I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown, eat interesting food, dig some interesting people, have an adventure, be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You’re going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It’s not what Tom Friedman writes about, I’m sorry. You’re going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consists of walking twelve miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can’t get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people — Americans and Europeans — come back and go, “Ohhhh.” And the lightbulb goes on.
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| — | Henry Rollins (via the-wanderlustproject) |
What we find in a soulmate is not something wild to tame but something wild to run with.
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| — | Robert Brault (via natashakills) |
Honduras rain forest may be home to ruins of lost city
Light detection and ranging reveals images that could be canals, roads, building foundations and terraced agricultural land.
A person who is liberated, who has freed his or her mind of all mental afflictions, still experiences physical suffering. The difference between us and an arhat, a person who has freed the mind from mental affliction, is that an arhat doesn’t identify with pain. Arhats experience physical pain vividly but don’t grasp onto it; they can take action to avoid or alleviate pain, but whether they do so or not, the physical pain doesn’t come inside. What an arhat does not experience is mental suffering. A buddha, one who is perfectly spiritually awakened, has gone a further step. A buddha has no mental suffering of his or her own, but is vividly and non-dually aware of the suffering of others. Superficially, the arhat who is free from mental suffering can seem to us who lack this realization as numb and detached, in a state of existential anesthesia. A buddha, one who is fully awakened, presents the paradox of being free from suffering and also non-dually present with other people’s joys and sorrows, hopes and fears. A buddha taps into immutable bliss, the ultimate ground state of awareness beyond the dichotomy of stimulus-driven pain and pleasure. The mind of a buddha has been purified of all obscuration and from its own nature there naturally arises immutable bliss, like a spring welling up from the earth. With the unveiling of the buddha-nature of unconditioned bliss, there is also a complete erosion of an absolute demarcation between self and other. The barrier is gone. This is why buddhas are vividly and non-dually aware of the suffering of others, their hopes and fears, the whole situation, and at the same time are not disengaged from the purity and bliss of their own awareness. The mind of a buddha doesn’t block out anything and nothing is inhibited, and this is why the awareness of an awakened being is frequently described as “unimaginable.”
B. Alan Wallace.
Photo by Thomas Kaye.
Area Cats Reject Reality, Live in Fantasy World
A pair of local cats, Dora the tuxedo and Luna the tabby, have declared their basement the “Barony of Fluff,” and are refusing to speak to anyone who doesn’t recognize the made-up kingdom.
“It’s lunacy,” said Susan Wolpert, who lets the basement to the kitties. “They owe me two months rent, but now they’re claiming that I owe them because of some archaic, feudal land-grant system they’ve set up.”
The two cats have reportedly built a fortress out of old cardboard boxes and are preparing for a long siege.
Via little_friends.
