The Circular Journey of Reincarnation

A Dance of Spirit, Self, and TranscendenceSculpted by ancient wisdom and breathed into existence by mystic philosophies, the idea of reincarnation challenges our perception of reality, questioning the depth of life, death, and the realms that extend beyond our comprehension. It’s an intriguing path leading to a fascinating panorama of eternal becoming, a ceaseless cycle of birth, death, and…

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THORNAPPLE CONCERT '검은 별' POSTER, 2023

Based around the skirt ‘Beautiful Illusions’.

Have a Beautiful Lughnasadh with your friends and family!

🧡🔥🌾☀️

Hope that the first harvest gave you joy, success and abundance!

Death and birth are the constant renewal and revival of the will's consciousness. In itself this will is endless and beginningless; it alone is, so to speak, the substance of existence (every such renewal, however, brings a new possibility of the denial of the will-to-live). Consciousness is the life of the subject of knowing, or of the brain, and death is its end. Therefore consciousness is finite, is always new, beginning each time at the beginning. The will alone is permanent; but permanence also concerns it alone, for it is the will-to-live.

from The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2 by Arthur Schopenhauer

why is religious Christmas imagery all so joyful and pleasant? where is the inherent horror of the birth of Christ? A mother is handed her newborn child, wailing and innocent. Her hands come away sticky. Red. Simply by giving her son life she has already killed him. He is doomed from the beginning. Her love will not save him from suffering. Because the thing cradled in her arms is not a baby, it is a sacrifice: born amongst the other bleating animals whose blood will one day be spilled in the name of what demands it. the night is silent with anticipation. Mary, did you know? That your womb was also a grave?

"War is a perverse, though powerful, form of confronting birth and death. By risking their lives, soldiers earn their right to live. They become, though this baptism of fire, owners of their own lives. What was given to them at birth arbitrarily and without choice belongs to them now. In risking their lives they mock death, and in killing they own death by taking life; it is as if they work out the drama of rebirth and death in that same action."

- On Sacrifice, Moshe Halbertal

Coming and Going

A most terrible cliché begins “there are two types of people in this world” and then typically follows with a false dichotomy. However, if you will forgive me:

There are two types of people in this world, those born screaming and those born quiet.

I think that those who come screaming, go screaming. And those who come quietly, are likely to go the same.

I myself belong to the latter, having apparently been such a still and silent infant that a nurse thought me dead. My only sister on the other hand screamed then and has not stopped since.

When people think they are about to die, they tend to either a scream or silence. I myself have thought myself certain to die twice. The first a car accident. Spinning out of control high up on hills that I had seen wrecks from before. They were the kind of wreck that determine the model and make of car was difficult, as there was so little of it left. I had driven past such wrecks more than once; I had even what I was sure was left of a driver. I knew people did not survive a fall from that height. As I spun out of control, I stopped singing along with what had been playing, and closed my mouth. As the car started to turn, I knew that should it spin off towards the cliff that would be it. Luckily for me it spun away from them, and I lived to sing another day, though the rest of that trip was in a very solum silence. The other time I was sure to die was at my own doing, a foolish mix dose of medications. I could feel myself going away and I was certain my last sight would be of my wooden floor. I awoke the next morning with headache to rival any other and eventually, summoned the words to call an ambulance.

I wonder if the quite of death has anything to do with the quite of birth. I have only seen one other person convinced he would die, my grandfather. He happened to be right on the occasion, though he had the good advice of hospice staff to assure him. I wonder if he was quiet when he was born.

My sister screams when she is worried and tends to yell when she is scared. While I scream when startled, if I am really properly afraid, I stop talking. This makes shared horror movies a great experience, as when I begin to slow down, she speeds up to fill in the gaps. My mother is the same, though I know not what she was like as a child.

I wonder if you know how you would go in the end. Not just a situation when a car is coming towards you a touch too fast, or a potential danger arises. There is a distinct difference in thinking you might die and knowing you will. Even if you turn out wrong the latter will change you. I am generally best described as a buffoon. But, when hurtling towards the cliffs, my hazards lights were on, my horn blearing, and I kept my eyes on the road best I could. Far better in a crisis than I ever guest. I ascribe that to luck rather than anything relating to the quiet.

I don’t truly know If one can tell how they will react in a situation when they look down death. I hope few of us ever do. Far better not to know. But I also wonder, do we go out of this world the same way we enter it? Do the screamers scream and the silent silence. If it does indeed work like so, one is forced to ask, would you want to know how your last moments will sound?

Propaganda is not the way things are, by Ajahn Sumedho

Buddhism is not a brainwashing type of teaching. Propaganda is not the way things are, by Ajahn Sumedho http://wp.me/pFy3u-1Om

One wonders how people can commit genocide! How can one group slaughter another group of people? When one gets into cultural habits and ethnic biases, then those things can easily take over the mind. If one is not reflective and has no understanding of the way things are, one is easily pulled into the prejudices of one’s particular ethnic background. Identifying as an American and growing up…

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"The Fall of the Starmaker"

Life's reason is to leave the world in a better place than you've found it in.

What Is Truthful Introspection? | Swami Bhoomananda Tirtha

What is meant by Truthful Introspection and what are its benefits?

December Meditation

It's 7:09pm, December 24th of the year twenty-twenty-two.

Christmas celebrations for me, within my immediate extended family (dad's side), usually feel a little like this.

The amount of

in the cup doesn't like to overflow very easily. And yes, we celebrate Christmas. However I will say that we are also somewhat Buddhist.

Alone in my art studio space, I burned incense on the recent Capricorn New Moon (December Solstice) and it felt completely like a yin balance to the yang of Christmas-season-related activities.

Little Annie Clear