How could a bartender be a Buddhist?  Years of tequila and country music in a Tex Mex restaurant.  Caught up in the culture of work hard/play hard, though it was work for me, and I'd go home alone at the end of it.  My years of observing people, of friendships real once, now scattered away, the community I was a part of.

Western science studied the outer world, the material aspect, while Eastern science, Buddhism studied the inner world.  China builds our stuff for us, cheaply, using material science.  China kills monks, destroys temples and culture thousands of years old in the blink of an eye.  China pollutes, like nobody's business.  China basically did its best to kill the thoughtful spiritual life of modern humanity, in the name of market economy, global power, 'communism,' (when Buddhist had been living communally for how long?)

It is odd for us here in the West to get it, to see through all the stuff we've accumulated, to clear and simplify and look within.  It's easy for us too to do the bidding of economic overlords.  It's hard to see the peace found within, to inhabit the present moment.  No wonder we don't get it, stuck in our egos, thinking a yogi is insanity, that compassion is secondary at best...


As technology advances, so does a basic ignorance of nature's scale.  The arrogance, to build a pipe line, that will bring a lifetime of profit for some individuals, be appreciated by some for a job for a while, that despite all humanity can do, despite its best technology will one day fall apart, thus leaving the future with the difficult problem of upkeep, of whether its worth it to keep the leaky pipes flowing.  Nothing lasts forever, and this is the problem when humanity attempts to meet things on a geologic scale.  What happen to the fracking pipes in the ground (and all those Dick Cheney proprietary secret chemicals) when they begin to rot?  Make money now, get rich, let the elite build their compounds, let the rest of the poor cope with flaming tap water…

The dharma asks us to be responsible for the actions of previous lives that led us to be born.  That seems a main responsibility.