Dependent Co-Arising

A layperson's overview of the 8-consciousness model of Yogācāra and how it relates to day-to-day living via either ego identification (top) or awake awareness (bottom). Additional details are in the alt text and in the thread below. I find it quite helpful.

Cape Cod Evening - 1939 https://botfrens.com/collections/173/contents/3103844

We have scrubbed the world clean of magic..., the price that must be paid for attempting to control the world from the standpoint of an "I" for whom everything that can be experienced is a foreign object and a nothing-but. ― Alan Watts (in The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)

We need politics that fights for all of creation, all the beauty and wonder of here. We are blessed to live in a temperate rainforest, and I sure hope that voters in Brazil, home to a miraculous tropical rainforest, make a better choice than we just did.

When neither desire nor thought arises, who am I? Truly, I am just as I actually am. — Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra (trans. Christopher Hareesh Wallis)

"This Dharma is abundantly present in each human being, but if we do not practice it, it does not manifest itself, and if we do not experience it, it cannot be realized. " – Dōgen

Unlike a computer, the human mind is capable of perception, or recognition. This function is the "unborn" aspect of mind.... It's this aspect of mind that can truly see Reality. Indeed, it's completely One with Reality. —Steve Hagen (in Why the World Doesn't Seem to Make Sense)

"The U.S. sticks out as the only major economy where planet-warming pollution increased dramatically last year" Utterly shameful. www.npr.org/2026/10/21/n...

Ordinary mind is mind as it is without the interference of passion or aggression. It is just our mind noticing itself.... It is simply our mind looking at itself and resting in that. — Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche (in Essentials of Mahamudra)

There is no intelligence without compassion. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Parisian cops started tear gassing and using water canons before the protest had even properly started. Had never seen anything like it. This was us trying to get to the authorized starting point of the protest and we could hear the explosions of tear gas in the distance

After some 40 years, I finally got to watch the entirety of Koyaanisqatsi (a Hopi word for "chaotic life" or "life of moral corruption and turmoil"). A deeply affecting film with a haunting soundtrack that should probably be much more widely known.

Neoliberalism is what happens when the seat of the small self, the "ego manager," is taken over by a subpersonality that sees only competition and adversity and feels only worry and fear. This happens both at the personal and societal levels.

The world doesn't want to be saved. It wants to be loved. That's how you save it. — Richard Brendan

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love. — Meister Eckhart (in The Essential Sermons)

I recall a similar belief about the durability and inevitability of the Iron Curtain, right up until it came down.

You can spend an eternity looking elsewhere for truth and love, intelligence and goodwill, imploring God and man—all in vain. You must begin in yourself, with yourself—this is the inexorable law. — Nisargadatta (in I Am That)

Progress is such a comforting word, so reassuring, a word with which we hypnotise ourselves. —Krishnamurti

Liberation is attained through the destruction of actions and defilements; actions and defilements arise because of falsifying conceptualizations; those arise from mental proliferation, which is extinguished in emptiness. ― Nāgārjuna (in Mūlamadhyamakakārikā)

If you meet the Buddha (or any other well-known person) by the road side, no need to kill them, they’ll die in their own time.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

Because it is altered by each act, wise or foolish, fearful or brave, the self, even as decision-maker, is doomed as an enduring entity. Constantly changing, it arises and passes. Yet in that very evanescence lies promise. — Joanna Macy

No-self living is like being an alcoholic who becomes sober and wakes up finding he or she has to live in a bar. —Adyashanti (The Imprint of Being)

Our karmically created mistaken conceptions and negative emotions defile the mind's inherent purity and obscure us from our buddha-nature. Enlightenment is in fact already inherent in our experience, if we can only recognize it. ― Daniel P. Brown (in Pointing Out the Great Way)

Suffering [dis-ease] is neither punishment not caused by something we have done wrong, but instead, it is a current human habit to identify with the limited patterns of consciousness. ― Loch Kelly (in The Way of Effortless Mindfulness)

you don’t hold "AI" accountable; you hold AI developers, vendors, and corporations that profit off it accountable holding "AI accountable" is like holding a toaster accountable. it's an inanimate object. it doesn't have wishes, feelings, or desires

Many scientists are individuals of great integrity, but too many of them have been failed by a mindset and system that rewards the lack thereof. Hard not to see a broader pattern at work here.

The raison d'être of humans is that they can become buddhas. . . . Apart from spreading Dharma, there are no other human affairs. ― Lü Cheng (cited in Just Awakening: Yogacārā Social Philosophy in Modern China, by J. Zu)

Where do sound and silence meet? Where does one of them start and the other end? What do you hear?

Some additional context here: www.npr.org/2025/04/29/n... A remarkable human being.

I'm standing in solidarity with my Palestinian Buddhist brother, Mohsen Mahdawi. pvsolidaritycouncil.org/buddhist-sol...

From generosity comes wealth, happiness from morality. From tolerance comes beauty, splendor from heroic effort. Through concentration, one is peaceful; through understanding comes liberation. Compassion accomplishes all aims. ―Nāgārjuna (Ratnāvalī, The Precious Garland, trans. McClintock & Dunne)