SITE MAP A

From Y2K Khatmandu to the Summer of Love 2004

American-Buddha.com went live in 2001, born of an impulse too powerful to be denied.  It has opened vistas into the minds of creative thinkers, and evolved into a growth-enhancing labyrinth that teaches its creators as they learn from the process of developing the site, and thereby take another step along the path.  This site map provides a history of the site's evolution so visitors can taste the logic of the experience, and understand the passion that fed its development.

Chogyam Trungpa said we'd eventually discover what it is to be American Buddhas.  If you think you can figure out what that means, read some of Trungpa's poems in First Thought Best Thought, and you won't be so sure anymore. Tara Carreon, the webmistress, aka AmbuFortunaZapataGaudi, started in on this Buddhist thing way back.  Here's a picture of a bunch of pre-Buddhists whoopin' it up in her living room back in 1979.  She saw Tibetan Buddhism in its nascent stages here in the west.  She started with the Nyingmapas in Southern Oregon in the late seventies, under the leadership of Dudjom Rinpoche and Gyatrul Rinpoche.  In Santa Monica in the eighties and early nineties, Yeshe Nyingpo Los Angeles was her living room, and her back yard.

In 1999-2000, Tara went to Nepal with her daughter Ana.  She had New Years Eve dinner at the Yak & Yeti, amid the splendid pomp of the international jet set mingling with wealthy Tibetan lamas.  Then and there she decided that there needed to be a new Buddhism for this time.  It became clear to her that the old Buddhism is a tired relic of past times, and revitalization is required.  Tara's Boudha Journal brings to life images and her thoughts from that trip.  After her return, she began to ask difficult questions, realizing that Buddhists are in sharp disagreement about what the Buddha really taught.  She had presumed that Buddhists all believe the same things, but discovered this was not true.  The theory of voidness is little understood by most Buddhists, and Alan Watts' essay The World As Emptiness is quite a bit different from Shantideva's approach to the same topic in his authoritative  Bodhisattvacharyavatara.  What could anyone make of the ravings of Robert Thurman?  While many are attracted to the clarity of an author like Takuan Soho, the Zen monk whose letters to a samurai friend are translated in The Unfettered Mind, rarely do we find anyone who demonstrates such clarity in their way of life.  Tara's increasing doubts about Buddhism reached a peak in mid-2000, flowering into a mushroom cloud of heresy in her now-notorious essay, Another View on Whether Tibetan Buddhism is Working in the West.  In one well-hated line, she observed: "Americans have no need to provide a cultural hothouse in which to preserve a displaced theocratic culture."  Thus, at the turn of the millennium, a new iconoclastic voice rang out.

Exile on the Net

The orthodox response to Another View was well-nigh apocalyptic.  Tara was branded as "diseased" in one of the first web-screeds responding to the article.  The now-defunct Tricycle bulletin board, which had been moribund until Tara posted Another View for discussion, underwent a period of feverish growth that continued for over a year and culminated in an explosion of acrimony that led to a permanent, completely unexplained shutdown of the entire board.  A compendium of those often-hostile interactions with traditional Buddhists on the Trike Boards was boiled down into Frequently Asked Questions. The encounter with the mean streak in modern Buddhists prompted us to write A Flaming Fistful of Reactionary Wisdom, a satirical enumeration of standard put-downs that Buddhists use to unhorse opponents in verbal jousting matches.  Eventually word trickled in that Another View had provoked a response from Dzongsar Khentse, a lama whose father clearly communicated his attitude of arrogant overlordship in an infamous Tricycle interview, Words for the West, now available online only at this website.   Dzongsar's attempt to respond to Another View, Tibetan Buddhism In The West, frankly admitted that while charlatans abound in the Tibetan clergy, as long as westerners are willing to be tricked, phony lamas like himself will be happy to exploit them.  Lame-brained as the response was, it was lauded as a clever riposte.  As resistance to her ideas resounded everywhere, Tara looked for signs that others were finding faults in Buddhism, and began discovering some Buddhists who were Disillusioned by Authoritarian Doctrines.  She found some writings by folks like John Horgan, whose essay Why I Can't Embrace Buddhism touches on many of the same concerns as Another View.  She learned the story of Dr. Rick Strassman, who was drummed out of his Zen Buddhist sangha for Stepping On Holy Toes after he performed clinical experiments with DMT, a powerful psychedelic that Strassman thinks might be the chemical door that mediates passage of the spirit at birth and death, as explained in his book DMT, The Spirit Molecule.  As Dr. Strassman's story showed, eviction from one's faith by politically motivated Buddhists is a painful experience.  Facing that pain became what the website was about.

The Authoritarian Iceberg

The website developed resources for contemplating the phenomenon of authoritarianism in general, seeking parallels between Tibetan Buddhist indoctrination and the principles of authoritarian domination.  We republished the Zimbardo Prison Experiment study, and analyzed "parallels between the Buddhist cult experience and the voluntary assumption of a prisoner-role" in an essay entitled Sleepers Awake!, which argued that "modern American Buddhists must take up the work of knocking on the cocoons of modern Buddhist sleepers who have forgotten freedom in the dream of joyful subservience."  Indeed, much of the social activism among Eastern Buddhist clergy has been learned from Western political traditions of dissent.  We had never considered critiques of Tibetans as aristocratic overlords at any great length, but now, as we dug deeper, we learned that corruption in the Tibetan Buddhist theocracy reaches the very core.  We made our trek toward total disillusionment by exploring the hidden side of the Dalai Lama myth: the serial murder of four of the Dalai Lama's incarnations in The Dalai Lamas, Prisoners of the Potala Junta; the true meaning of the Kalachakra Tantra in the Shadow of the Dalai Lama; and the Dalai Lama's involvement with tainted causes in His Material Highness, by Christopher Hitchens.  To round things off, we got a politically astute view of what Tibet was really like under the Potala Junta in Michael Parenti's Friendly Feudalism.  These disillusioning revelations are only the tip of the authoritarian iceberg hidden beneath the surface of Buddhism, but they should be enough to dampen some of the irrational exuberance that afflicts many modern believers.

Eventually we began breaking through the Tibetan Wall of Silence.  Tara got emails from people who had bad things to say about their experiences with lamas.  We got an email from a sexually-exploited student of Sonam Kazi, who had already sent it to the Dalai Lama, who of course never answered.  That's how we get mail at American-Buddha -- when the Dalai Lama won't answer.  Tara posted that email and others that followed on the Kazi Family Values thread.  One of Sogyal Rinpoche's former lovers sent an email that spoke of  "a great festering wound permeating the hearts of so many practicioners," and in a second, she disclosed that Sogyal said "that when a Master meets a Dakini, he has to rape her to gain her secrets."  We exhumed posts from the Google groups by Mary Finnigan, who was raped by Sogyal, who reported on the lawsuit an American woman filed against him, and told many people she was working on a book to expose Sogyal's misconduct.  Finnigan's book, however, was never published.  Pema Zangmo revealed her intimacies with Sogyal, and her Thorn In The Lotus essay on the damage women suffer in relationships with abusive lamas started one of the most popular threads the bulletin board has ever seen.  As we excavated the scandals, the bodies piled up.  AmLearning gave us more abundant dirt on Sogyal and other lamas, plus very blunt disclosures about Sakya Trizin, a top-level theocrat so wooden-headed he thought oral sex could get a woman pregnant.  We reprinted June Campbell's unwelcome outing of Kloset Kalu Rinpoche's affair with June, which brought a deluge of slander down on her from Tibetan Buddhist loyalists.  We shone a light on Penor Rinpoche's twin follies -- Steven Seagal and Jetsunma, who would be the culminating shame of the Nyingmas, but for the greedy and outrageous Kusum Lingpa and his gaggle of phony tulkus like Lama Fabulous of Kansas City.  Not to ignore the Kagyuptas, we breathed some life into the always-smoldering Karmapa Controversy, that features two tulkus for one throne, brutal combat between rival monastic gangs for control of a monastery, forgeries, lawsuits, and the likely murder of a famous tulku.  We reminded readers how Chogyam Trungpa's Vajradhatu killed the news that Osel Tendzin murdered at least two people, keeping him as venerable guru in the new Shambhala cult, while burying the names of his victims.  Eventually the smell of burning tulku-hide got so strong, it drew the attention of Trungpa's two stepsons, Ashoka and Gesar Mukpo, who being new to the family business, got meaner than junkyard dogs in defense of their officially-recognized divinity.  Finally, in Born In Tibet, Again -- The Exile of the Twelfth Trungpa Tulku, we exposed the secret corporate takeover of "Shambhala"  by the Eleventh Trungpa's son, who violated his father's succession plan by usurping the Twelfth Trungpa Tulku's authority and enormous worldly wealth, and is even now keeping the new tulku hidden in Tibet like a 21st-Century Count of Monte Cristo.

Some people have asked why we want to rake muck like this.  Like Gyatrul Rinpoche always said, "Motivation is everything."  Actually, Charles aspired to be a muckraker the first time he heard the word, and Tara put together the highschool magazine.  So doing a gripe site was inevitable, but we never thought we would have this much to gripe about.  But, like a jilted lover seeking solace against loneliness by reviewing evidence of their lover's faithlessness, this website catalogs the faults of wilful deceivers.  We hope it may supply others with similar relief.  If you read enough of this stuff, regardless of your view of divinity, you will realize that the lovely appearances presented by religious teachers are but the surface of a lotus pond hiding a tar pit filled with the bones of ignorant creatures, drawn to the cool, serene waters of the lake, and unable to escape.  As a final word for those mad enough to seek the water of spiritual inspiration -- just come to this website instead, and we'll get you through those long, dark, nights of the soul.  Hell, soon you'll be wishing they were longer.

Transcending Dogma

The realization that spiritual organizations are a trap, not a vehicle to transcendence, is not a happy discovery.  Most students discover the problem after what may seem like a waste of the most vital years of one's life.  Worse, after disillusionment with one's religion, it's not like everything suddenly sparks up beautiful and fresh.  For a while, the world seems more barren than before, and confronting the world without dogmatic armor may feel like a painful bore. Disillusioned belief-addicts feel utterly bereft without a devotional anchor.  Disillusioned meditators still want to find the peace they sought in meditation.  Fearful of throwing away their only connection to spiritual reality, ex-students remain suspended between tarnished beliefs and a dawning skepticism.

Don't remain long in this place of uncertainty.  Read something like Thinley Norbu's Words For The West, who makes it very clear that Tibetans want you to shut up, do as you're told, and leave your offering with everybody else's.  Or read The Anti-Gurus, John Horgan's review of The Guru Papers. Dispel your delusions and realize that authoritarian dogmatists are not friendly to your freedom.  You have simply been suffering from TIDS, and need to get on with the work of transcending dogma -- from the congenial dogma of enlightenment and salvation, to the morbid self-titillation of damnation savored by Hell's Habitues.

If you are part of the Buddhist cult scene, you will probably have to extract the poisoned arrow that was fired into you during an initiation rite in which you vowed loyalty to an authority figure for the lineage.  A vow creates a hook of conditioning that makes it doubly difficult to discard the dogma.  By taking the vow, you became part of a sacred in-group.  This in-group reinforced the mutual delusion that the guru's devotees are the privileged of the age, sharing front row seats at the cosmic drama with their precious guru.  Once afflicted with this self-delusion, a devotee will stand on his shaved head for a week while the guru loots his bank account, if told that the guru says it's necessary to save the world.  Check out Jetsunma's antics in Buddha From Brooklyn.  To understand how Jetsunma made her students into pliable sacred robots, check out our little joke at her expense, Vee Have Veys of Making You Love Sentient Beings.  Jetsunma, who was once arrested by the Maryland State Police for battery on a nun, was a very out-front negative dominatrix, with a knack for infecting the hyperactive, over-achieving, can-do American Singles with Student-Side TIDS.  I guess scientists can now pilot ordinary flies like model airplanes, using radio-control and cybernetic implants in the fly's brain, but Jetsunma subjugated modern Americans far more impressively with little more than chutzpah and a phony Tibetan title.  The Bulletin Board thread on this woman, Jetsunma: Queen for A Day has always been a hotspot, and justly so, because we can learn so much from her colossal vanity, and the ridiculous way Tibetan lamas inflated her profile with a bogus tulku title.  But the Tibetans are hardly alone in their clerical hypocrisy.  We have plenty of cosmic jackasses on display at Buddhist Babylon, so drop on by and be cheered up by all the gaping assholes you didn't have the bonehead spiritual impulse to fall on your face and worship.

We are vulnerable to adopting a dogma because we are looking for functional conditioning.  We have to find functional conditioning, because in our modern world, it seems to be our personal responsibility to find and adopt a belief system from among myriads of competing views.  The freedom to choose your mode of imprisonment induces vertigo, and we end up believing something.  And whatever draws you into a dogma, it's common sense that will drive you out.  For each person, the last straw will be something different, but eventually those of genuine intelligence, unable to stomach the self-deception, will take the road back to independent understanding. See my discussion of this process in Disillusioned by Authoritarian Doctrines.

Transcending dogma is a slogan to get you up in the morning, because the pathology of TIDS is serious.  When you try to walk away from a pathological attachment to a guru, you may need slogans, because some mornings you will not want to get up,  face the sun, or do anything, without dogma.  In the language of heroin addiction, you are Jonesin'.  Inside your being, there's just Jones, the insatiable need for a fix of dogma.  You feel tired, confused, beaten like a twenty-first century cybernetic ragdoll, and it's just not doable.  Not without dogma, a face to put on the universe, an answer to the question yawning in your face -- what the fuck have I done with my life?  Your pillow provides the only place to hide.  You never realized until then that dogma wasn't a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.  The hook is in.

At such times, it is important to leverage your strengths.  You need to make use of your friends.  You are not the first person digging yourself out of the hole of self-delusion.  Others have cut a path that you can follow.  The use of the mind as an independent organ of understanding has actually been explored by past generations of humans, and their writings are extant.  On this website, in fact.

Free Thinking

Maybe you think you're not good enough to think freely.  The writings of Thomas Paine provide an antidote to that kind of negativisim.  Paine rejected the strictures of tradition, because past agreements should not bind the current generation: "It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its government shall be organised, or how administered."  (Paine, The Rights of Man.)  Paine's writing is potent stuff.  During the winter of 1777, George Washington had nothing to offer his revolutionary soldiers.  Many of Washington's men hadn't seen their homes and families for over a year, had been paid no wages for months, and had already stayed on twice or three times their original six-month commitments.  He had no money to pay them, and the winter was bitter cold.  He assembled them and read aloud from Paine's The Crisis, which opens with the timeless invocation, "These are the times that try men's souls."  In The Crisis, Paine accused God of having "relinquished the government of the world, and given us up to the care of devils." He derided the king of Britain's asserted moral superiority, arguing that the king could make no better claim on heaven's mercy than "a common murderer, a highwayman, or a house-breaker."  Paine's words hit the mark -- the great majority of Washington's troops re-enlisted for another term, which turned the tide of the American revolution. But for Washington's timely resort to literature, the revolution might have been lost right there at Valley Forge.  More than a revolutionary firebrand, great as that honor is, Paine exemplified the spirit and method of independent critical thinking.

Learning From Nature

In The Age of Reason, Paine repudiates religious dogmatism and asserts that we can directly discern God's thoughts and intentions by contemplating the universe and the natural world.  As Einstein said, "in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people." This view of the natural world as teacher was fundamental to the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations record the thoughts of a man who drew lessons from nature, and as a king, tried to extend the nobility of kingship to all of his subjects.  In our own time, this tradition of combining natural history and philosophy was elaborated  by Loren Eiseley, whose classic, The Immense Journey, blends scientific knowledge with transcendent contemplation. In architecture, which gives form to human aspirations, Antonio Gaudi copied natural forms in steel, concrete, plaster, stone and ceramics, to express his vision of perfection in the earthly realm.

The Enlightenment and The Empirical View

Thomas Paine was rooted in the European Enlightenment, which had grown from the rational approach to the acquisition of knowledge expounded by Rene Descartes.  The rationalist view was sharpened to a weapon by revolutionary writers like Voltaire, whose acid satire Candide discarded volumes of tradition and hypocrisy to speak aloud what most people dared not whisper then, and still fear to speak today -- that religion is a farce, that the world is ruled by hypocrisy, and that the common fellow is the victim of every scoundrel with a clerical or military uniform.  Voltaire and Paine used rational thought to smash the idols of religion and aristocratic privilege, rejecting superstition without fear of thunderbolts falling or excommunication threatening, although the aristocrats might still exact their punishments.

Everyone aspiring to free thought must become accustomed to criticizing beliefs based on faith, tradition, and authority.  We must understand the empirical basis of knowledge, which is the attitude jurors are told to adopt when considering hearing the evidence and testimony they've seen and heard in trial.  I have asked many jurors, before allowing them to be sworn to sit on a jury that passed judgment on my client, whether they thought they could read minds.  Of the hundreds of people of whom I have asked this question, none ever said they could.  We laugh it off as a fun joke, as a question I had to ask "because we live near Ashland," a notoriously New-Agey locale.  Everybody laughs, but some of them are lying.  They think they can read minds -- they just won't admit it. I ask the question rhetorically, to push the most reasonable among them to evaluate evidence empirically, and to give them a weapon for arguing against the other jurors who want to rush to judgment: "But we've got to weigh the evidence, not just vote our prejudices!"

We establish an empirical basis by observing accurately and learning from other people based on their similar experiences.  We define the world concretely, which establishes the basis for our discussions about reality.  Our discussions are based on agreements.  We can buy and sell things, agreeing on prices, because we agree about the qualities of our goods, and their relative values.  We can agree to have unprotected sex, for fun or to have children, after obtaining full, honest disclosure about someone's history of unprotected sex, and not without it.  When Osel Tendzin, the Murderous Vajra, had unprotected sex with his students despite his AIDS infection, that was not empirical thinking, but rather, the darkening influence of superstition, causing a tragedy.  This was not consensual sex, but the guilty trail of a deranged murderer who believed himself a sacred lover when his sex had become a deadly weapon.  Lucretius cited Agammemnon's murder of his own daughter in a religious sacrifice as one of the debasing acts caused by superstition.  Lucretius was right.  When the religious explain for us why the innocent must die for a sacred cause, that is debasing.

The empirical view is often the one that's easy to agree on, but which the religionist will have an excuse for denying.  Don't have unprotected sex at all if you are an AIDS carrier.  That's empirical, and only a deluded nut-job like Tendzin, or a person with a bad case of Student-Side TIDS would try to deny it.  But that's the purpose of religion -- to cause us to take leave of our senses.  Religions bind people to eccentric and oppositional views, suppressing useful agreements about the predictability of the world we share, injecting preposterous notions into our discourse, causing neighbors to shoot each other on rampages of religious violence, to build walls to keep out Palestinians, to separate Islamics from Christians and Hindus, to deploy deadly technology in a search for security.  Religions are stupidifying, and this is equally true of all of the New Age derivations.  These are mostly resorted to by people who have somehow escaped the TV plague, and seek more sophisticated ways to establish themselves comfortably in blissful ignorance.  The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin written at the advent of the nineteenth century, should have alerted all of humanity to our common origin in the forests of early earth, but somehow, superstitious beliefs about our "divine" origin still obscure the truth of Darwin's commonsense deductions.  Thus, people continue to kill each other because God told them to, sometimes with a monumentally stupid gesture like that of Osel Tendzin, who thought his toxic emissions were blessed.

As Carl Sagan strove to remind us, the empirical view does not share points of agreement with superstition.  And as modern Americans, we needn't fret too much.  In our hearts, we are devoted to the empirical view.  Consumer cargo-cultists, reveling in the plethora of manufactured goods, foods, and media swirling 'round them, worship at the altar of science and technology with their dollars.  This deep reliance on the techno-financial-priesthood is all based on faith in the empirical view.  We don't even fool our own subconscious when we whisper eastern slogans in a foreign language while buying factory food with plastic money, listening to recorded music and surfing the Net.  We put our money where our mouth is, and give lip service to the miraculous, like a whore with a plastic saint on the wall.  When The Machine Stops, or when we even imagine the machine stopping, we all remember that we rely on society to maintain technological mastery over the world, and with it, our survival.

We know that the nature of things determines what we experience in this life, not the will of the gods, or hidden supernatural forces.  This was a very revolutionary idea when Lucretius expressed it, but we are born to the notion.  In Lucretius' day, it seemed heretical to attempt explanation of natural phenomena, instead of attributing events to the will of the gods.  In On the Nature of the Universe, Lucretius defied the priests to ask basic questions: Why does a man die if he loses too much blood?  Is the wind composed of particles?  Is mind composed of particles, and if so what is the nature of those particles?  Lucretius answered these questions by reasoning from observed facts, and explaining everything as the effects of atoms of varying density pushed about by other atoms, all milling about in empty space.  Lucretius analyzed all phenomena from an atomized, material viewpoint, and laid the foundations of our current empirical view.  Lucretius' reward for rejecting dogma was the exhilarating freedom of learning directly from life, free of traditional prejudices and superstitious notions.  As a result, he was often right, and gave us a sound basis for discarding faith as our means for ascertaining truth.

Free Thinking For Free People

Contrary to what is taught by most eastern religions, freedom of thought is fundamental to all of our efforts at self-realization, and dogma is a deadening route to self-conditioning.  In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill explains that we must protect our right to speak free from any sort of coercion to say the right thing.  And not merely because coercion is unpleasant, but because when some ideas are officially sponsored, and others are suppressed, there is no competition between them, and we can't determine what is true or false.  "Official" beliefs that exempt themselves from criticism are presumptively false, because only through competition in the marketplace of ideas, where criticism is open and unbridled, can the truth be revealed.

Free Thought and Visionaries

Visionaries are often suppressed by religious authorities, as were Joan of Arc and William Blake.  Both were called liars when they revealed their childhood visions of God and angels.  In Through the Looking Glass,  the clergyman Samuel Dodgson, under the pen-name Lewis Carroll, lampooned the Red Queen's strident authoritarian thinking, revealing it to be really no thinking at all.  While many have speculated that Lewis Carroll's works were influenced by drugs, Aldous Huxley was explicit on that score.  Huxley's taking of mescaline was in itself an act of free thought, and his monograph on the resulting trip, The Doors of Perception, was a bold piece of free expression that undoubtedly influenced his masterwork, Brave New World, which posited that ultimately humans would be most effectively conditioned through pleasure.  Huxley was fortunate not to experience the suppression of free thinking that forced Timothy Leary to spend years of his life in prison, then more years as a fugitive, because he spoke the heresy of chemical revelation.  Nevertheless, the fruits of Tim's explorations were rich and fanciful, as recorded in his lively intergalactic narrative, The Intelligence Agents.  Carlos Castaneda, the chronicler of the deeds of Don Juan Matus in The Teachings of Don Juan, and Journey To Ixtlan, crossed over into a world that some people don't believe exists, yet most everyone finds is marvelously attractive.  Phil Dick, the science fiction author, twisted together themes of multiple personality, mescaline, incest, and political and social intrigue in his superb short novel, Flow, My Tears, The Policeman Said.

According to Tim Leary in The Intelligence Agents, the agents of evolution have migrated east to west over the millennia, traveling against, or "into" the earth's rotation.  We leave our home in the east, and begin the journey west.  As you travel through the western reaches of this website, you will see beautiful things.  Frida Khalo turned herself inside out, revealing her pain and ecstasy for all the world and you to touch.  The late Helmut Newton, who wanted to share his work with as many people as possible, bequeathed us his eyes.  Robert Mapplethorpe dug deep in the mines of the unacceptable, pulling up treasures of human character and posthumously offending legions of prudes.  George Platt Lynnes reveals a world of stark male beauty.  Petter Hegre chronicles a monogamist fascination with a single extraordinary blonde.  Stuart Urban depicts the stylish puissance of the London bondage demimonde in Preaching To The Perverted.  Norman Spinrad has booked passage for you on an interstellar journey with a cosmically obsessed space captain and his dark-anima pilot, in The Void Captain's Tale.  Your evolutionary migration has begun.

Our Dirty Life & Times

When the aetherial regions lose their allure, you may crave some of Mark Twain's dry wit, pithily preserved in Pudd'nhead Wilson, a masterly portfolio of character sketches bound into a southern detective novella, featuring slavery, incest, social conditioning, fingerprint evidence, and an ironic ending that twists your heartstrings.  For a gritty exploration of working-class life across the pond, read George Orwell's Down And Out In Paris And London.  Orwell's straightforward depictions of mindless, exhausting toil, grinding poverty, enforced idleness, cheap wine and dear tobacco, is a cinema-verite' snapshot of the underclass in Europe's two greatest cities.

Moving deeper into the dilemmas and horrors of the modern world, visit with Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, and read his expose of the Gross Universal Cash Heist ("GRUNCH") in his classic, The Grunch of Giants.  Get an overview of why humans spend more on weapons and "security" than anything else in an easy-read, comic-book treatise, Addicted To War, which explains how banks and corporations dine daily on human flesh.  If you're really ready to bite the bullet and look evil in the face, try reading The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush.  In particular, Chapter 2 -- The Hitler Project will chill your blood as you read original documents from the WW II era, explaining why the "U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.'s stock shares, all of which were owned by Prescott Bush, E. Roland 'Bunny' Harriman, three Nazi executives, and two other associates of Bush."  This chapter explains how Prescott Bush fronted for Nazi bankers and financiers in the US, and used his Nazi connections to orchestrate Hitler's takeover of Poland to quell a strike at the major Polish steel mill, which thus remained under the control of Prescott Bush and his Nazi cronies while pumping out Nazi war materiel that claimed American lives.  Those not blinded by the light of Fox News will note the similarity between Prescott Bush's treasonous exploitation of WW II and the current Bush's exploitation of the WTC disaster with equal cynicism, and to greater profit.   The Trail of The Octopus, by Lester Coleman, a former agent of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) explains how US intelligence operatives conspired to commit the Lockerbie bombing.  Helen Caldicott helps us see it all as intra-species predation in On Star Wars, Space Wars & Death Merchants.  Maria Carreon helps us see it all as an adventure in ass-kicking at ByBeautyDamned.net.

Summer of Love 2004

People are manipulated by banks and multinationals in the economic sphere, by  media in the political sphere, and by clerics in the spiritual sphere.  The force of life is under attack from every direction.  True motherly impulses no longer hide out in terror, but take the fight to the oppressors.  This theme is the topic of a current BB thread, and of an old poem I wrote years ago, Mama's Home!  The short answer to the conundrum, "How could we have a Summer of Love in 2004?" is this: It wasn't any easier then, so get off yer ass and make it happen!

ABOL -- The Answer To Global Ignorance

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Remember that bumpersticker:  IF YOU THINK EDUCATION IS EXPENSIVE, TRY IGNORANCE.  Good point.  The copyright monopolists think ABOL's a scam, a joke, a lie, a fraud.  Our lawyer gets that sort of claptrap in his email.  But as we know, ABOL is needed, especially by those of us who haven't seen the inside of a library in years, except the American Buddha Online Library, of course. So please read the ABOL information by clicking the link above, then JOIN ABOL with one email to joinabol@american-buddha.com and lawfully enjoy access to our expanding nonprofit collection of literature and art.  Bon appetit!

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