Starving for meaning in New York

Ashley Wells, Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly; Bhikkhu Bodhi (Buddhist Global Relief)

New York City: Reaching Youth Starved for Meaning (buddhistglobalrelief)

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Bhante

The Reciprocity Foundation was established in 2006 to address the plight of homeless youth in New York City.

 

[Two years ago] in 2012, when they found that the homeless students were arriving hungry and unable to focus, the RF team started a vegetarian meal program  called “Starved for Meaning.” 

 

We won't stand for sexism, racism (FEMEN)

Meals, prepared collectively and served “family-style,” with a moment of gratitude before the meal, fulfilled the students’ hunger for community, dialogue, and meaning.

 

Last year, with the help of Buddhist Global Relief funds, the number of meals doubled and there was an increase in the number of youth coming to the center for food.

 

Bombarded with propaganda from the NY Times

In a questionnaire about the program, 100 percent of the youth said that their life improved as a result of the meals, they felt a greater sense of belonging, and they felt more optimistic about their life.

[This is June 2014 and] over the next year, BGR funding will help the Reciprocity Foundation increase the capacity of the vegetarian meal program for homeless youth in NYC and expand the food program to reach young people living on the streets. This and the next in the Bronx are annually renewable projects:

Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Global Relief Charity (BuddhistGlobalRelief.wordpress.com)

New York City: Community Garden Plots in the Bronx (Fiscal BGR Projects)

 

Occupy Wall Street (Carolyn Cole/latimes.com)

The Urban Community Food Project (UCFP) was started in 2011 as an initiative of the Urban Rebuilding Initiative. Its mission is to build a sustainable food system throughout New York in order to fight poverty and resultant food insecurity.

 

UCFP’s farms are located in the 16th Congressional District of the US, an area that has the lowest median income and the highest rates of unemployment and [police state mass] incarceration in the nation. UCFP works with at-risk youth, young adults, and formerly incarcerated men in local neighborhoods to convert urban spaces into food production sites. The food grown on these sites is donated to neighborhood food pantries and homeless shelters. The BGR grant will help UCFP fulfill its goals for 2014-15, which include:

1. Developing four inner-city farms that will produce 5,000 pounds of produce for local food pantries and soup kitchens;
2. introducing a new fitness program called “good food and fitness go hand in hand”; and
3. offering regular workshops on sustainability, urban farming, green technology, and civic action.
   

Without a Doubt – It’s Time to Get to Work on Climate Change

Ven. Santussika Bhikkhuni (BGR, March 31, 2014) 

Ayya

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has issued a report to dispel the fog of disinformation about the reality of climate change to impress on us the urgency of taking action. What we need to know is what we can do about it. 

 

One day when I was talking about the importance of taking immediate action on climate change, a good friend of mine said, “I just wish the scientists would get together and tell us whether they think climate change is happening.”

 

Well, my friend, there is a paper I want you to see. More

 

Our Quest for Meaning

Bhikkhu Bodhi (accesstoinsight.org); Dhr. Seven (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly

The stupas of Pagan, Burma, the ancient "City of Pagodas" (Platongkohphoto/flickr)

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You hungry for meaning? Eat Chinese food!

However much the modern world may pride itself on its triumphs over the foolishness of the past, the progress we credit ourselves with has been bought at a steep price.

The price is so steep that it throws into question the worth of our achievements. This price has been the shared conviction we've lost that our lives are endowed with any ultimate meaning.

Even though in earlier ages humans lived in a space populated largely by figments of the collective imagination, they could still claim a precious asset we sorely lack: a firm belief that their everyday lives had enduring significance stemming from a transcendent goal.
 

"NYPD is a layoff away from joining us!"

Present-day attitudes -- molded by scientific reductionism and technocratic audacity -- have combined forces to sweep away from our minds even the faint suspicion that our lives may possess any deeper meaning than material prosperity and techie innovations.

For many people today the consequence of this militancy is a pervasive sense of meaninglessness. Cut loose from our living spiritual traditions, we drift on a sea of confusion where all values seem arbitrary and relative. We float aimlessly along the waves without any supreme purpose to serve as the polestar for our ideals or inspiration for our thoughts and actions.
 

When in the Bronx, go back to Nature!

Nature does not tolerate a vacuum, and humankind does not tolerate a loss of meaning. So to escape the plunge into the abyss of meaninglessness, we grasp after distractions.
 
We pursue pleasure and power, wealth and status, surround ourselves with contraptions, invest our hopes in emotional relationships that only conceal our own inner poverty.
 
At the same time as we become absorbed in distractions to cope with our psychological void, we stifle a deeper and more insistent need -- the longing for a peace and freedom that does not depend on externals.
 
The Buddha's solution

Calm and insight bring inner-light (flickr.com)

One of the great blessings of the Buddha's teaching is the remedy it can offer for the problem of meaninglessness so widespread in human life today.
 
The Dharma can serve as a source of meaning because it provides us with the two requisites of a meaningful life -- an ultimate goal in life and a clearcut and flexible set of instructions to advance toward that goal from wherever we are now [even if it's in Jay Z and Alicia Keys' overcrowded, concrete megalopolis of New York City]. More

Through the Rabbit Hole with Krystle Cole

Urban Shamans Amber Larson, Xochitl, Crystal Quintero, Dhr. Seven, CC Liu, Bela, Wisdom Quarterly; Hamilton Pharmacopeia (VICE/HBO, 2012); Krystle A. Cole (NeuroSoup)

"You should get out more," people may say. Maybe people should get in more, like Alice.

TOPEKA, Kansas - Former goth stripper, author of Lysergic, and producer of numerous YouTube videos Krsytle A. Cole talks about her time spent living in an "Underground Acid Palace," a subterranean missile silo converted into a luxurious LSD-manufacturing facility.

She take Hamilton and VICE's cameras on a tour into the rabbit hole. We're not in Kansas any... well, apparently, we still are. And this time it's underground just like Alice in Wyrd (another word for Wonderland).
 
Krystle Cole spent three years of her life running from the DEA, being held partially against her will and used as a guinea pig for strange new psychedelic chemicals.
 

Lysergic, 2nd ed. (goodreads.com)

Eventually her friends-turned-captors were arrested, whereas Krystle herself barely escaped incarceration.

She now makes her living as a writer, sharing her experiences in books and on the Web in her firsthand and Erowid.org-style accounts of experimenting with entheogens and other forbidden substances on NeuroSoup.
 

I wonder, I wonder, I wonder what's down in there! (Alice at the gate of the Rabbit Hole)

 
We can't help but observe how much she looks like someone we knew, both in terms of her features and her mannerisms, who eventually became an expert Buddhist meditator and stream enterer. Of course, people do not believe anyone get enlightened nowadays. They do. How do we know? we'll be asked. That was courtesy of a strange set of circumstances too hard for others to believe. We believe it. We were there. We saw and understood.

DRUG DISCUSSION
Wisdom Quarterly (URBAN SHAMANISM)

The lights, the lights, painting with light (DigitalTurkey-Graph/flickr.com)

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The devas still descend from space.

Is there anything good to be said about any "drug"? Yes, the entheogens, the ones that bring out the "divine" (theos, deus, devas, the "godly") within. So, Xochitl, which drug? Native Americans have "plant helpers," not "drugs." To say that word tosses our minds to grim concrete ghettos and dreary suburbs painted neon. We're leaving that; we're back in nature; we're going to Wyrd or the Spirit World. An entheogen, a sacred plant, root, vine, mushroom, or combination -- whatever -- is all about getting to one thing: DMT (dimethyltryptamine).

(Gnosis) "DMT: The Spirit Molecule," which explores human consciousness, weaves an account of Dr. Rick Strassman's groundbreaking DMT research through a multifaceted approach to this intriguing entheogen/hallucinogen found in the body, brain, and hundreds of plants.

And this DMT is not out there. It's in here, in the center of our brains, behind the third eye, where the pineal gland is enclosed in gray matter with active rods and cones and its own inner-retina.
 
There are many ways to awaken it. "Drugs" are the worst way. People are not ready to see it. Amber, does Buddhism have anything good to say about drugs? I think we all agree with Dr. Gabor Mate that the problem of "drug use and abuse" is that almost no one in the U.S. who sets out to get high is actually trying to get high. They're just trying to get wasted.

 

Befriending Faeries

They are trying to obtund (dull) rather than enhance consciousness, trying to get blotto, blitzed, full of toxins or intoxicated. Right, Seven? That's right! We use the same word to mean exact opposite things -- doped up or wasted versus opened up and trying to see things as they really are.

Whatever there is of substances to get "high" on, that exists within for us to access. Crystal? There are Tibetan lamas who do dream yoga. But look at the yogis of olde, not the ganja-obtunded waste-cases sitting around growing great dreadlocks and clutching hash pipes. Maybe they would have taken or produce Soma and Amrita, the "nectar of the devas."

Yogis sometimes veer off the path (D. Earlotti)

What we call chocolate was something like that, Theobroma cacao, "cocoa the food of the devas." Which extraterrestrial-gods was it who pointed out the pits of that fruit was edible?

 

The subtle little fairies/devis in art (1909)

Serenity-meditation that leads to the absorptions leads to bliss in the first two jhanas, independent of the senses and sensuality. It comes from within. It makes possible the concentration and mental-collectedness needed for successful insight-practice called vipassana. Anyone smoking high-THC/low-CBD cannabis to get lost or wasted will get lost and waste her/his time.

Devas watch as liberator is born.

But if one pursues awakening the pineal gland, the third eye, the seat of consciousness, the "mind door" around the heart may get something else, awakening and liberation. But real liberation is not transient. It does not fall away. Drug experiences, absorptions (jhanas), hallucinations, and delusions do. The Five Precepts warn us away from intoxicants. This is very wise. Mere "knowledge" (ñāna), study (suta), and experience cannot substitute for actual wisdom (Sanskrit prajñā, Pali paññā).

Embodying DMT as "Soma"?

Stephen T. Naylor, Encyclopedia Mythica (pantheon.org)

The devas depicted in Western/Greco-Roman forms (Ilias Flaxman, Gestochen/Wiki)

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Where earthbound devas dwell, Plitvice

Soma is a very difficult deity [deva] for many outside of India to comprehend. He works on numerous levels, all of which are tied together rather strangely. Soma is firstly a plant. 

 

He is also an intoxicating drink which was brewed from that plant [which plant or mushroom, root or vine is disputed]....Though he is never depicted in human form, Soma obviously did not want for lovers [i.e., people who loved it]; poets rarely do.

In one episode, his desires caused a war. He had grown arrogant due to the glory that was offered him. Because of this, he let his lust overcome him; he kidnapped and carried off Tara, the wife of the [deva] Brihaspati. After refusing to give her up, the devas made war on him to force her release, and Soma called on the [titans] asuras to aid him.

Finally, Brahma interceded and compelled Soma to let Tara go. But she was with child, and it ended up that this child was Soma's. The child was born and named Budha (not to be confused with the Buddha). More

There is a "road" (path) to a weird "land" (place) somewhere outside of this illusion.

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Is it Amrita, the endogenous nectar of our divine nature?

Wisdom Quarterly edit of Wikipedia entry

Mohini, female-Vishnu with Amrita pot (W)

Amrita is repeatedly referred to as "the drink of the devas, the "gods," which grants them "immortality."

• Immortality? Perhaps that timeless vision or realization of who we really are, which does not end at death; our personality ends, and self falls away, but something, some whole, some connection to everything else, remains or is reborn, taking and clinging to a new form it immediately mistakes for "self" again. We are not so limited as any expression or manifestation would suggest.

Amrita features in the "ocean-churning" Samudra manthan legend, which describes how the devas, because of a curse from the sage Durvasa, begin to lose their immortality (divine vision of themselves?

 

Assisted by their mortal enemies, the asuras (Buddhist "titans"), they churn the ocean (cosmos, world-system, Milky Way, samsara) and create -- among other wonderful (Wyrd) things -- Amrita, the nectar of immortality.

 

In yogic philosophy (as it found its way from Hindu philosophy into its cognate Mahayana-Buddhism), Amrita is a fluid that can flow from the pituitary gland down the throat in deep states of meditation. It is considered quite a boon: Some yogic texts say that one drop is enough to conquer death and achieve immortality. More

The Los Angeles River renovation

Xochitl, Wisdom Quarterly; Alice Walton (SCPR); Soumya Karlamangla (latimes.com)

Kayakers on clean stretch of the L.A. River (Alissa Walker/flickr.com/Creative Commons)

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Alice Walton

L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti will announce today the Los Angeles River is receiving $1 billion to rehab 11 miles of it [where it is not paved but is allowed to percolate into the ground]. 

 

Maven's Morning Coffee daily email for Thursday, May 29, about Southern California: 

Deva-tree, cows (Fernando R. Carvalho)

Rehabbing the river from downtown to Elysian Park is seen as the first step toward rehabilitating the entire 51-mile stretch of the river. The Army Corps of Engineers will recommend a $1 billion proposal to revitalize 11 miles along the Los Angeles River, which gives Mayor Eric Garcetti one of his first major political wins, reports the Los Angeles Times:

It was never a sewer, just flood control. A $1-billion proposal to restore an 11-mile stretch of the L.A. River received support from US Army Corps of Engineers this week (Jae C. Hong).

 
Mayor thanks president for "listening" on L.A. River project

Soumya Karlamangla (latimes.com)

Soumya Karlamangla

With new backing from the federal government, city officials celebrated a step forward Thursday for a $1-billion plan to revitalize a strip of the Los Angeles River.
 

Recommended $1-billion project

After originally pushing for a cheaper $453-million plan, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced this week that it now supports a more robust, $1-billion proposal that would widen the river and restore habitat along an 11-mile stretch north of downtown through Elysian Park.

Speaking in a grassy park beside the river, Army Corps Col. Kimberly Colloton said the decision not only recognized "the importance of the river to Angelenos, but it validates its place as a waterway of national significance." More