My suggestion for retiring one word from the English language: “just” Nothing is *just* anything

This is well said. It’s how I’ve come to think of my Teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh; his life was the accumulation of uncountably many hard choices. Every time he could have turned away, or blamed, or hated, or tried to ignore suffering or seek comfort, fame or profit, he invariably made the hard choice

Really joyous to connect so deeply with @mandascott.bsky.social in this wide-ranging conversation on roots, and finding (or creating!) our spiritual home

Are we more than biological machines? Is free will truly possible? (And can it be increased?) youtu.be/xTw373j6dhA?...

Great to notice that learning goes down when tech enters the classroom. But perhaps we should also be applying this thought to ourselves. Cognitive/emotional capacity isn’t something that we only cultivate as children. We continue to cultivate it throughout our lives, or… we don’t.

Pope Leo!

Any reason European villages and towns can’t do this? (I’m going to suggest it to my cousin who is a village mayor)

Thank goodness for Pope Leo

This looks a bit more like it!

Cdn’t read the whole article bc paywall, but it aligns closely with the way I’ve come to see things expression I came up with while writing my book is “epistemic coat hanger” Spacetime (also matter + energy) are epistemic coat hangers: ie abstractions upon which we hang our cumulated observations

Starting to film some new courses for the new online monastery.. coming soon-ish

Scenes from “Star Wars: Revenge of the Chick” being filmed on our Island

Hmmm. Good luck with that. Explain what is primary (experience), by starting with a secondary abstraction (matter) created to account for regularities observed in experience As the locals sometimes say when you ask for directions: “oh sure i can tell you the way, but i wouldn’t start from here“

Oh my Buddha... my dear brother Phap Huu being completely awesome on TFI Wednesday with Chris Evans for a full 45 minutes. Maybe the world just wants more wholesomeness. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

i can see why introspection would be unappealing for this billionaire (and probably for many of them) Unfortunately for him, a reckoning will come, whether on the deathbed or before. Indifference to moral consequences doesn’t mean those consequences aren’t coming

I have a joke about awakening but you won’t be able to tell if it’s funny until some distant day, in a few years time, when a single dewdrop falls onto the tip of your nose at exactly the same moment you hear the plop of a frog jumping into a pond and see a flash of lightning striking the horizon.

plumvillage.org/about/thich-... Thay convened Europe’s 1st conference on the environment in 1971. Joined by 2200 scientists, inc 4 nobel laureates Their 1st proposal? “A moratorium on technological innovations the effects of which we cannot foretell and which are not essential to human survival”

time for a cuppa

Very much looking forward to this...

Thank goodness not all humans have been colonised by monoculture thinking

Metering intelligence is just another form of rent-seeking — limiting and monetising access to something you didn’t create in order to concentrate wealth and increase inequality further. Non merci Monsieur Altman

Maybe this? www.404media.co/ai-is-africa... AI is an extractive technology that relies on the brutal labor of underpaid workers … For years, the work of African data labelers has been more or less "ghost work,” …unseen, hidden labor It is not artificial intelligence. It's African intelligence,"

This random monk had been invited to a small gathering of ai leaders (CEO / chief scientist level allegedly) for a conversation about ethics — what do i say? If you have any deep thoughts, please help! (I also have some thoughts, but collective intelligence is likely better than individual imho)

Nevertheless:

Had the chance to visit Chichén Itzá today. But spent most of the time hanging out with these cool dudes:

I wasn't intending to turn this into a thread, but it seems to have happened anyway. It's about the great plague on our lives: the extreme wealth of a tiny number of people. And what to do about it.

The richest Americans saw their net worth soar 120% from 2017 to 2025. The top 1% now control $55.8 trillion in assets — more than the G.D.P. of the United States and China combined. Meanwhile, millions of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Still wondering if inequality is out of control?

I have wanted to write about this very thought many times — how Hollywood constantly tells us that the world can be saved by one man punching another man in the face. The quote is from an excellent interview with @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social — pls forgive my inept attempt at posting it. Link in reply

“One of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex, when actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. Thich Nhat Hanh said before he died that the next Buddha will be the Sangha…

Every single person in the entire chain of command that massacred the schoolgirls in Minab, and that is currently carpet bombing Iranian civilians, needs to be tried and jailed in The Hague. Sick, depraved monsters drunk on imperial hubris.

Preparing to embrace 175 leaders in the fields of climate, biodiversity and ocean protection today (from the whole continent of the Americas), to help them continue to metabolise their grief, rage and despair into resilience, courage and stubborn optimism. Giving up isn’t an option.

Blood-moon moonset Brotherhood Sunrise

Who is with the moon tonight?

Never be numb to human suffering

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." -Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

The U.S. Senate must be clear: no war with Iran.

Somehow the world, the present moment, and the potential for awakening in us all is still unfathomably, achingly beautiful… no matter all our attempts to pollute, attack, and annihilate it There is something indestructible in the heart of reality, always waiting for us to turn towards it

Capitalism and the Internet have even found ways to do this to mindfulness. Once you see the pattern, you see it everywhere. vimeo.com/1168468796

Now there is hope! It's no longer a choice between grim and grimmer. We can vote for who we want and win. Anywhere. It's just one constituency, but the Green victory in Gorton and Denton is an electric shock to our political system.

Episode 100 is here! #TheWayOutIsIn #podcast Brother Phap Huu & Jo Confino are joined by Sister True Dedication to celebrate the legacy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings. 🙏🏽 On the app 👉🏽 link.plumvillage.app/cKQv More here 👉🏽 plumvillage.org/podcast/one-... #mindfulness #ThichNhatHanh #PlumVillageApp

Forget FOMO Try JOMO The joy of.. (Secret introvert delight of getting some extra alone time)

Some of us have already tasted kiwi, and some of us have never tasted a kiwi. They may ask "What is kiwi? Can you give me an idea?" But you cannot. Even combining all your ideas, you cannot explain what a kiwi is. The only way is to offer them a kiwi Then you don't have to say anything at all

Don’t live in the map Return to the territory of your embodiment! Join the ABSTRACTION REBELLION! (The cutest ever placard courtesy of Siri Raworth-Krznaric — yes, that’s a toothpick)

“bifurcation of nature” (Frm Whitehead) shift in early science, associatd w/ Galileo conceptl split of reality into: Primary qlties: measrble features like positn, extensn, motion, mass -treated as “objctvly real” 2ndary qlties: sensry featrs like color, sound, taste -treated as “merely subjctv”

“fallacy of misplaced concreteness” A phrase coined by Whitehead to alert us to the tendency in the sciences to: Mistake models, concepts, or categories for the actual world forgetting that theories simplify and select features then gradually coming to see the abstraction as the “real” reality

“surreptitious substitution” Phrase coined by Husserl to point out the tendency of modern science to forget that its mathematical models are abstractions from experience It’s the unnoticed replacement of lived reality with abstract structures gradually seen as more real than experience itself

The anti-reification division needs YOU!

DØWN W!TH THΞ TYRΔNNY ØF M!SPLΔCΞD CØNCЯΞTΞNΞSS

RRR EEE SSS IIIIll SSS TTTT R R E S I S T RRR EEE SSS I SSS T R R E S I S T R R EEE SSS IIIII SSS T THE surreptitious SUBSTITUTION