Unlearn Life

The Greeks broke down love into an array of categories and subcategories: philia, ludus, storge, agape, philautia, pragma, and eros. They also conceptualized time as chronological (kronos) and seasonal (kairos). 

40% of the perfectly edible food we produce goes straight into the landfill uneaten. With all the waste that abounds, are we willing to make cuts to our lifestyles? With just a few adjustments, we could very well save the planet.

20% of the world's population uses a whopping HALF of the world's electricity. Meanwhile, the total population living with no access at all to electricity has grown to one billion people. Is this stark disparity the result of Earth's inability to provide? Or does the disproportion arise from our inability to share?

Remember the "Find the Slipper" game we played as children? One kid would hide an object and then direct the other kids by encouraging them with, "freezing, cold, warm, warmer, hot, on fire" until the object was discovered. This is similar to the way our guides speak to us through the veil. In this episode, we compare definitions of gods and guides. We discuss how these characters reach across dimensions to make contact and direct us through our respective dharmas.

Hari Dass Baba was mauna (silent) and put questions to his students using a chalkboard, hence the brevity. One of his brainteasers was the following question: "what happens when a pickpocket sees a sage on the street?" A pickpocket could encounter Buddha himself and reduce the Buddha to a mere pocket, pack, or purse. Feminists could say that men see women "only for their pockets." If men broadened their vision of what women are or could be, they would learn to see past the "pockets" of women and into their hearts, brains, and souls.

Morality is a puzzle, and you'll find a piece of it in the Bhagavad Gita, a piece in the Dhammapada, a piece in the Tao Te Ching, a piece in your family life, a piece from your workplace, a piece from nature, from meditation, etc. Christians treat morality like it's something you find all in one spot (the Bible) and Jews treat morality like the Torah has all wisdom, and Muslims say the Quran contains all one needs to know, but there's no one-stop-shop to meet all one's moral needs.

The Patriarchy is so much more than "men." It's tied into capitalism, militarism, colonialism, and almost all other toxic "isms." It's a force that has taken on such momentum that it will now require radical countermeasures if we have any hope of true equality for all, and future balance between genders.

The Patriarchy is so much more than "men." It's tied into capitalism, militarism, colonialism, and almost all other toxic "isms." It's a force that has taken on such momentum that it will now require radical countermeasures if we have any hope of true equality for all, and future balance between genders.

Family farms are the future. That, or else, we may not have a future. According to Swedish scientist Johan Rockstrom, Mother Nature has several "boundaries" within which She must operate or else extinction threatens Her and Her children (ummm...that's us, by the way). Thanks to Big Ag and current unsustainable farming practices, humankind has already breached several of these irreversible "boundaries," which means if we don't find clean, local antidotes to fetid factory farms and chemically-contaminated produce, then we risk not just our health but our globe.

This is a short dialogue about the celestial bodies we honor with our days of the week: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn.

Emerson famously said, "it's not about the destination but the journey." The power of a koan is its susceptibility to a number of interpretations. Meditation and mindfulness are about the moment and not the outcome. In a time when we need nuance more than ever, koans open our minds to explore possibilities in shades and hues that put to shame our tired old models of binary black and white.