On the border between China and Pakistan exists the worlds second highest peak: K2. While Mt. Everest is higher, K2 is a far more deadly mountain. One in four people who attempt to summit K2 perish. One man attempted to summit the mountain twice, and found himself on a journey of adventure and self discovery.

Adrian Hayes was born in the New Forest National Park in the United Kingdom and is 60 years old, although he doesnt look it. The former British military special forces soldier has spent most of his life traveling abroad, and is an author, adventurer, and business coach.

Hayes started mountaineering at age 16, and learned early on by climbing in Scotland and the European Alps.

I had this dream as a young kid of being a mountaineer, Hayes told The Epoch Times.

After serving as a Gurkha officer for the British Army in Nepal, Hayes began climbing in the Himalayas. In 2006, he summited Mt. Everest.

While enduring the beginning of a personal crisis involving contact with his children and a battle with his ex-wife, Hayes decided to attempt K2.

I suppose the reasons that I went for it [were] born out of that need to avoid pain, Hayes explained.

Hayes was determined, and was convinced he would succeed in summiting K2. He admits, however, that he may have been a bit complacent going into the expedition.

The moment Hayes arrived in Islamabad, Pakistan in 2013 everything started to go wrong. First, he had to spend a week procuring the proper visa. The weather was terrible, and lots of climbers had recently been killed. Moreover, the Taliban had murdered 11 climbers at the base camp of the ninth highest peak in the world.

Despite the dangers, Hayes and 19 other climbers attempted to summit K2. The weather was too severe and 18 of the climbers including Hayes decided to turn around.

However, father and son Marty and Denali Schmidt, who Hayes had befriended, attempted to continue. Tragically, they were killed by an avalanche at camp three.

I literally sat on a rock two days before in tears that it was all over, probably because I knew I was going back to absolute chaos. When we heard that they had been killed, I sat on that rock again thinking My goodness, that was a reason [we came down],' Hayes recalled.

When Hayes returned home, he sank into a deep depression. He had failed to summit K2, two of his friends had been killed, and his family strife continued. However, in 2014 Hayes was determined to try again. This time he was completely focused, and complacency didnt enter his mind.

Fortunately, on this second trip the weather was favorable. After acclimating to the altitude for four weeks, Hayes and the other climbers set out to summit K2 after they had waited for optimal weather conditions. The final push took seven days.

After reaching camp four on day four, they trekked through the night to reach the summit on day five before trekking down the last two days.

That fifth day is the biggie. Thats the one. Thats where youre going to make it, or youre going to get killed, Hayes explained.

When Hayes reached the summit of K2, there was a quick celebration of fists in the air and hugs. After about five minutes of taking pictures and congratulations, they had to descend as they were running out of oxygen and the weather was deteriorating.

On July 26, 2014 Hayes had successfully summited K2. Hayes was exhausted and starved of oxygen, but maintained his focus and made it down alive.

Throughout his experience attempting to summit K2 twice, Hayes learned a lot about life and himself. Firstly, Hayes learned that he and others climb mountains for themselves, the challenge, respect, and recognition. The expedition is not to raise money for charity or raise awareness for a cause, which is okay.

The second lesson Hayes took away was that we live in a world of information overload and social media.

When you go on these expeditions your mind goes on a different frequency. Your connection with nature. Your connection with the earth. Your awareness muscles. Your observation. Your problem solving muscles. Gut instinct. All these skills are being swamped by social media and screen time, and its a real struggle coming back, Hayes said.

Hayes also learned about the fundamental importance of teamwork and relationships, which helps him a lot with his work in team and leadership coaching. Hes also become more humble, and become better at gauging people and their intentions.

Two years after summiting K2, Marty Schmidts daughter encouraged Hayes to write One Mans Climb: A Journey of Trauma, Tragedy and Triumph on K2. Hayes discusses not just the climb itself, but his personal struggles and the lessons he learned from his two attempts to summit K2. The climb, his personal struggles, and writing the book taught Hayes a lot.

Through the depths of despair comes our greatest learning, Hayes said.

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Finding Enlightenment on the Summit of K2 - The Epoch Times

October 3 2019, 12:01am,The Times

Modern science may be on the brink of uncovering a trove of ancient wisdom

The Roman resort of Herculaneum once stood in the Bay of Naples. Like Pompeii, it was buried in volcanic ash by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79. In the mid-18th century workmen discovered the site, including the remains of a magnificent building thought to have been the residence of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

It has come to be known as the Villa of the Papyri, because it contained a library of some 2,000 papyrus scrolls. The volcano left them as blackened chars, yet new scientific techniques may now allow them to be read. And riches may lie in wait.

The scrolls have for 250 years resisted investigation because of their fragility. Any attempt to open them has destroyed

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The Times view on reading the scrolls of Herculaneum: Enlightenment Entombed - The Times

Photograph courtesy of The Black KeysMurder on the Orient Express

Agatha Christies murder mystery follows Hercule Poirot and the rest of the trains passengers as they try to discover which of them killed the American tycoon found dead in his compartment. Oct. 2-27. $36. Meadow Brook Theatre, 378 Meadow Brook Rd., Rochester; 248-377-3300; mbtheatre.com

The 1993 cult classic about a trio of wicked (but funny) witches comes to life just in time for Halloween. Watch actors from the Goblin King Players recreate scenes from the movie while the actual film plays on the big screen. Oct. 4-6. $15. Redford Theatre, 17360 Lahser Rd, Detroit; 313-537-2560; redfordtheatre.com

Get in the fall spirit with Blakes apple cider and donuts as well as plenty of seasonal activities. This autumnal event will feature crafts, lawn games, food trucks, inflatables, horse-drawn hayrides, and more. Oct. 5. No cost. Beacon Park, 1903 Grand River Ave.,Detroit; empoweringmichigan.com

Best known for her hit single Love Song and her powerhouse vocals, the singer-songwriter and actress is embarking on her Amidst The Chaos Tour after releasing an album of the same name in April her first musical work since 2015. Oct. 5. $35+. Fox Theatre, 2211 Woodward Ave., Detroit: 313-471-3200; 313presents.com

With all new material, but the same lively improv and high-energy bits, Dane Cook whose 2005 comedy album Retaliation is the highest charting comedy album in nearly three decades is embarking on his first national stand-up tour since 2013. Oct. 5. $49.50+. The Fillmore, 2115 Woodward Ave., Detroit; 313-961-5451; thefillmoredetroit.com

Six-time Grammy Award-winning indie rock band The Black Keys has just released its new single Lo/Hi, their first new material since 2014, and is coming to Little Caesars Arena as part of the groups Lets Rock tour. Oct 5. $40+. Little Caesars Arena, 2645 Woodward Ave, Detroit; 313-471-3333; 313presents.com

This exhibit focuses on the range of works by American artists that depict industry in the U.S. They convey both positive and negative themes, including dehumanization of workers, prosperity, and environmental consequences. Oct. 5-Dec. 30. No cost with museum admission. Flint Institute of Arts, 1120 E. Kearsley St., Flint; 810-234-1695; flintarts.org

View more than 40 works exploring 19th and 20th century American life and culture from painters of the era, including Jane Peterson, John George Brown, and Francis David Millet. Oct. 5-Dec. 30. No cost with museum admission. Flint Institute of Arts, 1120 E. Kearsley St., Flint; 810-234-1695; flintarts.org

French artist Jean-Antoine Houdon is considered the greatest sculptor of the Enlightenment. This exhibition showcases his pieces, including his busts of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington that date back to the 1700s. Oct. 6. No cost with museum admission. Detroit Institute of Arts, 5200 Woodward Ave, Detroit; 313- 833-7900; dia.org

Best known for their multiplatinum single Monster, the Grammy-nominated hard rock band has sold more than 11 million units worldwide. Now theyre touring in support of their 10th album, Victorious. Oct 6. $29+.The Fillmore, 2115 Woodward, Detroit; 313.961.5451; Thefillmoredetroit.com

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10 Things to Do This Weekend (Oct. 4-6): The Black Keys, Cider, More - Hour Detroit Magazine

Over the past two days I have attended the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment financial planning conference.

This is the continuance of the original Institute of Financial Planning conference following the merger with CISI.

I first joined IFP in 1992 and it was the organisation that had the greatest effect in developing my career in financial services and helped shape my business.

Since then I have missed just two conferences and only because of childcare responsibilities.

The IFP was a great place to develop financial planning and the annual conference was the place to share with other financial planners and learn from them.

There was little competition or rivalry, as members of IFP were only too happy to grow their world.

Some people feel that this kind of community and camaraderie has been lost since joining the larger and more corporate CISI, but to my mind this is more to do with the people making the criticisms than the environment.

There have been downsides to the merger that I will not go into here, but CISI has been on a learning curve and has endeavoured to understand the needs of the ex-IFP membership, and it now recognises inclusion is just as important as financial planning.

This years conference has been a demonstration of that, with quality platform presentations, very topical workshops about dealing with vulnerable clients, as well as practitioner presentations.

Awards are hard won and highly respected.

The rest has been up to us: the networking, catching up with friends and making new ones, sharing ideas and best practice.

To me, none of that has been lost and what has been refreshing is meeting up with the young, aspiring and hopeful planners who hang on to our every word.

Financial planning is gaining momentum as a profession and it has been a long time coming.

Change happens, that is life, and it is not always for the best, but usually there is a great deal of good that overcomes the bad.

So I say to those who could not embrace this particular change, give it another try and risk the opportunity of renewed enlightenment.

Marlene Outrim is managing director of Uniq Family Wealth

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Changes: Turn and face the strange - FT Adviser

By Damian Flanagan

Along the riverbanks of a fairly nondescript town in the far north of Japan a Union Jack flutters eternally. This is not because Rupert Brooke or any other Englishman laid down his life here, but because this stretch of riverbank is famed as "The English Coast," having been named so by the region's most famous literary son, the poet and fairy tale author Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933).

At first sight, there is nothing particularly "English" about it -- in fact nothing to distinguish this bit of river from any other river. But if you delve into the origin of the phrase, it all starts to get rather intriguing.

Back in Kenji's day, before the river was dammed, the river levels periodically rose and fell dramatically and when low, revealed wide stretches of white mudstones, which in the hugely fertile imagination of Kenji Miyazawa became associated with the chalky white cliffs of Dover. Hence he started calling this beloved stretch of riverbank his "English Coast."

As a child, Kenji was an avid amateur geologist and collector of stones -- he was even nicknamed "ishikko," "the stone kid." As an adult and a teacher at a local school, he brought his pupils to his "English Coast" to ferret for unusual stones and fossils.

I must confess that I am not the greatest fan of Kenji's stories. There's an air of child-like whimsy in classic stories like "Night on the Galactic Railroad" with which my hard-boiled self doesn't readily connect. All Kenji's stories are suffused with a passionate desire to transmit his Buddhist beliefs (Kenji was a devotee of Nichiren Buddhism) and many people find his writings profound, expressing compassion to all beings and a sense of transcendent universalism combined with a deep love for his local area.

But for me, the best writers are not those who offer enlightenment, but who have raging arguments going on in their own heads, who keep toppling one set of ideas with their own contradictions, conflicts and counter-arguments. Kenji was more of the let-us-spread-good-works school, which he admirably kept up in his almost saintly life, having no romantic experiences of his own and devoting himself selflessly to the promotion of local agriculture and the relief of poor farmers.

What no one can quibble with, however, is the extraordinary richness of his imagination, which was able to transform the ultra-ordinary world around him into something newly realized and fascinating. As well as an interest in English and German, he had a fascination with Esperanto (that universalizing tendency again) and referred to his native Iwate Prefecture with the Esperanto-inspired term "Iihatobu," transforming the region from a mere province of Japan into a fantasy region of his mind, just as the ordinary-looking river bank he daily walked along became "The English Coast."

But still, are his writings not too much filled with starry eyed wonder, magical animals and leaps of imagination? I became fascinated to discover that some of the fossils that Kenji discovered in the now-sunken mudstones of the "English Coast" were those of elephants. You might tend to think as you go about your daily routine that elephants are as far removed from your life as any animal might be, but once they too walked along the "English Coast" and may even now be buried beneath your feet.

Looked at in that light, Kenji's imagination begins to seem less like "whimsy" and more like excavations into the strangeness of the world around us. The journey from a simple stroll along a Japanese river to an odyssey with elephants along an "English Coast" becomes something like an exploration of our own jumbled, interconnected depth consciousness. In flights of imagination we discover strangely miraculous sunken depths of reality, to which the banal surface appearance of things often offers little clue.

@DamianFlanagan

(This is Part 13 of a series)

In this column, Damian Flanagan, a researcher in Japanese literature, ponders about Japanese culture as he travels back and forth between Japan and Britain.

Profile:

Damian Flanagan is an author and critic born in Britain in 1969. He studied in Tokyo and Kyoto between 1989 and 1990 while a student at Cambridge University. He was engaged in research activities at Kobe University from 1993 through 1999. After taking the master's and doctoral courses in Japanese literature, he earned a Ph.D. in 2000. He is now based in both Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, and Manchester. He is the author of "Natsume Soseki: Superstar of World Literature" (Sekai Bungaku no superstar Natsume Soseki).

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Edging Toward Japan: The Japanese town where a Union Jack flutters eternally - The - The Mainichi

David Nichtern is, by most metrics, a very successful person. As a longtime practitioner in the Shambhala lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, he has been empowered as a senior teacher and has served as the director of Karme Choling Meditation Center in Vermont and the Dharmadhatu Meditation Center in Los Angeles. As a musician, he won four Emmy award, has been nominated for a Grammy twice, founded Dharma Moon and 5 Points Records, and has worked with Stevie Wonder, Jerry Garcia, Lana Del Rey, Maria Muldaur, and Paul Simon, to name a few.

In a new book, Creativity, Spirituality, and Making a Buck (Wisdom, October 8, 2019), he offers his advice from both sides of his life on how to figure out what one wants to do and how to get there. Tricycle spoke with Nichtern about the book and his conviction that we do not need to separate our spiritual pursuits and our career goals.

You titled your book Creativity, Spirituality, and Making a Buck, three topics that arent often talked about in the same breath. What inspired you to write a book about this?

This book is the culmination of my actual life as a practitioner, a creative, an entrepreneur, and a businessperson, and it challenges the long-accepted divide between spiritual life and the way we operate in the world, in which our livelihood and issues of money are seen as soiled. On the one hand, people will say that a yoga class should be free, and on the other hand, people have the notion that topics like ethics should be reserved for church on Sunday. Render unto Caesar what is Caesars. But all of those elements exist together in peoples actual lives. The people in the spiritual communities and the secular communities are the same people.

The third piece, after spirituality and making a living, is creativity, which speaks to our individual life journeys, or what I call the life puzzle. Every person comes to a point where they need to express themselves as a unique individual. Some people might think that goes against Buddhist teachings on non-self or non-ego, but thats a total misunderstanding of the definition of anatman (Skt., no-self). We do exist individually, but we dont exist absolutely individually.

A fundamental Buddhist teaching is that the path to end suffering involves letting go of desire, but this book teaches people how to pursue their goals. Where does your work fit within the renunciant traditions?

Its important to be extremely precise about the root of suffering. The origin of suffering is not desire, but attachment, fixation, or objectification of the desire. And the operation where you cling to your projections and solidify them is what is being renounced. There is a hidden question here: Is it possible to have a career, a livelihood, or a relationship that does not become fuel for clinging, and therefore create further suffering?

In the renunciant path, they say, no, you cant do it. For certain people, that is the appropriate path. It was the right path for Pema Chdrn, who was a household practitioner and decided to become a nun. Its an honorable tradition within the Buddhist world, and the monastics and the nuns are centrally located historically. But so are the householder yogis and the patrons, who are part of the larger society.

Related: Death, Sex, Enlightenment & Money

In todays society, we have little to no role for renunciation. We dont have the type of framework that was once common in India and Tibet. People who dont work are called hippies or bums. So we have to move toward creating a relationship to livelihood that doesnt create further suffering.

One of the practices you offer in the book is metta meditation, which you apply to the business advice to not negotiate against yourself. How do those fit together for you?

When you start a job, for instance, you negotiate an agreement to work at that place. Now, if you have low self-esteem, you probably didnt create the optimal circumstance to be appreciated and respected for what your capabilities are. Negotiating against yourself, in the broader sense, is a matter of not being kind to yourself, not appreciating yourself. And on the flip side, you dont have to be an arrogant psychopath either. Its a middle way kind of situation.

Working a job or being involved in the business world is an extraordinary learning opportunity and a very underrated spiritual training ground. You spend eight hours a day at work, but only 20 minutes to an hour a day practicing on the cushion. But those eight hours are also a practice. Youre practicing being kind to yourself, having compassion for others, being insightful, developing good work habits, teamwork, leadership, and so on.

You also write about self-deception. How do you suggest we find the balance between self-compassion and self-criticism in our careers?

The short answer is: its no different from anywhere else where you spend time and create relationships. The underlying principles are the same because theres only one person, which is you. Those principles are mindfulness, awareness, compassion, consideration for others and for oneself, a sense of adventure and enjoyment, and appreciation for life itself. None of that is excluded from the sense of personal journey that each of us are undergoing.

Ive watched spiritual communities develop for 50 years, and up until recently, this part of peoples lives has been a huge missing link. People go get money so they can go off on their retreats, as if the job itself were unholy. I was taught that the job is part of the sacred environment.

The term McMindfulness is often used to criticize people for using spiritual practices without an ethical framework. How is your project different from mindfulness as a way to relieve stress so that employees can work harder?

Thats a good question. Sometimes what is being taught is what I would call pre-mindfulness, which is relaxationlike using a body scan to improve sleep. I dont see any big harm in that; its better than taking an Ambien, for sure. But its pre-meditation. Mindfulness involves both relaxation and becoming more aware of whats going on by focusing the mind and observing non-judgmentally. If you teach somebody how to do that practice, you may not be taking them all the way to full realization, but youre helping them to work with their minds, to become more stable and focused, and to relieve stress, which is certainly a form of suffering.

Youre suggesting that the boss at the office could usurp that practice: Great. Now that youre focused, work harder, work more efficiently. And Ive said before that mindfulness alone could make somebody a better assassin. I have some meditation students who are coming from the corporate world, and the thing I tell them is that there is a second stagethe B-side of the mindfulness recordand that is related to discovery, ethics, and compassion.

I start every student with mindfulness, and so would any classical monastic Buddhistthe Karmapa [the head of the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism], for example. After developing focus and stability, theres a second step, which is making friends with yourself and understanding yourself and the world better. Then the third process, which I call transformation, involves shifting your habits to make them more beneficial for other people. And those practices actually apply very well to leadership and teamwork.

What role does creativity play in this schema?

Creativity is important to me because Im a musician. Thats how Ive made my living. My whole adult life I have had to make things up and get you to pay me for it. Otherwise, I cant pay my rent. What I do is completely subjective in a way. It comes from nowhere; no one can explain where creativity comes from. Yet, whether or not you call yourself a creative, every human being is creative all the time.

Even though from a Buddhist point of view our sense of individuality might be distorted, our sense of being an individual, creative force in the universe is not distorted. Each flower, each tree, each insect has its own individuality. This is a tremendous part of whether people are happy or not.

Related: Why Right Livelihood Isnt Just About Your Day Job

I make a distinction between your offeringpoetry, music, artand your livelihood. They can be the same thing, but that is a huge choice. The day you say, this is what I want as my livelihood, theres another conversation to be had that can be very helpful. I know a lot of people who say, Im doing this, but Id really rather be doing that, and a lot of what they need to learn is simply business skills: how to make contacts, how to negotiate deals, understanding royalties and intellectual property, and so forth.

A lot of the advice you offer seems to have nothing to do with spirituality. For example, you write about the importance of understanding intellectual property. Why did you include those sections?

The whole thrust of the book is saying, find your vision, and once you do, then begin to bring it down to earth. This is the principle of joining heaven and earth, a classical paradigm in Asian thought. Heaven is the progenitor or the primordialthe pure realm of mind or consciousness in Buddhist terms. Earth is the realm of relative reality, which is subject to impermanence. If people have too much heaven, they have vision but dont know what to do with it. If theyre too mired in the earth, they have no vision, no direction, no kind of ultimate sense of what theyre doing.

So, youre right. A lot of what I discuss in the book is earthly wisdom. But many spiritual people have bypassed earthly wisdom at their own risk. Lets say your cabinet is falling off, and you see that you need a Phillips head screwdriver. If you have the right tool and understand that tool, youd be able to fix your cabinet. Otherwise you have somebody whos supposedly enlightened but theyre standing there with a flathead screw and a Phillips head screwdriver. To me, that is not an enlightened person.

It reminds me of when you see a spiritual center with terrible graphic design.

Or a funky website that makes it hard to get information or register, or when you get there, stuff is not working. I firmly believe that theres a way to integrate these things thats positive for everybody.

A lot of people harbor stress and shame around issues of money. Did that factor into your decision to write the book?

Sure. Stress and shame are spiritual problems. Those are not financial problems. Theres nothing inherent that I can see about proper livelihood that needs to be stressful or shameful. But those are obstacles. When someone bypasses that by saying Im spiritually enlightened, but Im stressed out and shamed about livelihood or money, what I hear is thats the next area that really needs to be illuminated. That doesnt mean becoming a greedy, stuffed pig. It means being a healthy person.

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David Nichtern Wants to Make You Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise - Tricycle

By Ayushman Jamwal

What is it like, to wade in your darkness and ride the violent chain reactions of your actions? The latest attempt to understand the iconic villain of the Batman Universe, The Joker, has once again endowed the character with gritty realism, mirroring the horror and liberation of our own personal demons on the movie screen.

Beyond the legendary iconography of the Joker, Todd Phillips beautiful direction and Joaquin Phoenixs masterful performance show the origin of evil in a loveless world, how the underbelly of society can create its own monstrous avatar.

Emotional tether

The emotional tether philosophy states that people can bear the cruelty, unfairness, isolation and indifference of their social and professional lives, if they are tethered to an emotional constant. For many of us, the tether is our parents, siblings, spouse and/or other relatives and friends, who help us nurse the wounds from the slings and arrows of the world. Every superhero possesses that tether to reconnect with sanity as they wade through their and the worlds darkness.

Batman has Alfred who repeatedly reminds him that the Caped Crusader is Bruce Waynes attempt to conquer the chaos of his world. Superman has his mother Martha Kent, Spiderman has his aunt May, Iron Man has his wife Pepper, and there is a universe of characters who play the voices of reason and are the sources of love which keep heroes on the side of order, justice and humanity.

In the poverty-stricken projects of Gotham city, with no handle on a job and a fleeting aspiration to be famous, Arthur Fleck struggles on, caring for his sick mother, creating phantoms of relationships to fill the voids in his life, taking whatever help he can from the city governments fledgling mental healthcare program. The Joker emerges when he loses that one tether, the mother-son bond that turns out to be a fraud, a trauma that eviscerates his identity, his real and delusional ties to others, and most importantly, his fear of cause, consequence, order and death.

Apostles of chaos

The father of Nihilist philosophy Friedrich Nietzsche once said, if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. The Joker represents the perfect symbol of Nihilism, highlighting that civilisation can create its own agents of destruction the forgotten, nameless, faceless class of the urbanised world, who find no fairness or empowerment in society, and who choose to seek purpose as apostles of chaos.

Humanity, time and again, moves from one social order to the next, terming God, state and philosophy as the ultimate social arbiters, but the Joker is the emperor of nothing and unburdened by dogma, becoming the ultimate agent of disorder.

There is no search for a greater mystery, only pursuit of power, by tearing down socio-political institutions of human administration, as they seem meaningless. Power in futility is the ethos of the Joker where Nietzsches God is Dead meets the Bhagwad Gitas Destroyer of Worlds philosophy. The acceptance of the meaninglessness of existence and the rejection of the fear of authority or code is his enlightenment and inspiration. The more comprehensible and mechanical his universe, the more pointless it becomes, and the more powerful his resolve to upend it.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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The joker philosophy in a loveless world - Times of India

Theres a reason people think President Trump has a cult of personality, but it may not be the reason you think.

Yes, there are those who think Trump was delivered to us by God and that his decisions and actions are imbued with divine providence and authority. But that sort of stuff is taking the word cult too literally. It harkens back to pre-Enlightenment notions like the divine right of kings, the Roman imperial cults or the Chinese mandate of heaven which were mainstream, not cultish, beliefs anyway.

As with so many words and ideas, cult of personality in the modern sense probably begins with Karl Marx, who used personality cult in a letter to a friend in 1877. Nikita Khrushchev cited that passage (and several later ones by Marx) in his famous 1956 secret speech, formally titled On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences. That address began the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union and the de-escalation of Stalins terror.

Before I go on, let me state unequivocally that Trump isnt Stalin. Hes not even close.

Khrushchevs speech was monumentally important for numerous reasons, but Im going to focus on the part thats relevant to my point. In Marxist lingo, cult of personality is synonymous with cult of the individual indeed, Khrushchev used the phrases interchangeably in his speech. Both terms refer to the idea that a single person can be greater than the party, or wiser than the ideology the party stands for. Think: I alone can fix it. Such a mindset is a threat to the power of the party and the legitimacy of its doctrines.

Stalin didnt care. He encouraged, often through murder and terror, the idea that his judgment trumped any other authority or doctrine. He was infallible.

And it worked. During Khrushchevs speech, delivered to the cream of the Communist Party leadership, some members of the audience grew physically ill and had to leave the room it was that alien to their ears to hear Stalin criticized. Theres still a cult of Stalin in Russian. One might even say that Vladimir Putin is its high priest.

Of course, having dictatorial control over a country and possessing the will to murder and terrorize tens of millions makes it easier to cultivate a cult of personality.

None of that has much relevance to American politics today. But theres a simpler reason for a cult of personality: Its the only sustainable line of defense. Stalin violated party ideology all the time. He contradicted his past positions cavalierly, adopting and discarding ideas on a whim. He would even change his views to test his loyalists. Today, insist that chocolate ice cream is the best flavor and get everyone to agree with you. That way, if anyone disagrees tomorrow when you say its vanilla, youll know who the potential traitors in your midst are.

This is where Trumps cult of personality comes in. For several years theres been a kind of competition on the right to come up with a coherent intellectual or ideological framework to support Trumps presidency. Every single one that comes out of the clouds of theory to get close to the reality on the ground has crashed. Hes a nationalist who puts America first but says well await Saudi Arabias say-so on a military strike against Iran. He says he wants free trade but also thinks tariffs are good.

Just this past week, the same people who insisted that Trump would never collude with a foreign nation for his political interest are now defending collusion with foreign nation for his political interest. The people who turn crimson with rage when you point out Trumps decades of corrupt business practices now insist his only interest in the Bidens is his concern about corruption. They say its outrageous that Bidens son sat on the board of a Ukrainian company when Biden was vice president, but they also say its fine to have a daughter and son-in-law duo running vast swaths of foreign and domestic policy while also making a fortune from their business interests around the world. Enemies are sinful or decadent when they lie or cheat on their wives, but who are you to judge Comrade Trump?

Theres no halfway defensible ideological, intellectual or moral standard that Trump doesnt violate, often routinely. A cult of personality that replies Trumps right or his enemies are worse before the question is even asked is the only place to hide.

A doctrine of infallibility is the only defense of this deeply fallible man.

Jonah Goldberg is a Creators Syndicate columnist.

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Trump's defenders have adopted a doctrine of infallibility | News, Sports, Jobs - Williamsport Sun-Gazette

By: Professor William Kolbrener

The BDS movement in the US gets its lifeblood from the progressive academy post-humanist professors with a simplistic ideological narrative, and millennial students who assent to a tweetable narrative they can easily understand. In this narrative, Israel stands for the evils of Western modernity while a fantasy Palestine, sanitized of religious fundamentalism, intolerance and political extremism, stands for the alternative. An illiberal pedagogy, now dominant in the Humanities, drives home this plainly political agenda.

In the 1960s, the Chilean revolutionary pedagogue Paolo Freire, inPedagogy of the Oppressed, argued that the ruling class ensure education limits reflection, creativity and innovation among the people.

The resulting lack of historical contextualization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Middle Eastern Studies Departments, when combined with the lack of historical memory among millennials, makes combatting BDS a particularly difficult challenge. An undergraduate, for example, will tweet theIrish Times Arab-Israeli Conflict in 10 Points which fails to mention the dates 1948 or 1973, without realizing the list may be controversial.

And its not just the millennial assent to BDS which is problematic. Also damaging is the surreptitious entry of anti-Israel sentiment into more moderate discourses about Israel. Moderation, reason, and liberalism per se are all now held under suspicion. BDS and the progressive coalition that supports it undermine the very language of liberal democracy and the principles of education which have informed it for at least a century. Indeed, it is the collapse of liberalism in America the emergence of populist left and right that most challenges Israeli claims to existence.

THE NEW PEDAGOGY: EDUCATION AS IDEOLOGICAL INITIATION

The attack on Israel as a central part of a neo-liberal hegemony is inculcated in a distinctive pedagogy in the contemporary post-humanist the human is also a category of domination, apparently Humanities. Famously, in the 1960s, the Chilean revolutionary pedagogue Paolo Freire, inPedagogy of the Oppressed, argued that the ruling class ensure education limits reflection, creativity and innovation among the people. Freire opposed this, believing that true education, and indeed civilization, depend upon dialogue, and if the relationship between educator and student is modelled on the Hegelian master-slave relationship, then the possibility of genuine communication is undermined.

Today, a new pedagogy of the oppressed manifests itself in the American academy, taking two forms. First, those enlightened to the colonial usurpation of Palestine by Israel enact the banking model of education in which the knowing woke professor deposits information into the passive mind of the student. This education-as-ideological-initiation parallels the model of education Freire criticized, encouraging acquiescence not initiative.

Second, students certain of the singular narrative they have imbibed, then themselves become agents working against critical reflection, as they refuse engagement or argument with other frameworks whether in other classrooms, on social media, or at home. Applied to Israel/Palestine, this new pedagogy of the oppressed involves the woke saying to those who disagree with them: dont you dare communicate with me. Indeed the invocation of rational discourse and democracy is viewed as entailing a surreptitious form of intellectual conquest. Skepticism towards liberal values and to Israel, now framed as the distillation of all the evils of the neo-liberal West is cast as critical thinking and becomes the most visible and effective form of virtue-signaling.

FRANKFURT SCHOOL

Central to the story of how Israel became associated with the historical sins of neo-liberalism, the failure of enlightenment, and the fundamentalism of religion is the work of the Frankfurt School in post-World War Two Germany, particularly of two Jews, Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Founded in the early years of the Weimar Republic, the Frankfurt School brought together Hegelian philosophy, Marxist political thought, and eventually Freudian psychoanalysis all under the rubric of a critique of Western capitalism. Under the threat of Nazism, Horkheimer and Adorno moved their School for Social Research from Frankfurt to Geneva, and eventually to New York in 1935.

Though made up of European intellectuals, including the neo-Freudian Eric Fromm and the sociologist Leo Lowenthal, by 1940 all the members of the Institute had become American citizens, with the Frankfurt critique of Western culture now emanating from Southern California. Outside of academic circles, Adorno became known for the proclamation no poetry after Auschwitz, by which he meant that the Nazi Death camps marked the end of any pretense of Western refinement and culture. How, after all, do you write a sonnet in the shadow of Auschwitz?

The pursuit of enlightenment and rational universalism, in Adornos view, led directly to the Nazis, with the distinction between civilization and barbarism blurred in the Final Solution. Enlightenment, in this reading, contains the seeds of its own destruction, the eventual domination of the world through a reason that had been rendered fully instrumental in the service of the State, leading ultimately to genocide. That is, for Adorno, the promises of enlightenment freedom led to fascism and the death camps.

In a bizarre, even perverse historical twist, the humanists of the 1980s appropriated the Frankfurt School antipathy towards Western enlightenment, providing a legacy for todays progressives, who have turned their suspicions against Israel and the Jews. Starting in the 1970s, Michel Foucault, the most influential figure in the humanities over the past four decades, adopted the perspective of the Frankfurt School for social and cultural history.

Writing on love, sex, mental illness, and the prison system, Foucault found all aspects of Western life to be in the fields of power, with hisDiscipline and Punishturning the prison into a metaphor for Western cultural domination. For Foucault and his followers, notwithstanding appearances, all social relations are governed by power. All reason is nothing but instrumental reason, whatever its garb, whatever its self-image. In fact, Foucault shows the ways in which the systemic institutional injustices of the civilized West have been pursued in the name of enlightenment values.

A self-acknowledged follower of Foucault, the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton gave voice to the still-prevalent academic gospel in his popularLiterary Theoryof 1983, that reason must be understood as a dominative instrument of patriarchy and Enlightenment, affirming with the latter pairing that enlightenment shares patriarchys bad name.

The Marxist literary critic, Edward Said, still the guiding-spirit of many American Middle Eastern Study Departments in America, re-packaged Foucault, calling the Enlightenment the master-sign of both Orientalism and colonialism. In the now canonicalOrientalism bridging between the continental literary criticism of the 70s and Marxist political activism Said linked Zionism, for him the colonialist projectpar excellence, and enlightenment rationality. That therealaims of the purveyors of enlightenment are power and domination is writ large in the Jewish State, standing as a symbol for all the excesses of the West.

Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern Studies Departments may currently be dominated by a post-modern ethos asserting the relativity of all values. Yet with the Frankfurt School ethos implicit in contemporary cultural and social critique emanating from Humanities Departments, Israel and the Jews serve as an anchor for a surreptitious new morality and an accompanying sanctimony, as not Nazi Germany but Israel represents the dystopian apotheosis of Western civilization. What starts with Frankfurt School as a critique of enlightenment reason and fascism is now turned against Israel and the Jews.

That newly-elected members of the US Congress are preparing for a visit to Israel/Palestine, expecting to find what the Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub described as an Auschwitz in every city in Palestine shows the extent to which the Frankfurt School language condemning the Nazis has been turned on its head, now applied to Zionists and Jews.

THE UNIVERSITY

Progressives schooled in this social theory think of the modern university ascomplicitin this process of domination; a self-sustaining bastion of privileged neo-liberalism. In a post inElectronic Intifada, university administrators are said to be deeply embeddedin the project of corporate neoliberalism. Further, Zionism and neoliberalism converge, with the contemporary university said to align itself a page right out ofOrientalism with Zionism as a settler-colonial project. For progressives, colonialism is not only the privileged lens through which to understand the Jewish presence in the region, butthe only one.

For an even more colorful set of (mixed) metaphors, theNew Arabwebsite, decries the speaking tongues of liberal Zionism upon which Israeli-American neoliberal imperialism hangs its machine guns and parks its drones. The self-proclaimed objectiveNew Arabgoes on to associate rampaging Israelis slaughtering Palestinians and destroying their mosques with the amalgamation of Islamophobia, liberal Zionism, and neo-liberal imperialism.

On the pro-Palestinian web, political commentary turns into cartoon allegory. In this story, Israel, the struggling and the admittedly sometimes-challenged democracy is the villain, with the terrorist organization Hamas, remade through the romanticizing progressive lens, a band of heroic freedom fighters. Academics may not express this perspective in such hyperbolic term, but in concert with the BDS movement, they create a moral cosmos, as rigid as any to be found in conventional theologies, in which Israel represents all evils the colonialist nation-state, the false promises of liberal enlightenment, as well as the fundamentalism of religion.

With the wrongs of the West displaced onto the Jewish State, undergraduates in elite programs in America view the conflict through the allegorical lens provided by their progressive professors and anathamatize Israel. With that lens in place, progressives are taken in by the cynical uses of Islam, with Linda Sarsour the master of this art. Sarsours version of Islam, transformed for the Western media into a liberation theology, stands as a protest against the dominating ideologies of Western Judeo-Christianity. Islam, however, no less than Judaism or Christianity, carries with it the very hierarchical values against which progressives position themselves most adamantly.

But the Islamic purveyors of BDS mask their theological agenda, claimingtheirmonotheism enacts cutting-edge cultural and political practices, especially when it comes to gender, and on the way convince liberals that all evils of the West are somehow distilled in the support for the Jewish State. Indeed, the BDS movement and its progressive advocates and enablers embrace a version of the very theological movements to which most liberals still have a visceral antipathy.

Left populists, and those liberals embracing progress, in their political zeal, forget that the liberal values and institutions they have rejected, in fact enable their political voice and standing namely the belief in tolerance, a neutral public sphere and free speech. The millennial break with historical memory, which progressive university professors both cultivate and feed upon, fail to acknowledge that free speech is part of a 200-year-old, indeed fragile experiment, attempted in only a few corners of the world (and now failing in many of them).

That the current Israeli government has aligned itself with demagogues, and waged war against democratic institutions makes foregrounding the importance of liberal institutions and democracy even more critical. This emphatically doesnotmean siding with right-wing populists Bibi-supporting evangelists and MAGA Trumpers who are apologists for the idea of liberty and not its practice, but rather showing those committed to democracy that Zionism is an outgrowth of liberalism, not its contradiction.

Enlightenment and Zionism, as Adorno argued, are indeed linked. While the injustices wrought by the single-minded pursuit of enlightenment the domination of nature by instrumental reason have not been fully redressed, havent we learned in recent years that an imperfect reason is preferable to the savagery of demagogues and absolutists? Can we finally give up that very particular Western notion which has the status of a given in Humanist education today that enlightenment is worse than its alternatives?

Today, liberal Jews fail to remember what would have been obvious to Jews before World War Two, habituated to hatred and violence from both Left and Right. Intersectionality excludes Jewsnotbecause they represent, among all minorities, an unacceptable form of difference, not to be assimilated into a coalition of the oppressed.

But progressives, with their BDS agenda, push Jews away from their intersectional gatherings, because Israel is seen to represent all the core ideals Patriarchy, Nationalism, and Enlightenment rationality against which all other repressed minorities are united. The recent exclusion of Jews from intersectional gatherings is not then based upon a failure to understand Jewish minority claims, but on an ideology-driven image of the Jews and Israel as representing the antithesis of all progressive values.

But this war against the Jews, from both Left and Right, isalsoa war against the democratic traditions of the West. Zionism is part of the civilizational process,partof the liberal tradition. As it was in the 1930s in Germany, todays hatred of the Jews manifests the Wests own suicidal tendencies, its penchant for the irrational, now abetted by populist extremism on both sides.

Progressives may pay lip-service to the democratic institutions, but antisemitism reveals not only their enthrallment to the worlds oldest hatred, but to a populism that takes precedence over democratic values, and an educational tradition which values ideology over critical thinking. Those of us who are devoted to the traditions of classical liberalism should understand that BDS and its progressive advocates not only undermine the Jewish State, but also the very democratic institutions upon which our civilization depends. (isgap.org)

This article was originally published in Fathom.

William Kolbrener, professor of English Literature at Bar Ilan University, earned his MA from Oxford and his PhD from Columbia University. He is the author of books on the eighteenth-century British proto-feminist Mary Astell, as well as John Milton, the author of Paradise Lost. He has also written The Last Rabbi on Joseph Soloveitchik, and a collection of personal essays, Open Minded Torah. Kolbrener was a lecturer on the 2019 ISGAP-Oxford Summer Institute for Curriculum Development in Critical Antisemitism Studies.

Excerpt from:
Poisonous Pedagogy: Israel Hatred and the Collapse of Liberal Education - The Jewish Voice

Most people have heard that the Buddha was enlightened and that Buddhists seek enlightenment. But what does that mean?"Enlightenment" is an English word that can mean several things. In the West, the Age of Enlightenment was a philosophical movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that promoted science and reason over myth and superstition, so in Western culture, enlightenment is often associated with intellect and knowledge. But Buddhist enlightenment is something else.

To add to the confusion, "enlightenment" has been used as the translation for several Asian words that don't mean the same thing. For example, several decades ago English speakers were introduced to Buddhism through the writing of D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966), a Japanese scholar who had lived for a time as a Rinzai Zen monk. Suzuki used "enlightenment" to translate the Japanese word satori, derived from the verb satoru, "to know."

This translation was not without justification. But in usage, satori usually refers to an experience of insight into the true nature of reality. It has been compared to the experience of opening a door, but to open a door still implies a separation from what's inside the door. Partly through Suzuki's influence, the idea of spiritual enlightenment as a sudden, blissful, transformative experience became embedded in Western culture. However, that's misleading.

Although Suzuki and some of the first Zen teachers in the West explained enlightenment as an experience that one can have at moments, most Zen teachers and Zen texts tell you that enlightenment is not an experience but a permanent state: a stepping through the door permanently. Not even satori is enlightenment itself. In this, Zen is in alignment with how enlightenment is viewed in other branches of Buddhism.

Bodhi, a Sanskrit and Pali word that means "awakening," also is often translated as "enlightenment."

In Theravada Buddhism, bodhi is associated with the perfection of insight into the Four Noble Truths, which end dukkha (suffering, stress, dissatisfaction). The person who has perfected this insight and abandoned all defilements is an arhat, one who is liberated from the cycle of samsara, or endless rebirth. While alive, he enters a sort of conditional nirvana, and at death, he enjoys the peace of complete nirvana and escape from the cycle of rebirth.

Most of us perceive the things and beings around us as distinctive and permanent. But this view is a projection. Instead, the phenomenal world is an ever-changing nexus of causes and conditions or Dependent Origination. Things and beings, empty of self-essence, are neither real nor not real: the doctrine of The Two Truths. Thoroughly perceiving sunyata dissolves the fetters of self-clinging that cause our unhappiness. The dual way of distinguishing between self and other yields to a permanent nondual outlook in which all things are interrelated.

In Mahayana Buddhism, the idea of practice is that of the bodhisattva, the enlightened being who remains in the phenomenal world to bring all to enlightenment. The bodhisattva ideal is more than altruism; it reflects the reality that none of us is separate. "Individual enlightenment" is an oxymoron.

A branch of Mahayana Buddhism, the Tantric schools of Vajrayana Buddhism, believes that enlightenment can come all at once in a transformative moment. This goes hand-in-hand with the belief in Vajrayana that the various passions and hindrances of life, rather than being obstacles, can be fuel for transformation into enlightenment that can occurin a single moment, or at least in this lifetime. Key to this practice is a belief in inherent Buddha Nature, the innate perfection of our inner natures that simply waits for us to recognize it.This belief in the ability to achieve enlightenment instantly is not the same as the Sartori phenomenon, however. For Vajrayana Buddhists, enlightenment is not a glimpse through the door but a permanent state.

According to legend, when the Buddha realized enlightenment he said something to the effect of "Isn't it remarkable!All beings are already enlightened!" This state is what is known asBuddha Nature, which forms a core part of Buddhist practice in some schools. In Mahayana Buddhism, Buddha Nature is the inherent Buddhahood of all beings. Because all beings are already Buddha, the task is not to attain enlightenment but to realize it.

The Chinese master Huineng (638-713), the Sixth Patriarch of Ch'an (Zen), compared Buddhahood to a moon obscured by clouds. The clouds represent ignorance and defilements. When these are dropped away, the moon, already present, is revealed.

What about those sudden, blissful, transformative experiences? You may well have had these moments and felt you were onto something spiritually profound. Such an experience, while pleasant and sometimes accompanied by genuine insight,is not, by itself, enlightenment. For most practitioners, a blissful spiritual experience not grounded in the practice of the Eightfold Path to achieve enlightenment will not likely be transformative. Chasing blissful states can itself become a form of desire and attachment, and the path toward enlightenment is to surrender clinging and desire.

Zen teacher Barry Magid said of Master Hakuin, in "Nothing Is Hidden":

The teacher and monk Shunryu Suzuki (1904-1971) said of enlightenment:

Both legend and documented evidence suggestthat skilled practitioners and enlightened beings may be capable of extraordinary, even supernatural mental powers. However, these skills are not evidence of enlightenment, nor are they somehow essential to it. Here, too, we are warned not to chase these mental skills at the risk of mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.

If you wonder if you have become enlightened, it is almost certain you have not. The only way to test one's insight is to present it to a dharma teacher. Don't be dismayed if your achievement falls apart under a teacher's scrutiny. False starts and mistakes are anecessary part of the path, and if and when you achieve enlightenment, it will be built on a solid foundation and you will have no mistake about it.

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What Do Buddhists Mean by ... - Learn Religions