Only 10 percent of people are born left-handed. I’m one of them. And I think that minor but meaningful difference (among myriad other nudges and foundations) helped make me the weird, Satan-obsessed person I am today. (more…)
Let us speak, for a moment, about desire.
In the Buddhist traditions (notably Zen/Chan Buddhism), desire is a condition of delusion. The world we perceive with our senses is a kind of sham initiated by ignorant craving. What many Buddhists correlate to enlightenment is emancipation from worldly desires and from the perception of dualities (black/white, good/evil, life/death).
Depending on which sect you’re dealing with, this victory over desire and the practitioner’s subsequent enlightenment are incremental: today I am craving a good anime, tomorrow I am aware that both the anime and the craving are illusions. That’s one notch in the Buddha belt—plenty more to come. (more…)
