Defining Purpose

The viral video of the Dalai Lama telling a boy to suck his tongue is food for discussion. I appreciate many of the tenets of Buddhism and find that they have been helpful on my journey away from Christianity and self-discovery. Given that America is predominantly Christian, it seems, however, that this situation is useful to analyze and demonstrate what it means to hold somebody too highly in reverence. Throughout Christendom, there has been scandal on top of scandal, from Catholicism to the SBC. Notice how the deep followers’ cognitive dissonance causes them to explain things away or suggest that God forgives such and such. Their reverence is just way too attached. And, here, we have a situation wherein people come to believe that a high religious leader is the reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion.  The path to self-fulfillment and self-realization is a precarious one comparing say a pastor to the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama was sought out when he was still a boy. A Prot...

There are charlatans, self-proclaimed gurus, and demagogues somewhere out there, today. They have been around before, and yet, for every rationalist out there in grave attempts to set records straight, they show no signs of disappearing. It’s been said that  “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on”. Why? Are people just gullible? What are some of the tools one needs in order to put a spell on you?  Ignorance is bliss, as they say. But, it seems that just about anybody can be fooled - at least, by someone . Ignorance can be played up perhaps because the audience has never experienced some far away place. It can be played up through an undeveloped grasp of history. It can be played up through many condescendingly daunting scientific words. Or, maybe, it can be played up through the audience simply being unaware of themselves. Imagine living in a time with no airplanes and you were perhaps some peasant who had not quite the means to...

Nihilism, in essence, doesn’t have to be an end goal - rejecting life and self. No, that isn’t the latent use value hidden there. Nihilism need not be feared either. Nothingness, the void, is most supreme in separating a thing from a thing even from that very thing which it is. At the moment, I am most concerned with how nihilism separates me from the Other and Self from animal. Solipsistically, how can I know, whether another human being is a gregarious malleable animal primed, conditioned, and capable of being directed by the whims of puppet masters and manipulators or a conscious being capable of free thought? When one sees advertisers, politicians, and religious leaders holding sway over the masses, it’s difficult to think that the said masses could ever be fully conscious. How do they not see the deceptions and narratives appealing to their sensory inputs? There’s nothing that leaves a bad taste in the mouth more than knowing you’ve been misled. But, isn’t it strange just how ofte...