Buddhist Extremist Cell Vows To Unleash Tranquility On West

A representative from the Buddhist extremist group Kammaṭṭhāna warns of a "coming storm" of spiritual oneness and enlightenment.

WASHINGTON—In a 45-minute video posted on Tibetan websites Thursday, Tsuglag Rinpoche, leader of the Buddhist extremist group Kammaṭṭhāna, threatened to soon inflict a wave of peace and tranquility on the West.

Speaking in front of a nondescript altar surrounded by candles, burning sticks of incense, and a small golden statue of the Buddha, Rinpoche did not specify when or where an assault of profound inner stillness would occur, but stated in no uncertain terms that the fundamentalist Buddhist cell plans to target all Western suffering.

“In the name of the Great Teacher, we will stop at nothing to unleash a firestorm of empathy, compassion, and true selflessness upon the West,” said Rinpoche, adding that all enemies of a freely flowing, unfettered state of mind will be “besieged with pure, everlasting happiness.” “No city will be spared from spiritual harmony. We will bring about the end to all Western pain and anxiety, to all destructive cravings, to all greed, delusion, and misplaced desire. Indeed, we will bring the entire United States to its knees in deep meditation.”

“Wisdom and virtue to America!” continued Rinpoche. “Wisdom and virtue to all living things on earth!”

According to reports, Rinpoche stressed throughout his address that Kammaṭṭhāna soldiers would continue waging a tireless holy war on Western feelings of emptiness and negativity for as long as necessary, noting that “a jug fills drop by drop” and that “it is better to travel well than to arrive.”

The extremist leader specifically criticized the United States for its “blatant disregard of karmic balance within the universe” and ominously claimed that Americans will “one day soon” experience the highest form of metaphysical equilibrium through a union of both body and mind. Rinpoche also said all Western nations would “pay a heavy price in negative thinking and self-doubt” if they do not immediately engage in serious introspection and true spiritual liberation.

Sources confirmed the video then featured an uninterrupted 19-minute clip of water quietly flowing between rocks in a small forest creek.

Please continue this important article and view video here: http://www.theonion.com/article/buddhist-extremist-cell-vows-to-unleash-tranquilit-34623

Reflections On Growing Our Hearts Bigger

At times, it all seems so simple, so basic. We need to be kind. We need to care about one another. We need to hold ourselves and others with compassion and remembrance of how connected we all are.

And, yet, how true it also is that growing our hearts bigger is often not an easy task. Especially when there is so much that can put us back to sleep. Even something as silly as the "war on Christmas" can pull us in.

We also have choices. It is true that each and every one of us - including me! - can commit to trying to increasingly know when we've been triggered, when we've been hooked, when we find the anger welling up inside against some Other, some me vs you, us vs them. And we can try, as best as possible, to stop and intervene on ourselves. And say, Oh, there I go again... getting hooked, buying into the polarizations, into the Great Distraction and the pull away from coming together... including within our own fragmented selves.

Divided we are a conquered people - in our minds, in our hearts, in our actions... or lack of actions. Which is not helpful to me, to you, or to anyone.

I am very much also speaking to myself each time I reflect on issues and triggers and polarities and how human I am along with the rest of us. I need these reminders. I need this healing, this recognition of how my heart has been wounded, has been caught up in a culture that too often does not teach love and understanding and compassion. I need these reminders to stay open, to not shut down, to not get stuck in my judgments, anger, fear, and sense of separateness. I need to work to channel my reactions into skillful responses, ones which help rather than harm. Don't we all? 

We're not going to get through and out of this Great Mess unless we become, more and more, part of the Great Turning, the Great Awakening, the Great Heart that weaves through us all. We truly are all in this together.

Peace & blessings ~ Molly 

 

Jeremy Scahill: If We Are Going To Kill Our Own People

Blessed are the courageous truth-tellers.

May they inform and inspire us all.

Ever since hearing George Bush state in the wake of 9-11 that "they attacked us for our freedoms," I responded to what I deeply felt was a lie by passionately pursuing the truth. Then, I truly had no idea why we were attacked, but I wanted and needed to find out! This extraordinary journey has been teaching me how to follow threads by learning how to follow the money and learning how to discern who to trust for information and who not to trust. I had no idea what a propagandized people we Americans are, including me! This continues to be a gradual awakening which has been humbling with each new fact and piece of awareness and knowledge, which has again and again put me face to face with the depths of my own ignorance. Over these past 14 years I have increasingly read everything I could get my hands on, learned to tune into programs like "Alternative Radio" with David Barsamiam and "Democracy Now!" with Amy Goodman, and I have had the privilege and honor of seeing amazing and couragous people speak who would come to Portland. Jeremy Scahill is certainly among them. So many have been teaching me and helping me to awaken to that, indeed!, another world is possible. And it is up to each and every one of us to do our part, whatever that may be, in assisting with this great birth that is trying to happen within each of our minds and hearts and all over the world.

Peace & blessings - Molly

With Jeremy Scahill in Portland

Three weeks after he climbed out the kitchen window, the boy was outdoors with his cousins—teenagers like him—laying a picnic for dinner beneath the stars. It was then he would have heard the drones approaching, followed by the whiz of the missiles. It was a direct hit. The boy and his cousins were blown to pieces. All that remained of the boy was the back of his head, his flowing hair still clinging to it. The boy had turned sixteen years old a few weeks earlier and now he had been killed by his own government. He was the third US citizen to be killed in operations authorized by the president in two weeks. The first was his father. 

If we are going to kill our own people without charging them with a crime, well, then we should just say we live in a different country, and stop telling the world that we're the great, shining city on the hill. 

― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield

Exclusive: Air Force Whistleblowers Risk Prosecution to Warn Drone War Kills Civilians, Fuels Terror

Has the U.S. drone war "fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like ISIS"? That’s the conclusion of four former Air Force servicemembers who are speaking out together for the first time. They’ve issued a letter to President Obama warning the U.S. drone program is one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism. They accuse the administration of lying about the effectiveness of the drone program, saying it is good at killing people—just not the right ones. The four drone war veterans risk prosecution by an administration that has been unprecedented in its targeting of government whistleblowers. In a Democracy Now! exclusive, they join us in their first extended broadcast interview.

Please go here for the full video interview and transcript: http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/20/exclusive_air_force_whistleblowers_risk_prosecution

'Drone' Documentary Targets Deadly US Military Program

Three children stand amidst the rubble in the Dande Darpa Khel region of North Waziristan. They are holding remnants of a drone-fired missile and rubble from their neighbour's house. They don't yet understand their parents were killed in the strike. Jalaluddin Haqqani, an Afghan fighter and Taliban member who went on to found the Haqqani network, is said to have been the target. (Noor Behram Copyright @ Flimmer Film 2014. All rights reserved)

(Photographer: Steven Moore Copyright @ Flimmer Film 2014. All rights reserved)

"We were the ultimate voyeurs, the ultimate peeping toms.  And we're getting orders to take these people's lives. It was just point and click." - Brandon Bryan, former drone operator in the U.S. Military.

Brandon Bryan spent five years as a drone operator in the U.S. Military. 

By his own estimation, he was involved in operations that killed 1,626 people. Though to this day, he says he doesn't know how many of those killings were justified.

Drones have become a staple technology in the U.S. war against terror but they're very seldom seen, and their operators are seldom heard.

• Get the data: Drone wars -  Bureau of Investigative Journalism

But Brandon Bryant has become a vocal critic of the U.S. drone program. And he's one of the main figures in a new documentary film called, "Drone."

 Please go here for original link and to continue article and documentary trailer: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-november-20-2015-1.3327528/drone-documentary-targets-deadly-us-military-program-1.3327580

Kathy Kelly: War's Genesis and Ultimate End

At its core, war is impoverishment. War’s genesis and ultimate end is in the poverty of our hearts. If we can realize that the world’s liberation begins within those troubled hearts, then we may yet find peace…What good has ever come from the slaughter of the innocents?

- Kathy Kelly

http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/kathy-kelly 

E. B. White: I Awaken Each Morning

I awaken each morning torn between a desire to save

the world and a desire to savor the world.

This makes it hard to plan the day.

- E. B. White

  

Thích Nhất Hạnh: Our Own Life

Our own life has to be our message.

― Thích Nhất Hạnh, The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology

 

The Worst Humanitarian Crisis In the World Today

Syria crisis: Fast facts

• 12 million Syrians have fled their homes because of conflict;half are children.
• 4 million Syrians are refugees; most are in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan.
• Children affected by the Syrian conflict are at risk of becoming ill, malnourished, abused, or exploited. Millions have been forced to quit school.
• More than 700,000 Syrian refugees and other migrants risked their lives this year to travel to Europe.

After more than four years of conflict, what’s so urgent now?

Winter is coming: Refugees in settlements have fewer resources than ever before. They need adequate food, warm clothes, shoes, blankets, heaters, and fuel.

Despite rain and cold, the human tide of refugees is still coming; every day, thousands more attempt sea crossings to reach Europe.

More than 3,200 have perished this year, including Aylan, a little Syrian boy whose photo touched hearts around the world.

More: A Google map perspective of a refugee’s
foot journey from Syria to Serbia

Why Syrians are fleeing: Three reasons

1. Violence: Since the Syrian civil war began, more than 240,000 people have been killed, including 12,000 children. One million more have been wounded or permanently disabled. The war has become more deadly since foreign powers joined the conflict.
2. Collapsed infrastructure: Within Syria, healthcare, education systems, and other infrastructure have been destroyed; the economy is shattered. An estimated 4.8 million people are in areas of Syria that are difficult to access because of the conflict. It’s hard for aid groups to reach them.
3. Children’s safety: Syrian children — the nation’s hope for a better future — have lost loved ones, suffered injuries, missed years of schooling, and witnessed violence and brutality. Warring parties forcibly recruit children to serve as fighters, human shields, and in support roles, according to the U.S. State Department.

Syria Crisis

The crisis in Syria affects more than 12 million people - more than those affected by Hurricane Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, and the Indian Ocean tsunami combined.

Please go here for more facts and how we can stand with the refugees and help: http://www.worldvision.org/news-stories-videos/syria-war-refugee-crisis

Helena Norberg-Hodge: A Close Relationship

Throughout the world today there is a growing awareness of the failings of the Western model of development and a corresponding desire to look for more human-scale, ecological ways of living.

It may seem absurd to believe that a 'primitive' culture in the Himalaya has anything to teach our industrialized society. But our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness that ancient cultures have never abandoned.

I have seen that community and a close relationship with the land can enrich human life beyond all comparison with material wealth or technological sophistication. I have learned that another way is possible.
 

 - Helena Norberg-Hodge