmic Contraband and more...
BUDDHASCOPE, 3/00:
Bodhi Bars, "American (Buddhist?) Beauty?",
GI Joe Compassion; Buddha Thunkit and more...
BUDDHASCOPE, 11/99:
The Buddha's Out There; 'You've Got Zen!';
Poetic Dharma; Zen Thugs and more...
BUDDHASCOPE, 5/99:
The Ford Noble Truth; Sci-fi Karma;
Killer Ad; Live and Learn and more...
BUDDHASCOPE, 1/99
Venerable Telly Savalas; Inverted Buddhist Sex;
ASCII Buddha; The Zen of Closing Arguments and more...
BUDDHASCOPE, 11/98
Beer Enlightenment; The Zen of Michael Jordan;
The People's Karma; Hip-Hop Karma and more.
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