This post includes links to great podcasts. I encourage you to follow the links to the podcasts. They are much more informative than anything I have to say about them. ------------------- As COVID deaths in the US exceed 700,000, I continue my search for the source of widespread stupidity. To state the obvious, stupidity sells. I encountered  this  CBC podcast on the subject of "Conspirituality" - lovely term embracing the dog's breakfast of ideas promoted for commercial reasons that treat "mainstream" health measures (such as vaccines) as a kind of conspiracy against the individual who, instead, should be buying magic crystals, retaining semen or following some arcane practice rather than submitting to the awkward fact that good intentions and independent thinking will not save you from having a more or less run of the mill body and life. Another lovely term from this podcast is "privatized religion". This refers to the fact that anybody with a measur...

Jacob Chansley (with The Horns) Got 41 Months in Prison Totally Repudiated Q-Anon Etc It is a total mystery why some people refuse to get vaccinated or why an entire political party seems to be living in an alternate reality. As I write, thousands of health care workers in New York have refused to get the first jab in order to go back to work. And the "audits" keep coming. What the f*k is going on? To understand human behavior, you must stand back. Compassion must always be the starting point. There, but for the grace of God, go I. Through long effort, I reduced my own FI (f*g idiot) score from 9 (MAGA hat) to 5 (seriously confused). Along the way, I have had bizarre ideas about "reality" and acted on them. Sometimes with tragic results. Anti-vaxxers don't have a monopoly on stupidity. When I was about 5 years old, I grew skeptical of the stories everyone seemed to believe about some fat guy at the North Pole delivering presents for all the children of the world...

 Zen avoids making general prescriptions (although thousands of books make it seem that Zen is brain surgery). It's personal. Unique to each person. So in discussing my personal performance, the "art" of living, I need to be myself: to "ring my own bell". I consider the 8 fold path as great advice, though I update it considerably for the 21st century.  It's a set of "alarm bells" that go off when I have somehow wandered off the path of Zen. The classical image of a Zen master is one who doesn't care at all about appearances. He makes no effort to bridge the gap of understanding between himself (always male) and his students. Yet he *must* be presenting himself to his students and *must* convey the art of Zen by example  more  than words. Zen masters turn out to have a striking presence after all, deliberately intended to convey what will "go over" with their followers. OSHO - One of my early teachers For some of these guys, the image ...

What does it feel like to be a person whose daily life is dominated by performance art?  It's possible to be the world's greatest car salesman (certainly a performance), yet feel that "this isn't me". Perhaps the money has coaxed him away from who he really is or should be. This is touched upon by Buddha's eight-fold path, which is: Right Understanding,  Right Thought,  Right Speech,  Right Action,  Right Livelihood,  Right Effort,  Right Mindfulness, and  Right Concentration Buddhism is the grandfather of what we now call "mindfulness", which I think of as Buddhism without the hocus pocus. Our hypothetical car salesman is ignoring rule 5 - Right Livelihood. He is also breaking virtually all the other rules by his focus on selling cars rather than doing something truly important (to him). He is an excellent car salesman - a job that requires a wide and deep understanding of human nature and a performance that is fine-tuned to every customer in ev...

 It is not possible to understand the 21st century without seeing the overwhelming influence of "performance art". To be sure, this insight is not new: All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players - Shakespear But in the time of Shakespeare, no ordinary person could acquire a million "fans" by offering online makeup advice. Nobody could step into a public shouting match while sitting with a laptop at the kitchen table. We've always had opinions, but these days we have the feel the compulsion, even the obligation, to express our ideas through public performance. My father's decision to join the Canadian Army and go off to war was almost casual. It was a job and a way to see the world. He didn't know much about world affairs, let alone the noble cause behind the war. There was little of the passion that millions of us seem to feel when we take to the street to publicly "demonstrate" -- feeling that, by doing this, we infl...