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Anagarika Eddie - EzineArticles.com Expert Author  

     Anagarika eddie is a meditation teacher at the Dhammabucha Rocksprings Meditation Retreat Sanctuary and author of A Year to Enlightenment. His 30 years of meditation experience has taken him across four continents including two stopovers in Thailand where he practiced in the remote northeast forests as an ordained Thervada Buddhist monk. He lived at Wat Pah Nanachat under Ajahn Chah, at Wat Pah Baan Taad under Ajahn Maha Boowa, and at Wat Pah Daan Wi Weg under Ajahn Tui.   ... [More]

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  • Hurdling Through Our Lives
    [Self-Improvement:Happiness] Relaxing and enjoying life involves a philosophical outlook called equanimity. We have to see that one thing is not better than another. One person is neither superior nor lower in rank than another. We have to understand that, because that's the way it actually is, that's a fact whether we agree or not.


  • What is the Most Important Thing in a Romantic Relationship?
    [Relationships] There's gotta be a millions of articles about relationships. Books, too. If you are thinking about writing a book, put "relationship" in the title and you will have agents beating down your door!


  • How to Recognize a Saint If You Meet One on the Street
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] As we read about these fourteen traits, we might think that we can become saintly too by simply practicing what saints do, however, it never quite works out that way. Mimicking secondhand or academic information never leads to an authentic shift in our basic behavior. And although we might convincingly pretend for awhile, what we really are will eventually come out, just as water seeks its own level.


  • A True Story of Lust and Seduction - With a Twist!
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] Twenty-six hundred years ago, Subbha the Buddhist nun was walking through a mango grove when a lustful young man blocked her path. Subbha the Nun: "What wrong have I done you that you stand in my way? It's not proper my friend that a man should touch a woman gone forth (Buddhist nun who has dedicated her life to finding enlightenment).


  • Why Do We Get Angry When Someone Disagrees With Us?
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] The fact is; it is more important to feel in control and superior than it is to ferret out the facts and come to logical conclusions. Why? Because our idea of self or ego, although false, must be constantly blown up like a balloon with a small hole in it. Otherwise, if our ego was permitted to diminish, which would mean that we became peaceful and loving, then we would see the reality of our vulnerability and weakness as a human being, which would far too devastating for anyone caught in the web of delusion that we call life.


  • What We Fear Most
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] It's not surprising that most people don't know the answer to this question, because although the answer is obvious, the obvious is many times looked past just as we never see a clear lens but only what is beyond it. And no, it isn't death that we fear most. We have rationalized that fear into eternal life with our religions, so death is not the most feared. As a matter of fact, most people, if you ask them if they fear death, will say, "No," Of course, when death is imminent, that could change.


  • Measure Life in Inches, Not Milestones
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] Being present in every moment, along each inch of our way requires tremendous understanding; knowing that it all changes and that we cannot hold on to anything, yet in this very moment we have it all. Understanding that life will unleash its arrows that will find their marks in our hearts, but nevertheless this very moment, this inch along our way, always completes us.


  • I Want More
    [Self-Improvement] Do you? Why aren't you completely satisfied now? Or perhaps you are, but weren't six months ago. Or maybe you aren't now but were six months ago! What is it that you want more of?


  • It's Okay to Fail
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] Be that butterfly. Fold your wings and just "be" for a few precious moments in time. Nothing to accomplish now, no battles to fight, no points to make. Just be, quietly, peacefully, at ease with yourself, nobody is watching you or judging you. You can now, for a few moments, be a complete failure in the eyes of the world and no one will criticize you.


  • Unusual Urges
    [Self-Improvement:Inspirational] There are no responses to our most serious questions. We might come up with an answer of some kind in our brain, but our heart always recognizes hype. After the pat answers are blown away by the reality that we face, a subtle awareness returns to haunt us; a recognition that we live only on the surface of something very deep, so deep that we can't seem to get our arms around it, and we desperately need to.


  • Especially For the Lonely During the Holidays
    [Relationships] Everybody, it seems, is out there having fun with family and friends, and here you are, alone, reading articles, desolate, despondent, filled with despair, hopeless, reaching out in urgent need of anyone who might listen to your forlorn longings in this joyous of seasons. Woe is you.


  • Looking For Our Happiness in All the Wrong Places
    [Self-Improvement:Happiness] What do you do when you are unhappy? Usually, you will try to change things so that you will become happy again. To put up with the unhappiness is unthinkable. A survey of political articles reaffirms this idea. Most reflect a very deep unhappiness with something or someone, with the gist of the article being to change either our leaders or our government so that we can be happy again.This is akin to being a slave to outside circumstances, because no matter how things change, they will in time revert back to their original state, just as water seeks its own level.


  • Two Different Worlds
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] We live in the past by remembering who we are and what we were, and we live in the future by extending the "who" into what we hope are pleasurable type circumstances. But we don't live in each moment; we don't know how to do that. And because we don't know how to live in each moment, we live instead in the dreams of the past and the illusions of the future, but never in reality. Chances are, during our entire lifetime, we have never lived in the reality of the moment, not even once.


  • Why Buddhism is a Peaceful Religion - Five Distinctions
    [News-and-Society:Religion] These distinctions are confined only to Buddhism, as far as I know, and as such may seem to be a separation from other religions. But when they are viewed in the context of sane, compassionate human development, where our values include loving and understanding each other, they can be applied universally to almost any religion that is the least bit open-minded.


  • The Future of America - A Prophecy
    [News-and-Society] Big shifts already are occurring all over the world. Can you see them? We have a tendency to ignore things that are uncomfortable, hoping that they will somehow go away - until they smack us aside the head and we wonder why we never saw the train wreck coming.


  • The Stardust That We Are
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] But in that moment, and they are rare in our lives, perhaps our hearts take an turn that somehow changes us, and suddenly we know, in our hearts of hearts, that the stars and us are one. We are but the dust of stars sprinkled on the earth to dance awhile before we return to our destiny.


  • Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up!
    [News-and-Society:Religion] If you look, not necessarily at what Christ said but the life that he led as depicted in the Bible - He was not a family man. Nor was He a businessman, or a politician, or nationalistic. All of that Old Testament stuff; procreation, obedience, commandments is for a different audience, an audience that was not capable of understanding for themselves and had to be told what to do by an authority figure.


  • The Less We Have, The Happier We Become
    [Self-Improvement:Happiness] Americans are becoming cheerier even though they have lost economically, and the truth is; the less we have, the less we have to worry about, and the less we worry, the more time we have to see beauty of trees, and the wonder of the universe and contemplate our part in it. Without possessions getting in our way, we become human beings again.


  • Melt Down!
    [News-and-Society:Economics] Can you feel it? It's almost palpable, a feeling that permeates everything, hanging in the air like an impeding thunderstorm. Silent, ominous, dangerous, frightening and yet at the same time exciting and alive, and pregnant with possibility. It all began on a sunny day in 1991. We were just emerging from a supposedly not too serious recession and everything appeared to be rosy again.


  • The Curious and Fascinating Process of Dying
    [Home-and-Family:Death-Dying] When we are dying and begin to lose what is commonly referred to as consciousness, many times we see visions that arise independently of conscious thinking. These are the result of how we lived our lives. We might see fearful beings chasing us if our life has been filled with hatred. Or, if our life has been filled with love, we may see our departed family members welcoming us, or hear divine music or see divine landscapes too beautiful for description. The dying may utter words like, "I see beautiful people and beautiful gardens, and I hear beautiful music, or they may converse with the departed friends and relatives that they see.


  • What Silent Prayer Is, and Isn't
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] When we think about prayer, what comes to mind is some kind of request or solicitation of God . Maybe we are ill and ask to get better, or ask forgiveness, or maybe a little help with the lottery. These are the kinds of prayers that we mostly engage in. We might also repeat a mantra, for example, the "Our Father," or Hail Mary" as an act of devotion or contrition. Then there are the holy thoughts about God, heaven, the saints and Jesus as we sit quietly. Or, we might thank God for something good that has happened to us and ask for protection from the bad. These are all prayers of thanks, worship, appeals and requests, but they are not silent prayer.


  • Why Should We Pray Silently?
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] Silent prayer, therefore, addresses the need to open up to that which is beyond our small self and really become Christlike ourselves. If we adhere to the original Church father's doctrines and rendition of the gospels, there is really nothing we can do to proactively change ourselves except to be perpetual works in progress and sinners who have no chance of ever becoming more than that. Subsequently, we are forced to entirely depend upon the Church for our final salvation. Thomas claims that Jesus never taught this kind of thing; that all of us have the potential to become sons and daughters of God right here, right now, in this lifetime.


  • Why Are Americans So Angry?
    [News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] So what can we fix? America, I believe, is waking up to the fact that we can no longer fix anything. Like gluing together a model airplane that increasingly disintegrates with each flight, pretty soon there are no parts left to glue.


  • Extremist Christians, Muslims, and Jews - A Common Denominator of Violence
    [News-and-Society:Religion] The fundamentalist wings of Middle Eastern religions seem to have one thing in common - violence. All born from the same founder, Abraham, they appear to have a particularly destructive way of relating to anyone who doesn't believe as they do, or who refuses to follow their customs.


  • WARNING - Do Not Take This As Financial Advice
    [Finance] The recent upturn in some of the indicators and the stock market is because of stimulus and businesses cutting expenses. This won't last. There is no stimulus left and nowhere else to cut except perhaps to go completely out of business and sell the assets - if you can find a buyer.


  • The Realities of 2012
    [Self-Improvement] As with most serious problems in our country, only a crisis of major proportions generates action. By the time action is taken, however, it is always a day late and a dollar short. This results in bad judgment and further serious consequences. But this time it's going to be 2012, the end of our world as we know it. All of the following will not happen by 2012. By 2012, however, the handwriting will be on the wall, and it will say that the only way we could ever get our power back is through a world war.


  • Is Conflict an Inherent Factor of Religion?
    [News-and-Society:Religion] One of the most difficult areas to get past in human relations is the idea that "my" religion or ideal is Truth and yours isn't. When someone says to you that your beliefs are all wet compared to his or hers, how does that make you feel? Historically, it has made people feel so bad that they have killed each other. This is not good.


  • How to End Stressful Relationships
    [Relationships] Stress in our relationships is something that we can no longer avoid. At one time we could keep it under control, but now that it is so difficult to make ends meet and to just plain survive, the stress can become unbearable.


  • Why Doesn't God Come Down and Just Say Hello?
    [News-and-Society:Religion] Well. Why doesn't he, or she? I guess that's the first problem, one of gender. The Bible is gender blind, I mean Adam has all of his ribs but somehow his wife was created out of one of them instead of out of the earth from which Adam was created. And another question, If Adam and Eve had three sons (no daughters), hmmm, who had sex with whom to keep things going, so to speak? But that doesn't mean that God might be female, or male, or Gay.


  • Don't Fall For These Three Fallacious Debating Tactics
    [Self-Improvement:Techniques] These are three of the most common underhanded tactics used in debates. They come into play as an attempted deflection from the main argument that your opponent is usually losing and can no longer argue intelligently. If you watch out for them and keep bringing your opponent back to the original premise of the debate, your opponent will have no choice but to discuss the actual facts of the argument instead of trying to wiggle out of them.


  • A Different Way to Live
    [News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] The way that we have been living is called the way of least resistance. This way involves emotionally and logically going after what we believe will make us happy. For the vast majority of us, this usually includes a career, a partner, then a house, cars, furniture, kids, college tuition, grandkids - you get the picture.


  • Locating God
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] Hello, God? Are you there? Hello. Are you listening? I know; you have a gazillion other things to do and billions of people to keep happy just here on earth, let alone all the people on all the planets around all the billions of stars in just our small galaxy.


  • Dropouts and the American Dream
    [News-and-Society:Politics] According to CNN Money, the high school dropout rate is very high, as high as 22% in Alabama, and of those who are able to finish high school, only 27% nationally go on to finish college. This means that there will be lots of people in the $8.00 to $10.00 an hour salary bracket for years to come trying to raise families like everyone else and have some kind of a life, maybe even a little money left over for the kids at Christmas.


  • Who Are You? Don't Answer Too Quickly!
    [Self-Improvement] Before you answer too quickly with names, titles, party affiliations, physical attributes, gender and job titles, go a little deeper and see who you really are. You can begin by describing yourself in a different manner than you usually do.


  • Trying to Figure Out Life (Life Situations - The Usual Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them)
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] Life . . . Is life. It's up and down, happy and sad., and nothing is ever guaranteed (except perhaps our eventual demise)! Yet we question life's surprises and unpredictability as if we are special and are supposed to be protected from all the bad things that happen to other people, And when we are not, when something breaks our string of exceptionally good luck, we begin to question life.


  • Spiritual Insight - Extraordinary, Yet Very Ordinary
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] A direct experience of spiritual insight will change your life, a fact which is irrefutable and well documented. But spiritual searching, rather than spiritual insight - well, that's another story.


  • Where We Are All Headed
    [News-and-Society:Economics] Yep, we are all headed for bankruptcy. The housing market is not going to come back, and neither are jobs. That is all over with. We're done, and as we move toward 2012, it will worsen.


  • Living Life Unconsciously
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] Do you feel at times that you are just going through the motions, living life unconsciously? Did you know that this feeling is actually close to spirituality, more so than being entirely and endlessly enthralled with life?


  • Making Smaller Footprints
    [Self-Improvement:Personal-Growth] There seems to be a knack for keeping footprints small, even in the midst of a busy life. If your wants are small, if you can get by with little and still be happy, then the footprints begin to shrink. Wanting and craving for things and experiences so that we don't become bored is what causes "Big Foot" footprints! Whatever you buy, gasoline or big screen TVs, they set into motion a string of footprints, from industrial pollution to financing terrorism.


  • So Who Invented God Anyway?
    [News-and-Society:Religion] When we look back through antiquity it all gets a little wonky, but there seems to be a consensus that Zoroaster, from Iran/Pakistan, invented God. As a matter of fact, many of the middle eastern religions such as Judaism and Christianity can trace their roots directly back to this man. Even his pictures -- pale face, brown beard, looking up toward heaven, resembles very closely the pictures representing Christ these days.


  • Meditation - What's the Point?
    [Health-and-Fitness:Meditation] In life, two things separate successful people from ordinary people. People with no college degrees or credentials whatsoever have made it to the highest ranks of corporate America, and if you look carefully at their attributes, you will find these two things standing out head and shoulders above anything that they have learned in the past. Creativity enables them to see everything anew and therefore not become bogged down in in old concepts and stale solutions.


  • Trying to Simplify Your Life With a Complicated Mind?
    [Self-Improvement:Personal-Growth] "Mind is the forerunner of all things," a wise person once said, and this is very true. If your mind is filled with all kinds of words, thoughts, emotions, possessions, worries and concerns, and you fill it even more by trying to figure out how to simplify your life, then what happens is you find yourself being disingenuous, and not sincerely simplifying your life at all. The wants and desires are still there, only temporarily submerged by a new idea (I must simplify my life!) but this new idea will not hold because the idea was from the surface consciousness, or logical part of the mind.


  • Are We Dealt Our Hand in Life at Random? (Karma and Its Results)
    [Self-Improvement] Due to having performed and completed such kammas, on the dissolution of the body, after death, he reappears in a state of deprivation, in an unhappy destination, in perdition, in hell. If, on the dissolution of the body, after death, instead of his reappearing in a state of deprivation, in an unhappy destination, in perdition, in hell, he comes to the human state, he is short-lived wherever he is reborn. This is the way that leads to short life, that is to say, to be a killer of living beings, murderous, bloody-handed, given to blows and violence, merciless to living beings.


  • Evolution of Religion - Where Are You? Six Steps
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] These six major steps weave in and around each other, and there are many others, all revealing a transition between materiality consciousness and heightened consciousness, or between an outward emphasis (thinking, remembering, body and mind), and an inward emphasis (the replacing of thought and memory by a spiritual fullness devoid of body and mind). Therefore, the materially minded, dependent upon thinking and memory, and believing strongly in body and mind, will not be able to relate, from an experiential standpoint, to the heightened mind.


  • Expecting Your Life Situation to Change, But Not Willing to Change Yourself (Life Situations)
    [Self-Improvement] We seem to always run into the same difficulties with life sooner or later, don't we? A good example is a new relationship. Things start off famously, swimmingly, but after some time the same old problems seem to rear their ugly heads, even with a new person. What's going on here?


  • Thinking That Life is a Cake Walk! Life Situations - The Usual Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them
    [Self-Improvement] This has the potential to be one of the bigger mistakes because it means that we are blind to the realities around us, and usually insensitive to others. When we have blinders on, we tend to create a personal little world that is in fact very fragile, difficult to maintain, and quite fictional.


  • Using Logic Instead of Intuition (Life Situations - The Usual Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them)
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] Then, you will finally face your greatest fear - emptiness, the emptiness that in the beginning was so frightening that you had no choice but to run and hide from it with your various escapes conveniently provided by the logical thinking mind. While at the same time, even while escaping, knowing deep inside that you could never flee the truth of emptiness.


  • Overestimating How Much Control We Have Over Our Lives (Life Situations - The Usual Mistakes)
    [Self-Improvement] It's easy to set ourselves up for disappointment; all we have to do is (A) Overshoot our expectations, and (B) Insist that our plans come off without a glitch. Maybe we want to go to college, then meet the perfect person, have a perfect family (with perfect kids!), find the perfect career, the perfect home, cars and SUVs, live long and healthy, and die peacefully in our sleep after a perfect life full of love, excitement, and wisdom.


  • Happiness - It's Temporary
    [Self-Improvement:Happiness] When will you finally be happy? Isn't that what we are all working toward? It's that carrot tied at the end of a stick just out of reach of the donkey as he pulls the cart trying too get closer to the carrot. But every time the donkey moves, the carrot moves, too.


  • Spiraling Toward Oblivion
    [Self-Improvement:Personal-Growth] Where is the significance in anything that we do; it all passes so quickly into anonymity. Yet, each and everything that we do seems so important. Is it really? Or is it that we have to justify our existence by our accomplishments, rather than simply living and eating and procreating as the White tailed deer do. What is it that drives us to live these complicated, harried lives when we could as easily lay back and let the world go by?


  • Let Them Eat Cake
    [News-and-Society:Politics] It seems to me that too many people are taking a big cut out of the health care pie for themselves. Instead of a middleman, we have numerous middlemen that come between the sick person and his or her care. And it has gotten too top heavy, way out of control.


  • Nothing Matters
    [Self-Improvement:Spirituality] We know from scientific radioactivity studies of the Earth and Sun that our solar system probably formed about 4.5 billions years ago, which means that the Universe must be at least twice that old and probably older, maybe twenty billion years or so. Therefore, whatever we do for posterity isn't going to matter much in light of the huge expanse of time and space that is a fact in front of us every star-lit night. To think otherwise would be more than folly; it would border on arrogance and conceit regarding our place in this universe, which is no more than an insignificant speck of dust.


  • Conservatives Have a Good Reason to Be Frustrated
    [News-and-Society:Politics] If you ask a Conservative what's wrong, especially a fringe conservative who recently has fallen into vitriol and bitter criticism of each and every small move the president makes, he or she might insist that everything is Obama's fault. If Obama would only let things alone instead of stirring things up everything will be great just as it has been for the last thirty years. But it's not Obama's fault. The conservative movement's angst has much deeper roots.


  • Who in the World is Going to Finance US?
    [News-and-Society:Economics] The FDIC is now considering asking large banks for loans because it is broke - after only 94 bank failures (there are hundreds on its danger list). So how safe is our money? I'm afraid that our greed and thirst for easy money did us in this time. The excesses on unregulated Wall Street, the speculation, dishonesty, the instigation and sale of bad mortgages all over the world for the last eight years has caused a crisis that isn't going away anytime soon.


  • Health Care Was Just a Warm Up - Here Comes Immigration!
    [News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] Picture this: You live on a rural Texas ranch. In the middle of the night, there is a knock on the door. You open it. Standing before you is a young woman in tears, an unconscious baby in her arms. "Help me. My baby is Dying." "Are you legal?" You ask.


  • Three Warning Signs That Our Country is in Real Trouble
    [News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] Countries and systems don't fail overnight. There are warning signs. Red flags precede any kind of a decline. Usually, these warning signs are dismissed as temporary obstacles on the road to unending success as we go whistling past the graveyard. Until one day the bottom falls out without any apparent warning. The red flags were always there - it's just that nobody paid attention.


  • Can We Save Our Democracy?
    [News-and-Society:Politics] The current health care debate is indicative of this shift toward a dysfunctional democracy. It is blatantly clear to everyone in the world, even people in this country with special interests, that our health care system is in a shambles and is a disgrace compared to many systems in other countries that function well. Thirty percent of our health care costs are tied up in paperwork generated by 1500 different insurance companies reaping a profit for basically doing nothing - acting as a go-between, a middleman between a patient and his or her care.




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