“…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.”
Little Big Man and Me
I’ve noticed how many Facebook posts are about what’s wrong with the other side. My liberal friends spend much more time finding fault with conservatives than promoting their own ideas, and vice versa.
My Schizophrenic Conversation
I’ve experience more than my share of traumatic losses. That’s the bad news. The good news is that each one taught me a great deal, and telling some of the stories may help others.The video below, from January 2012, is the first story I ever told with Better Said Than Done. It’s not easy to…
Does True Charity Exist? — July 29, 2013, Sermon
…giving that makes use of the head as well as the heart – that uses economists, philosophers, business people, scientists to direct charitable gifts in the most effective ways.
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.
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Church Issues — June 6, 2010, Sermon
What every single one of these issues has in common is that the opinions about them are fiercely held.
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,…
Memories Are Made of This — October 20, 2013, Sermon
This isn’t really the word’s etymology, but when we re-member it’s as though we are bringing together various members of the thought into one coherent memory, and the members – the various bits from various parts of our brain – change over time.
Questions for My Father
Dad, what were you thinking and how were you feeling when you left your little shtetl of Shershov in 1921 and set out alone for the United States? At the age of 23, what made you go? Hunger? War? Pogroms? Poverty? You left behind a brother and sister in that swampy town in what’s now…
Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires
I used that title for a sermon I delivered in February 2012 about income inequality. The phrase, which has been attributed to Steinbeck, is a very loose paraphrase from his “America and Americans”: Socialism never took root in America because Americans don’t see themselves as poor – only temporarily embarrassed millionaires. I added that, speaking as…
Melting-Pot Dharma 