In a previous entry (Do You Really Want Peace on Earth?) I mentioned the upcoming Mindfulness Day. We had a nice event, meeting new and old friends and enjoying “golden wind” on a clear autumn afternoon. In my presentation, one of three offered that day, I talked about why we have problems and how to solve them.

All problems come from selfishness due to self-preservation. The accretion of four billion years of self-preserving action and its results (karma) has created hard shells with which we shroud our individual and collective selves, like shellfish. Confined and limited, we can no longer move freely, knowing and acting well.

No one likes the selfishness of others, but everyone loves one’s own. Selfish individuals or groups are hated, hit, hypnotized in hubris, but eventually humiliated due to their own karma, like iron crumbling in its own rust. Like cancer, selfishness grows from its essence and destroys…

Sixteen Webster University students and staff, part of the Webster Works Worldwide team, arrived at the Missouri Zen Center early Wednesday morning to sit zazen (seated meditation), transplant trees and flowers in our garden, and make repairs to our building. After a few hours they and our staff enjoyed lunch with bon appétit under the warm sun surrounded by trees and flowers, with baby mice and a big snake they found rounding out our garden’s abundant biodiversity.

Before starting zazen, I talked about the global problématique (all ecological, economic, and ethical crises intertwined) and the sixth mass extinction – the first to be caused by humans – that threatens to destroy the whole global life system. Then, I talked about how we can avoid our catastrophic demise by sitting calm and clear, stopping our karma (cognate of ceremony, repeated action resulting in habit), and becoming truthful and peaceful, like a tree…

Killing the Buddha, a great web magazine that was dormant for awhile, is back.

The magazine, which was founded by two talented religion reporters, Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau, has been resurrected, and is already offering some thought-provoking essays about belief.

Jeff is a friend, and the author of the recently published “The Family.” He also runs a great religion blog based at NYU called The Revealer.

KTB was notable in its heyday for being a place where writers could question belief - theirs and others’. Wrestling with one’s faith is a time-honored tradition and KTB is, as it says on its newly revamped site, “a place for brazen stories of belief — lost and found and lost again.”

Check it out. And make sure to check out the mag’s archives section.