Here’s a 64-min recorded video Dhamma Talk (120MB .mp4).

Topics:

  • Climate Change, Canada’s current forest fires, Society, over-consumption, efficiency, salesmanship, salespersonship, salesmen, salespersons, “upselling”, incentives, Social Media, art, priorities, views, dittis, disasters, psychology, burying one’s head in the sand, faith, environmental awareness, bicycles, monasticism, sacrifices, lifestyle


Dhamma References:

  • the phrase “fewness of wishes”, or its equivalent, is mentioned 52 times in the EBT suttas (with hundreds of references in the Vinaya). The Pali word “appiccha” means “with few wishes; wanting little; having few needs; modest”

  • Right View (“Samma Ditti”), the first step in the Noble Eightfold Path, doesn’t just inform our meditation, but also our wider lifestyles, where we can have a keen sense of the difference between needs and wants.

Past Dhamma/Vinaya-related posting References:

Other References:

  • Tahn Ajahn Jayasaro and myself at Nalanda Buddhist Society

  • “Get the Gear” skit on Portlandia

  • “Around the World in 80 plates” skit on Portlandia

  • Quotation from Herman Hesse’s Nobel-prize-winning book “The Glass Bead Game”. Note: this story takes place in the future, and Herman Hesse is satirically referring to our present time as “the age of the feuilletons”, which is to accuse it of being fixated on trivialities and low forms of culture:

    “We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather “chatted” about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge.

    …these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Pheeacians. Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles — for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow. … People heard lectures on writers whose works they had never read and never meant to, sometimes accompanied by pictures projected on a screen. At these lectures, as in the feature articles in the newspapers, they struggled through a deluge of isolated cultural facts and fragments of knowledge robbed of all meaning. … But although it is easy to fit any given segment of the past neatly and intelligibly into the patterns of world history, contemporaries are never able to see their own place in the patterns. Consequently, even as intellectual ambitions and achievements declined rapidly during that period, intellectuals in particular were stricken by terrible doubts and a sense of despair. They had just fully realized (a discovery that had been in the air, here and there, from the time of Nietzsche on) that the youth and the creative period of our culture was over, that old age and twilight had set in. Suddenly everyone felt this and many bluntly expressed this view; it was used to explain many of the alarming signs of the time: the dreary mechanization of life, the profound debasement of morality, the decline of faith among nations, the inauthenticity of art. The “music of decline” had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts”

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