BEATING THE POISONED DRUM

First, one must make oneself thoroughly disreputable.

Perhaps we might distinguish pop-Buddhism and “real” Buddhist praxis by referring to the former (McMindfulness, etc) as “blackbox” soteriology, and the latter as its “whitebox” alternative.

Dukkha is just experiential unrequited love.

The stainless mind is obscured by stubborn objects. The dharmadhatu is liberated to the extent that objects are not stubborn.

The naive perspective on language adheres to the specificity of the linguistic configuration as revealing truth. The rational perspective takes specificity as leading to the articulation of truth. But those much-maligned postmodernists might be credited with discovering that linguistic articulation itself induces the state it seeks to describe. This is the dawning of mystical insight, […]

Integral theory’s downfall may be its inability to stop engaging in interference competition while accusing “green” of the same offence.

One must have the capacity to be classically untrained, oblivious to notation as one composes what others will confine to the sheet; then, one must be willing to confront one’s unfinished melodrama as a kind of opus that others will parasitise.

Take it further, perhaps: Samsara IS ruin; samsaric activity is nothing but fragility disguised as robustness. Bodhisattvas hide their antifragility in robust behaviour.

The precautionary principle, particularly Nassim Taleb’s “non-naive” version that explicitly stresses the avoidance of ruin, may be the only guiding principle Buddhism can adopt if it wants to thrive in the West. Skilful means, reinterpreted as karmic risk-taking, can’t be left to conventional cost-benefit analysis, especially analysis by committee. Buddhist activism is the fastest way […]

Note to self-contracted self: Omniscience, all-at-onceness, is meta-holonic ascendancy, the individual holon intentionally expanding upward into the whole of which it is a part.