Juicy summer Dharma reads

Amber Larson, Dhr. Seven, Crystal Quintero, Wisdom Quarterly (SUMMER READING)

"Peace is within; do not seek it without" - the Buddha (Vinita Jaynt/pinterest.com)

Juicy Dharma reads for the beach over the long Memorial Day weekend (thedailybeast.com)

 

Young, rich Prince Siddhartha (Buddha-to-be)

This weekend is the unofficial launch of summer in the U.S.

It would be fun to read some good trash with a half-hundred shades of nonsense and salacious... but that gets old fast.

Where's the substance I want? Where's the long term profit. Cheap thrills are not only not that cheap, they aren't that thrilling.

Snakes as sex symbols for Eves?

We have to wonder if the story of the Bodhisattva, when reborn as Siddhartha in the faraway frontier of ancient India, wasn't a kind of bodice ripper of its time.

Handsome, gallant prince has a harem ("dancing girls and all-female musicians and palace guards"), plays sports like archery and proto-polo (Persian chowgan or some kinder version of buzz kashi or kokspar with an un-taxidermically-treated leather "ball"), rides a white pony horse named Kanthaka, does feats of strength, learns great royal skills from Brahmin tutors, wears flowing gowns of the greatest Kasi fabric, and enjoys more riches than he can comfortably get his head around. Where?

Prince Siddhartha in the upper floors of his seasonal palace guarded by women and filled with "dancing" girls and female musicians and a surfeit of luxurious foods and other delights.

Playing with the boys in feats of strength in Central Asia -- proto-polo with a "pigskin" made of lamb, equestrian skill for warriors in need of nomadic endurance (wiki/army.mil)

    

Indus Valley Civilization and Kapilavast

Imagine a cosmopolitan crossroads on the Silk Road, travelers and magicians going from the Far East to the West and paradises beyond India and Asia.

Was that the Terai of Nepal? Not likely, but that's what the colonial British books say. Afghanistan is a better candidate, Sanskrit-speaking Gandhara and the remnants of the once great Indus Valley Civilization (romanticized "distant lands" between Egypt and India) and what remained of it. India's influence extended all the way to Iran (which later became Zoroastrian and Sufi-inspired Persia before being overtaken by Islam).

Dance, dancing girls, dance!

Worlds to the west were pre-Christian, pre-Jewish, pre-Abrahamic described in the pejorative as "pagan." Full of shamans, traders, trailblazers, and Sumerian-Egyptian-Arabian-Bedouin post-Babylonians. Life could not have been easy, after the fall of so many great empires and city-states like Harrapa and Mohenjo-Daro.

The Path to Enlightenment, like the course of society as explained by the author-comedian Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy BBC Radio series), goes through phases or stages of sophistication. How will we survive? How shall we eat? ...What's for lunch?

Read (pinterest.com)

So reading The Aphorisms and Back-Stories (Dhammapada), The Bodhisat Fables (Buddhist Birth Stories that inspired Aesop, according to British scholar and University of London Professor Rhys Davids), or The Lists (more) may do at first, then the stories (sutras, long discourses,  and apocryphal texts), then The Analyses (vibhanga), then The Commentaries, The Higher Teachings, but eventually what we need for nourishment is The Synthesis (Bhikkhu Bodhi, Pema Chodron, Ajahn Brahm, Sharon Salzberg, Ayya Khema, Caroline Davids, Joan Halifax, Islaine B. Horner, Ayya Tathaaloka (facebook)...

• Worldly juicy readings (thedailybeast.com) 
• Thailand Coup 2014 (Chiang Mai Daily), Vice video
• VIDEO: World's greatest Indian drum solo boy
• VIDEO: Alien God to arrive from space soon 

"Persepolis" or Persepolis? (video)

Eds., Wisdom Quarterly; Marjane Satrapi ("Persepolis"); Discovery.com "Persepolis"

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Ancient Persia

The remnants of a great empire

One of the most impressive settlements in the ancient world, Persepolis was destroyed and burned by invader Alexander the Great in 330 BCE. It lay forgotten for over 2,000 years. This documentary travels to modern Iran to bring Persepolis back to life and investigate the complexities of the Persian Empire that was responsible for creating this astonishing city.

The Spread of Buddhism from its origins in Afghanistan (Gandhara) and India (Magadha) to Iran, where two counter-movements arose in Zoroastrianism (Asuras, Parsis) and Islam (Muslims, Sufis) that then rolled into India and Buddhist strongholds in East and Far East Asia.

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"Persepolis," Iran

WATCH FREE: FULL FILM NOW

Religion is mostly a horrible thing. "Persepolis" is the poignant story of a young girl in Iran during the Islamic Revolution.
 
It is through the eyes of precocious and outspoken 9-year-old Marjane that we see a people's hopes dashed as fundamentalists take power -- fomented by the West who is enriched in the process of creating a terrorist dictatorship to rob the resources of a nation -- forcing the veil on women and imprisoning thousands.

 

Ancient India used to include modern Iran

Clever and fearless, Majrane outsmarts the "social guardians" and discovers punk rock, ABBA (pop), and Iron Maiden (heavy metal). Yet, when her uncle is senselessly executed and as bombs fall around in the capital of Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war, the daily fear that permeates life in Iran is palpable.

As she gets older, Marjane's boldness causes her parents to worry over her continued safety. So at age 14, they make the difficult decision to send her abroad to school in Austria. Vulnerable and alone in a strange Western land, she endures the typical ordeals of a teenager.

Map of Buddhist Central Asia and India

In addition, Marjane has to combat being equated with the religious fundamentalism and extremism she fled her country to escape. Over time, she gains acceptance, and even experiences love. But after high school she finds herself alone and horribly homesick.

Though it means putting on the veil and living in a tyrannical/hypocritical society, Marjane decides to return to Iran to be close to her family.
 

Like Buddhist Asokan Edict: Cyrus Cylinder

After a difficult period of adjustment, she enters art school and marries, all the while continuing to speak out against the hypocrisy she witnesses. At age 24, she realizes that while she is deeply Iranian, she cannot live in Iran.

She then makes the heartbreaking decision to leave her homeland for France, optimistic about her future, shaped indelibly by her past.
 

(LY)  Discovery: Did the oldest civilization on Earth exist in Persia?

Persepolis' Marjane Satrapi's new film "The Voices"

• IRAN: People of the Flames, Zoroastrians

• Ancient Civilizations
• Persian City of Giants Found!
• Ancient Man Made Tunnels: Underground Civilizations
• Dwarka, India - 12,000-y.o. City of Krishna Found
• Ancient Pyramids in the Antarctic Explained
• India: Oldest, Most Advanced, Continuous Civilization?
• 12,000-y.o. Göbekli Tepe: National Geographic
• David Childress and James Tyberonn: Ancient Civilization Mysteries 2013

Secret underground worlds (video)

Pat Macpherson, Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly; David Wilcock, Giorgio Tsoukalos, David Hatcher Childress (C2C), Linda Moulton Howe... (History.com)

(History Channel) documentary: ANCIENT MAN MADE TUNNELS: Underground Civilizations

Buddhist stone carved caves of Ellora, India

The first stop is Turkey's underground city of Derinkkuyu in Cappadocia. Then onto the origins of U.S. DUMBS (Deep Underground Military Bases) in the American Southwest (and elsewhere), built by aliens and once inhabited by various Puebloan and other Native peoples or "Indians." See Minute 9:45 for the Native Americans and civilizations in the Southwestern United States: Navajo, Zuni, Pueblo, Hopi, and Apache tribes. These First Nations people all share a common creation "myth" of emerging from the ground rather than coming across the Bering Straits and down from Alaska as modern anthropologist try to explain. By their own account, they got help from the "Snake People" (nagas) and "Ant People" -- subterranean humanoid dwellers.

• Right beneath our feet: the reality of underground bases
• VIDEO: Lost Cities: Archeological Cover ups like the Egyptian-Buddhist caves of the Grand Canyon, USA (David Hatcher Childress)
• Lost Cities and Ancient Mysteries of the Southwest
• Was the carved "installation" in the Grand Canyon a Buddhist temple? -- Discovered by American anthropologists and buried by the Smithsonian
• A look inside the storybook architecture unique to L.A.

St. Patrick's Day: So long to Pagans (video)

Pat Macpherson and Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly  HAPPY "PAGAN GENOCIDE DAY"!

(Bet You Didn't Know) St. Patrick's Day secrets and its strange history

     

The Pagans the Patriarch Destroyed

(Lillian Ewing) Documentary: Pagans of Ancient Times in Ireland and the British Isles

Patriarch Patrick, not Irish

Paganism refers to a group of polytheistic traditions -- primarily those of cultures known to the classical world. In a wider sense it has also been understood to include the non-Abrahamic (as opposed to the Dharmic), folk, or ethnic religions.

The term Pagan was historically used as one of several pejorative Christian counterparts to "gentile" (גוי / נכרי) as used in the JudeoChristian Bible -- comparable to "infidel" or "heretic." Modern ethnologists often avoid this broad usage in favor of more specific and less potentially-offensive terms such as shamanism, polytheism, pantheism, or animism when referring to traditional or historical faiths.

 

College Paganism: "Blarney Blowout" (UMass)

Since the 20th century "Paganism" or "Neopaganism" has become the identifier for a collection of new movements attempting to continue, revive, or reconstruct historical pre-Abrahamic religion.

There are roughly 300 million Pagans worldwide today (possibly many more who do not yet realize they are yearning for a more authentic Earth-based spirituality torn from us by sexist patriarchs, male-dominated religions, genocidal conquerors and enslavers). More

 
The Home of the Destroyers

Patriarch, ex-CE) Benedict

(History Channel) What drove the Holy Roman Empire/Church to switch from Mithraism to Catholicism, keeping the same hill in Rome, many of the same symbols and traditions, and just changing worship from the god Mithras to the new pop sensation god Jesus (Saint Issa, tulku and former Buddhist monk, later glorified as if he were Messiah/Maitreya (the teacher-to-come, which means "Friend" or Mitra, from the Sanskrit root maitri, which calls back to Mithraism -- as if all three of the world's great religions were rooted in Buddhism)? 

Religious symbols of the world

We may never know for sure, but the Vatican may have just been pandering to the masses it aimed to conquer, lead, and tyrannize. In some decades as a world capital (the "Holy See") of great wealth and luxury, more Satanism is practiced in the Vatican than Christianity, according to whistleblower Father Malachi Martin.

• The Real History of St. Patrick's Day
• St. Paddy's Day police checkpoints, Los Angeles
• AUDIO: Exorcisms and Possession
• AUDIO: "Prophecy of the Popes"
• The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church
• Hostage to the Devil, Keys of this Blood, Windswept House: A Vatican Novel

Yes, we molest. But it's not like it's a secret! It's not like it's just your kids. God wants us to!