Am I just imagining this or...? During the recent election campaign in the United States, I spotted a number of unrelated ads on YouTube and elsewhere (both English-language and Swedish) featuring actors/models who kind-of-resembled Kamala Harris.
Maybe I just noticed such models (perhaps of an East Indian background?) more due to the elections, but a more interesting possibility is of course that it was quite deliberate!
“Buried Bones and Buddhas Beyond. Ancestor Cults in 17th-century Khams
and the Transcendentalisation of Tibetan Religion” is an article by Reinier J.
Langelaar, originally published in 2022 in a collection of scholarly papers on
Tibet. I found it free-standing (and for free) on the web. Langelaar has analyzed
the works of 17th century Buddhist Karma chags med, a native of
Khams or Kham in eastern Tibet who was trained in both the Kagyu and Nyingma
traditions. They apparently form an important milestone in how the pre-Buddhist
ancestor cults of Tibetan villages and clans were “transcendentalized” and
eventually replaced by Buddhism altogether.
The cults of the ancestors are very far removed from Buddhism. The most
obvious difference is that the ancestral spirits don´t reincarnate. Indeed,
it´s not even clear whether they are “spirits” at all, since they are conceptualized
in purely material terms. The only material thing the ancestors lack is an
actual physical body. Otherwise, they have exactly the same desires, thoughts
and even foibles as their living relatives. They can experience hunger, thirst
and cold. Perhaps they even crave sex or love, since there are occasional
reports of ancestors haggling for spouses from among the living! For all these
reasons, the ancestors must be appeased with food, drink, clothing and respectful
worship in general. In return, they bestow good luck on their descendants. If
treated improperly, they can cause misfortune instead, for instance by
attacking horses or livestock.
The entire ancestral cult is very “this-worldly” from a Buddhist perspective. Indeed, Buddhists might even interpret certain aspects of it as an active attempt to stop reincarnation. After the usual “sky-burial”, the bones of the ancestors are gathered together and placed in whitewashed vases together with offerings such as jewels. They are hence supposed to stay around as protectors of the clan. By contrast, Buddhism is “other-worldly”, its goal is the super-intangible nirvana, it believes in some form of rebirth or reincarnation, salvation is not clan-based, and so on.
It seems Karma chags med tried to reconcile the
ancestral cults with Buddhism, but in such a manner that Buddhism remained on
top. Thus, he claimed that Ban thung, the ancestor of the Brong pa clan in
Khams, was a bodhisattva dwelling in a pure Buddha-field, while also emanating
a kind of body double who acted as the chief ancestor of the clan on here on
Earth. Conversely, Buddhist luminaries such as Padmasambhava (who had no known
lineage) were recast as powerful “ancestors”. Karma chags med also introduced
Tantric rituals during the secondary burials. Thus, when gathering the bones of
the deceased ancestor, the powerful bodhisattva Manjushri should be invoked. But
what about reincarnation? Here, the solution was rather obvious: humans have
more than one soul or spirit, one of them remaining as an ancestor, while the other
is reborn in a new body.
Flash forward 400 years. When the author visited Khams, he quickly
realized that the ancestral cults had all but disappeared in the area inhabited
by the Brong pa. Only one person was aware of their previous existence, and
showed the author an old tree-shrine to Ban thung, who had fallen into disuse long
ago. But…Ban thung *is* still worshipped in the area, in the form of an idol
standing on the grounds of a Buddhist monastery! He is, after all, a bodhisattva
now…
I suppose paganism has been succesfully replaced in Tibet.
No idea if this is true or not, but the part about Fermi´s paradox is fascinating, and could be another possible "solution" to it.
The idea is that our galaxy is situated inside a large cosmic "void", within which intrastellar communication and space travel is extremely difficult. So if aliens exists somewhere inside this void, we might never encounter them. Also, the void is of no particular interest to advanced alien civilizations that might exist outside it, which explains why we never hear from them, either! In plain English: Homo sapiens (the crown of creation, goal of evolution, blah blah) really does live in a universal backwater...
Another portion of the video discusses the expansion rate of the universe, dark matter and such.
Michael Tracey (who opposes US aid to Ukraine) doesn´t think the incoming Trump admin or the current GOP majority in the House have done enough to stop said aid. Or anything at all, really.
>>>House Republicans pledged in 2022 to impose oversight on Biden's conduct of Ukraine war policy, and end the so-called "blank check." Then they won the majority, and this "oversight" consisted of *increasing* war funds to Ukraine, performing little or no actual oversight, and demanding Biden loosen restrictions on Ukraine. >>>The "oversight" that Republicans have been far more concerned with has been to confabulate an "anti-Semitism" panic, which they made a top legislative priority. >>>Now, Biden authorizes US ballistic missile strikes on Russia, and the House does nothing. Just like when Biden first authorized US munitions to be used inside Russia in May, and the House did nothing. However, there will be plenty of important action taken on Trans in bathrooms.
Further down the thread, somebody comments: "There will be no important action taken on trans in bathrooms, either." (This is a reference to Speaker Johnson prohibiting a Democrat House member who is a trans-woman from using the female bathrooms in Congress.)
An intriguing postscript to the Chinese spy balloon scare of 2023. A photo of one of the objects shot down by the US Air Force over Yukon in Canada has finally been declassified. Now, we are supposed to think it may have been an UFO instead! Could there be a connection to the recent disclosure hearings in Washington DC?
My guess is that the objects of course were Chinese (or even Andamanese) and that the USAF for some reason are trying to get the public to think that they were alien space craft. To avoid an embarrasing "Sputnik moment"?
Some quotes from the first article linked below:
>>>What makes the incidents of February 2023 particularly intriguing is the lack of concrete details about the objects themselves. While the Chinese balloon was clearly identified as a surveillance device, the other three objects remain largely mysterious. The fact that no debris has been recovered has only fueled speculation about their nature. U.S. President Joe Biden suggested that the objects were likely benign, potentially private or research balloons, but the absence of detailed imagery or wreckage has left room for alternative theories.
>>>The limited information provided by the military has also stoked conspiracy theories, with some speculating that these objects could be of extraterrestrial origin or advanced surveillance technology deployed by rival states. Experts, however, caution against such conclusions.
>>>In the wake of these incidents, both the Pentagon and NASA have ramped up their efforts to investigate UAPs, a term that has largely replaced the older “UFO” terminology in official discourse. Meanwhile, Canada’s Sky Canada Project, led by the Office of the Chief Science Advisor, is expected to release its own report on UAP sightings in 2024, potentially shedding more light on these mysterious encounters.
The second link goes to a blog post by ultra-alternative blogger Vox Day who says (seemingly un-ironically) that the UFO over Yukon must be a Cylon ship?! The Cylons are the bad guys in the Mormon-inspired science fiction franchise "Battlestar Galactica"...
