The Death Business

“Religions are in the death business: preparing people for death, pretending to send them off after they’ve died, making believe they know what happens afterward, and explaining to the dead person’s relatives where they think their loved one might be now. Without death most religions don’t have a whole lot to live for.”

— Sit Down and Shut Up (Brad Warner)

More from Brad Warner here, here and here.

The Unconscious

“My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”

— From a lecture titled The Concept of the Collective Unconscious delivered by Carl Jung on October 19, 1936, to the Abernethian Society at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.

Stacking stones

There are a lot of articles on stacking stones. Why some people stack them… and at least as many on why you should not.

Because stone stacks are built using unaltered stones, they require your full attention on the task of the present moment to find the perfect connection of the stone’s centre of gravity to its foundation to balance the next layer. The process is meditative; it heightens present moment awareness/mindfulness. Even the simple act of choosing the stones heightens mindfulness!

I have no interest in balancing stones (the fad that seems to piss off conservationists everywhere). I just like making a little pile. I do find the process meditative.

The Other Side of Nothing

(Amazon) “In the West, Zen Buddhism has a reputation for paradoxes that defy logic. In particular, the Buddhist concept of nonduality — the realization that everything in the universe forms a single, integrated whole — is especially difficult to grasp. In The Other Side of Nothing, Zen teacher Brad Warner untangles the mystery and explains nonduality in plain English. To Warner, this is not just a philosophical problem: nonduality forms the bedrock of Zen ethics, and once we comprehend it, many of the perplexing aspects of Zen suddenly make sense.”


We are not individual beings but components of an infinite reality that is just one single entity.

Zen Buddhists are Buddhists whose main thing is meditation. […] A way to learn to clearly see what reality actually is, beyond all dogmas and beliefs.

In everything in the world there exists nothing besides illusions. […] We can’t see the true nature of reality, but we can discover it. […] No explanation can ever match the reality it’s trying to describe.

In one sense, God created us. In another sense we are continuously creating God.

“Our life and our surroundings are part of a single continuum.” […] “Action and the place in which it occurs are indivisible.” — Nishijima Roshi

Mind and matter are two aspects of the same thing.

When we stop wanting things to be different from how they actually are, we stop suffering.

The truest thing you can ever say is, “I don’t know.”

The body exists within awareness rather than awareness being something that occurs inside the body or even inside the mind. The body is inside me rather than me being inside the body. […] The body is a manifestation of consciousness or of mind.

“Zazen is good for nothing!” — Kodo Sawaki

Whatever the particular thing is that you think is the worst thing in the world, it is part of you. Continue reading

The Order of Time

“The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but becoming. He says, “The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have limited duration.” He gives a rock as an example of a thing, as contrasted with an event. But, he says, “On closer inspection, in fact, even the things that are most ‘thinglike’ are nothing more than long events.” A rock isn’t a rock forever — even though it might seem like that to us humans. It starts off as a bunch of sand, gets compressed and melted, exists as a rock for a while, and eventually wears away into sand again. Even to say it started off as sand is wrong, because the sand wasn’t always sand either. The molecules that make up each grain of sand have their own complicated history. Therefore, any given rock’s existence as a rock is an event within the long, long history of its constituent, parts.”

— The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (quoted in The Other Side of Nothing by Brad Warner)

Bangkok Haunts

“(You) think the Western mind is some Frankensteinian product of a botched religion and a bunch of ancient Greek pedophiles, the same unholy combination of schoolboy logic, lust for blood and glory, we-know-best, and destroy-to-save that slaughtered three million in Vietnam, most of them women and children, all in the name of freedom and democracy, before we ran away because it got too expensive.”

“Modernism is largely a form of entertainment, and a superficial one at that. It doesn’t survive environmental disasters or oil shortages. It doesn’t even survive terrorist attacks. It certainly doesn’t survive poverty, which is the lot of most of us. One flick of a switch, and the images fade from the screen. […] Confusion seeks relief in bigotry, which leads to conflict. One high-tech war, and we’re back to the Stone Age.”

— Bangkok Haunts (2007) by John Burdett

Green Button

Imagine having a couple of buttons on your desk. Let’s say, red and green. And everytime you walked by you could press the red button for a negative/angry/fearful thought… or the green one for a positive/peaceful/uplifting thought. Wouldn’t last long, just a few seconds or a minute or two.

Why would you ever push the red button? You wouldn’t, not if you thought about it for a spit second. You’d wear that fucking green button out. But we find ourselves soaking in negative thoughts and — if we’re lucky — have a moment of awareness.

“Whoa. I must have hit the red button. A couple of times.”

All of which goes to explain why people report constantly hearing me muttering, “Green button, green button, green button.”

My friend Kent reminds us the red button state is most people’s default. (Always going for green.) Buddha says “life is the red button state’. Awareness would be the inbetween.

Sit Down and Shut Up

Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, & Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye

Amazon: “In Sit Down and Shut Up, Brad Warner tackles one of the great works of Zen literature, the Shobogenzo by 13th-century Zen master Dogen. Illuminating Dogen’s enigmatic teachings in plain language, Warner intertwines sharp philosophical musings on sex, evil, anger, meditation, enlightenment, death, God, sin, and happiness with an exploration of the power and pain of the punk rock ethos.”

This book got a lot of my highlighter. A few examples below:

“There are two basic kinds of thought. There are thoughts that pop up unannounced and uninvited. These are just the results of previous thoughts and experiences that have left their traces in the neural pathways of our brains. The other kind of thought is when we grab on to one of these streams of energy and start playing with it.”

“Effort is far more important than so-called success because effort is a real thing.”

“Thoughts are nothing more than electrical activity, changes in the organic chemistry of the brain.”

“Words cannot capture what your life really is. […] All humankind’s problems today stem solely from our inability to see that words are just words.”

“Everything you ever do is always, always, always a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”