"[C]ovetousness, schadenfreude, anxiety, dread, and on and on."

"It’s the frequent fruitlessness of such feelings that the Buddha is said to have pondered after he unplugged from the social grid of his day — that is, the people he lived around — and wandered off to reckon with the human predicament. Maybe his time off the grid gave him enough critical distance from these emotions to discover his formula for liberation from them. In any event, it’s because the underlying emotions haven’t changed, and because the grid conveys and elicits them with such power, that his formula holds appeal for many people even, and perhaps especially, today."

Robert Wright, writing in the NYT, on a theme that has been big in the NYT: how technology is hurting our brains.

"Our minds are quite scattered with planning and remembering and tracking and we don't live much in the present."

"We can be so lost in our minds that we don't see the sunset over the Pacific, we don't see the eyes of our children when we come home, we don't see the garden."

Why haven't I produced another post yet this morning?

Because I'm seething away in the comments on the Goldie Hawn/Buddhism post from yesterday!

When do Hollywood liberals favor teaching religion in schools?

When the religion is Buddhism, propounded by The Hawn (as in Goldie) Foundation and it's used "to rethink our whole approach to classroom education, integrating neuroscience with the latest social and emotional learning techniques," because "a peaceful, happy child is the first step towards a peaceful world."

Somehow the Other's religion is neuroscience, to be imposed on rowdy children to make them serene. Thanks, Hollywood liberals. You know, I can't think of one Hollywood movie about kids that had a placid protagonist. The movies always boost boisterous children. The great kids that we are encouraged to identify with are mischievous and too energetic for their stuffy teachers. If there were a movie with an aging hippie teacher character bringing nonviolence to the kids through Buddhist meditation, I'm virtually positive she would be a self-loving idiot whose was really about repression and a hostility to the vibrancy of youth. But outside of the movies, are our Hollywood friends on the side of the childish protagonists or the repressive authority figures?

"In our culture, women have been conditioned to have closed sexuality and open feelings, and men to have open sexuality and closed feelings."

From a ridiculous article about a commune dedicated to the female orgasm.

AND: I'm concerned about the dedication of communes to female orgasms.