“…from a neuroscience perspective, the brain and body is constantly in flux. There’s nothing that corresponds to the sense that there’s an unchanging self.”
Category: Buddhism
My Epiphany about Impermanence and Emptiness
You and I and everything else in our world are like this web page. We are made of tiny particles that dance and degrade and even hop out of us into the air and water and other things around us.
The Buddha Is in Everything — December 3, 2006, Sermon
Buddhism says we are disappointed by the world because of faulty expectations. It is faulty to think that babies will never cry and dogs will never bark and brakes will never screech, so why let those things throw us off? The Buddha is even in hateful thoughts and violent crime.
The Challenge of Compassion — February 26, 2012, Sermon
Now that I think of it, I guess I showed compassion by stepping in for an ailing minister with just a few days’ notice in February 2012, to write and deliver this sermon on compassion. ***** Rick Ruzzamenti, of Riverside, California, is an electrical contractor with a surly streak and an impulsive side. But he…
A Noiseless Patient Spider
We all yearn for connection, and no one has captured that feeling as well as Walt Whitman in this 1868 poem A noiseless patient spider, I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them,…
The 5th Precept and the 12 Steps — December 1, 2013, Sermon
Even though she had been clean for some time and in fact was working in a recovery center, she broke down when she talked about her failures to care for her daughter, as she told us: “There’s no love greater than the disease of addiction.”
Community: Warm & Fuzzy or Cold & Hairy — September 14, 2014
Whenever I meet newcomers to Unitarian Universalism, one of the things I talk about is the community – that it plays a bigger role for us than it does for many other religions. We don’t come to church on Sunday mornings to pay homage to a deity and improve our chances of making it into…
Melting-Pot Dharma 