in Deed, Grief, Crisis Opportunity, Buddhism, Chogyam Trungpa, Impact News

Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh believes that putting an economic value on nature is not enough. Fundamental change can happen only if we fall back in love with our planet. Read more: Banking Crisis, Climate Change, Dalai Lama, Free Market, Economics, Buddhism, Eco-Buddhism

To the Chinese, materialism is not superficial. It is meaningful, tantamount to advancement within society and faith in the future. Run amok, however, it corrupts ambition and threatens the country's social fabric. Read more: Confucianism, Chinese Culture, Deng Xiaoping, Buddhism, China Materialism, China Modernism, China Spirituality, China Middle Class, World News

Nothing is the positive yet indeterminate impression on the horizon, just before becoming something definite. It is nothing and it is not-nothing. Together with the present, it is the future and it is the past. Read more: Existential-Crisis, Positive-Nihilism, Mind, Hinduism

It is increasingly obvious that natural limitations will soon force economic growth to cease. Buddhist teachings emphasize that this does not require a reduction in the quality of life. Read more: Sustainability, Green Living, Buddhism, Peak Oil, Economic Crisis, Green Faith

These are disastrous times for millions of people, and our zero-sum money system can only enrich the few by bringing pain to the many. Can we build an economic policy out of our shared crisis and find a common purpose in its solution? Read more: Jared Bernstein, Kanye West

This March I turned 64 -- one year away from Medicare, two years away from Social Security. So there it is: I'm a baby boomer, a Buddhist, and one individual face to face with his own aging. But I'm not alone. Each day and every day for the next twenty years, 10,000 boomers will turn 65. This is a fact with enormous implications for our politics, our society -- and, I believe, our spir...

"The institutions of our society co-arise with us. They are not independent structures separate from our inner lives, like some backdrop to our personal dramas. Nor are they merely projections of our own minds. As collective forms of our ignorance, fears and greed, they acquire their own momentum, enlist our massive obedience, and depend on our collective consent." --Joanna Macy: World A...

Another externality dismissed in market systems is the fate of the species. Systemic risk in the financial system can be remedied by the taxpayer, but no one will come to the rescue if the environment is destroyed. That it must be destroyed is close to an institutional imperative. Business leaders who conduct propaganda campaigns to convince the population that anthropogenic global warmin...

Japan, heretofore a land unto itself, soothed by a unique combination of geographic isolation and Zen-Buddhist equanimity, has discovered the world can be kind. If the nation's leaders take this opportunity to encourage citizens to "open up," to emerge from their spiritual shell, Japan will become more confident, more productive and forward leaning. If not, she will retreat even deeper ...

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing. --Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe Looking again and again at that which cannot be looked at, Unseeable reality is seen just as it is. --Karmapa Rangjung Dorje, Mahamudra Aspiration Prayer The firs...

What's happened in Japan affects all of us. Perhaps, like me, you've noticed a sober backdrop of stunned sadness that's been pervading our collective psyche. If we are to become more conscious human beings then each moment can be taken as an opportunity to wake up. What can we learn so that this tragedy helps us deepen our understanding and become more awake? A central tenet of existen...

Author's Note: On February 21st the Des Moines Register announced that a bill proposing to force the sale of Jackson Pollock's "Mural," in the collection of the University of Iowa's Art Museum, had died. This blog, about the controversy generated by the bill, and also about the cultural forces surrounding it, was composed while the bill was still under consideration. It is hopefully sti...

"If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?" -- Rabbi Hillel "The problem which divides people today is not a political problem; it is a social one. It is a matter of knowing which will get the upper hand, the spirit of selfishness or the spirit of sacrifice; whether society will go for ever-increasing enjoyment...

China's recent passive-aggressive behavior on the world stage is unfortunate but not unexpected. President Obama is handling the PRC's non-collaboration with great skill and savvy. He realizes the Middle Kingdom's ancient cultural imperatives and contemporary geo-political objectives dictate a balance of caution and steely firmness. If he stays the course, push-me-pull-you tension bet...

In an age when the word "reality" has become synonymous with nasty behaviors on TV shows and "truth" seems impossibly divided between political cults, perhaps we could find a better sense of both in what we lightly call "myth." The tales of the gods and goddesses that we have told ourselves since humanity's first light may seem irrelevant in today's world except as bed-time stories, but t...

One need not journey to the mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan to discover evil. We have our own home-grown variety of dangerous extremism here in Florida. The Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, whose pastor Terry Jones has written a book called Islam is of the Devil, believes he is called by God to defeat non-Christians in general, and Muslims in specific. Terry Jones has...

New money religion: "Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the value of total production of goods and services in a country over a specified period, typically a year. How much GDP grows from one period to the next is an indication of a country's economic health." Old money religion: "Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a person's life does not consist in the abundance of ...

Last week someone told me that in his eighty-odd years he had never seen such pervasive levels of fear and anger. This observation gave me pause to wonder: how do we restore ourselves, heal our spirit and revitalize the earth too? What is true healing, anyway, and can it be effected? When we are unwell, it's mostly due to imbalances clogging our lives and limiting our innate capacity for...

"The way you support yourself can be an expression of your deepest self, or it can be a source of suffering for you and others... Our vocation can nourish our understanding and compassion, or erode them. We should be awake to the consequences, far and near, of the way we earn our living." --Thich Nat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist Monk "I had my eyes opened. I saw that I had become part of a ...