Jiddu Krishnamurti was born on this day in 1897. (correction, Krishnamurti was born on the 12th of May, 1897. I jumped a day…) In his childhood he was identified by prominent Theosophists as the next world teacher. By which they meant the next Christ or Buddha. They proclaimed when he came into his adulthood he would speak truths that would be hard to hear. They were right. Pretty much as soon as he grew up he repudiated the titles as... Read more

On this day in 1994 Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president of South Africa. It is said that when Benjamin Franklin was leaving the constitutional convention of 1787 a citizen asked him whether our new country was going to be a monarchy or a republic. Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Mandela delivered a republic to South Africa. And while none of the men who have followed rise to Mandela’s stature, they have allowed fair votes (more... Read more

Thank you, Jan! Read more

Over the past weeks I’ve found myself pointed by numerous friends to a NY Times Magazine article, “Enlightenment Therapy.” Then it found itself being discussed at the Zen teacher’s listserv to which I belong. So, finally I decided I had to read it. It’s pretty interesting stuff. The author Chip Brown seems to have had a long time interest in matters of the mind. It is telling, I find, that his undergraduate studies included both literature and biochemistry and one... Read more

A clip from the film Waking Life. Read more

Monkey Mind has been “awarded” the Honest Scrap by two fellow bloggers, Enlightenment Ward and Rev. Danny Fisher. This award is bestowed upon a fellow blogger whose blog content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant. This award is about bloggers who post from their heart, who oftentimes put their heart on display as they write from the depths of their soul. 1) brag about it; 2) choose a minimum of seven blogs that I find brilliant; 3) and... Read more

Thank you, Robyn, for putting us straight. Although, I have to admit, here’s a cogent defense of a Buddhist read of Kant! Read more

Today Governor John Baldacci of Maine signed a marriage equality bill into law. The battle is won, if not yet the war. Bless them all, this is the work of God… Read more

I’ve long been taken with the current Unitarian Universalist Statement of Principles & Purposes. It is the most recent of a long line of attempts not to formulate a creed, that is a statement one must assent to in order to belong to a group, but rather an attempt to describe what is commonly held among this band. As such there have traditionally been “escape clauses,” that is in one manner or another an acknowledgment no individual must subscribe to... Read more

While I’m quite fond Cinco De Mayo, among the other things worth noting today is how it is Soren Kierkegaard’s birthday. I discovered him in my late adolescence, and, my, he was a liberating force… (God, hard to read, however! I recall one translator footnoting a particularly hard paragraph, declaring in that note that he really wasn’t as awful a translator as the passage suggested…) I continue to be impressed by existentialists of all stripes. I like to think of... Read more