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Suffering People Down the Street – Who Cares?

By jimhilgendorf1 on April 29th, 2013

Walk down any street these days, and sense – if you have any sensibilities at all – the enormous suffering that people are carrying as baggage.

It is not apparent at first, there is too much din and cacophony crowding the streets.  But reach inside, get to know personally the stories of each one, and you find there a sense of growing hopelessness and lack of empowerment.

Especially this is true of our youth.

Who cares?

Politicians are caught in webs of power struggles, money and self-aggrandisement.  Money and power ride the elevators to a privileged few, the stock market rises and booms, corporate profits burgeon, but so many are left in the wake of all this scrambling in the dust.

A woman I met just recently was just deserted by her boyfriend, whom she had supported for over a year.  She is now left with her two children, bereft of family, what does the future hold?  She thought of overdosing on pills the night prior, but something held her hand in check.  Her eyes show nothing.  They wait for a vision of something to propel her forward one more day, one more week.

This sense of powerlessness grows.  What can one person do?  More and more, we are alone in a vast universe.

This is not the reality of life.  At the core of life – of each person’s individual life – is immense, untrammeled power.

This is the message of the Buddha.

The Buddha’s life reaches to the stars and beyond, and to the depths of quarks and bosons, the very building blocks of the universe itself.  This is the true aspect of the Buddha’s life.

But the Buddha is also you and I.  Buddha, or life’s vast potential, waits, unsummoned, at the core and heart of our lives, and we do not know it, we do not realize it, we do not know how to bring it forth.  We do not know who we are.

The Buddha, who cares compassionately for every living thing, whose heart reaches everything, is you and I.

This reality is what we need to awaken to.  This is the America and the new world we need to build.

It is already there.  Bring it forth now.

____________________

James Hilgendorf, author.

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.

Visit James Hilgendorf’s website.

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Among Neanderthals

By jimhilgendorf1 on March 28th, 2013

In antediluvian times – going back several hundred thousand years, men and women roamed the landscape – called Neanderthal, not quite human, but a subspecies of the genus homo, closely related to all of us today.  They led lives obscure until about 30,000 years ago.

Then came Cro-Magnon men and women, early modern humans.

For some 10,000 or 15,000 years, these two existed side by side and intermingled and even interbred to some extent.  What must it have been like, two different species of humanity going about their days and nights in close proximity?

We live the same rhythms today.  We live among our own Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.

They take shape as things past that hang on with their last breath – old, discarded, defunct ideas and philosophies that breathe even now among us, yet are dying and dead, hanging on like dead leaves on withered branches.

They are antediluvian thoughts and convictions and dogmas that live on in the bodies of many of the people whom we pass each day, and these thoughts and convictions have already died and are passing away, yet they are still among us, and we intermingle and interbreed and life keeps moving on as strong and simple as the sun returning each day and the wind blowing away with fresh vigor and energy all detritus and debris to make way for new growths and expansions and for the proper vehicle to express the heretofore inexpressible mind and heart of the universe.

—from “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity”, by James Hilgendorf

_______________________

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.


 

 

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The Most Loved Person

By jimhilgendorf1 on March 17th, 2013

The Buddha once said:

“You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere.  You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”

—From “A New Myth for America”, by James Hilgendorf.

__________________

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.


 

 

 

 

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Moment to Moment

By jimhilgendorf1 on March 15th, 2013

Everything can turn on a dime.

Nightmare today, bliss the next.  Everything unfolds from the workings of our mind and life.

Envision the end result a failure, and circumstances will corroborate your every thought.  Life mirrors our vision.

Everything around is our mirror.

Success…failure. The secret lies in the subtle workings of our mind.

Never give in.  Never imagine your world at an end.  Never imagine your circumstances as the final word.

Pull forth from the depths of your imagination and effort an unbridled dream.  If your intent is great and good and aligned with the compassionate intent of life itself, the universe around will enfold you in its embrace, will  draw people from the farthest reaches of the globe to support and further your dreams.

Believe in yourself.  Your power is immense.

Never imagine deadends.  There is always a way through.

Youth, especially, dream big.  Carve out a new world.  Fashion from the nightmare of resignation and emptiness and loss of hope around you a magnificent jewel.  Spark a new vision of life.  Life is there for you to mold to the expanse of your dreams.

The jewel is yourself.  There has never been anyone like you.  Surpass any and all who have ever lived.  They are waiting.  They are cheering you on.

Deepen the power of your life and mind.  Deepen faith in yourself.  Never give in, never give up.  Have patience.

Everything can turn on a dime.

__________________

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.


 

 

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Carl Jung & The Living and the Dead

By jimhilgendorf1 on March 12th, 2013

in 1922, the great Swiss psychoanalyst, related that he had a dream of being with his father, who had died in 1896.

Jung wanted to bring his father up to date about all that had happened to him and his family since his father’s death, but his father was preoccupied with other thoughts.  He wanted to consult his son about marital psychology.  Jung prepared to give a lecture on the subject, but then awoke.  A few months later, Jung’s mother died.

He writes:

“My parents’ marriage was not a happy one, but full of trials and difficulties and tests of patience.  Both made the mistakes typical of many couples.  My dream was a forecast of my mother’s death, for here was my father who, after an absence of twenty-six years, wished to ask a psychologist about the newest insights and information on marital problems, since he would soon have to resume this relationship again.  Evidently he had acquired no better understanding in his timeless state and therefore had to appeal to someone among the living, who, enjoying the benefits of changed times, might have a fresh approach to the whole thing…Such was the dream’s message.”

Rather than the dead knowing more than the living, Jung was led to believe the very reverse is true: the dead depend upon the living for any further development of their own knowledge and consciousness.

Again, Jung observes:

“The maximum awareness which has been attained anywhere forms, so it seems to me, the upper limit of knowledge to which the dead can attain.  That is probably why earthly life is of such great significance, and why it is that what a human being ‘brings over’ at the time of his death is so important.  Only here, in life on earth, where the opposites clash together, can the general level of consciousness be raised.  That seems to be man’s metaphysical task.”

—From “Life and Death: A Buddhist Perspective”, by James Hilgendorf

________________________

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.


 

 

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Carl Jung & Near-Death Experiences

By jimhilgendorf1 on March 11th, 2013

Carl Jung, the great psychoanalyst, once had an extraordinary near-death experience when he was about seventy, in connection with an accident.  He wrote:

“I can describe the experience only as the ecstasy of a non-temporal state in which present, past and future are one.  Everything that happens in time had been brought together into a concrete whole.  Nothing was distributed over time, nothing could be measured by temporal concepts.  One is interwoven into an indescribable whole, yet observes it with complete objectivity.”

From his own experiences and dreams, and from work with his patients, Jung became convinced that our normal ideas of space and time were incomplete.  He wrote:

“There are indications that at least a part of the psyche is not subject to the laws of space and time.  Scientific proof of that has been provided by the well-known J.B. Rhine experiments.  Along with numerous cases of spontaneous fore-knowledge, non-spatial perceptions, and so on – of which I have given a number of examples from my own life – these experiments prove that the psyche at times functions outside of the spatio-temporal law of causality.  This indicates that our conceptions of space and time, and therefore of causality also, are incomplete.  A complete picture of the world would require the addition of still another dimension; only then could the totality of phenomena be given a unified explanation.  Hence it is that the rationalists insist to this day that parapsychological experiences do not really exist; for their world-view stands or falls by this question.  If such phenomena occur at all, the rationalistic picture is invalid, because incomplete.  Then the possibility of an other-valued reality behind the phenomenal world becomes an inescapable problem, and we must face the fact that our world, with its time, space, and causality, relates to another order of things lying behind or beneath it, in which neither ‘here and there’ nor ‘earlier and later’ are of importance.  I have been convinced that at least a part of our psychic existence is characterized by a relativity of space and time.  This relativity seems to increase, in proportion to the distance from consciousness, to an absolute condition of timelessness and spacelessness.”

—From “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective”, by James Hilgendorf.

____________________

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.


 

 

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An Identity Large Enough for the World

By jimhilgendorf1 on March 10th, 2013

Why is it that people, from time immemorial, have prayed for peace, desired peace, and yet done just the opposite, over and over dipped their hands in blood?  What is it that perpetuates this nightmare?

The ideals that different religions espouse are identical: peace, brotherhood, friendship, respect.  And yet there is another force that constantly divides and separates.  These ideals we all share; and yet we, as individuals, as families, as communities, as nations are traumatized by hatred and division and war over and over again, ceaselessly, with no remission.

What is the problem?

At the core, it is identity.  Who are we?  This is the question that is at the heart of all the hell on earth.  We do not know who we truly are.  Nationality and religion give people identity; and yet the identity that nationality and ethnicithy and religion give to people leads over and over to hatred and blood baths and war.

The religions that give us our identity are tribal still.  We war in tribes, under the banners of our different gods.

We have not gotten to the heart and core of who we are.  We are human beings, all of us.  There is no distinction in our humanity.

Our religions give us an identity, yet separate us.  Their spiritual vision is not broad enough, nor true enough, to embrace everyone.

A new world is coming.  The seeds are already here, and our world needs a new spiritual foundation to undergird the new civilization being born before our eyes.

The Buddhism of the SGI, or Soka Gakkai International, is just such a religion.  It has already encompassed the world, with 12,000,000 members in 192 countries and territories.  It is a religion for a new world.

At the heart of Buddhism is the ordinary human being.  This is who and what Buddhism extols, the common human being and the great life of the universe which courses through our body and blood.

We are all connected on this planet; and a new vision of our common humanity and of our place in the universe is needed in order to usher in the new coming civilization.

A new identity.  A broader vision.

A new myth for America.

______________________

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.


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Chasing the Dream

By jimhilgendorf1 on March 7th, 2013

Our dreams are what impel us on.

Like phantom apparitions, they lead us to sweat and aspire after the fulfillment of our every desire.

I once knew a woman who strained for years to gain wealth, with no tangible result; then came suddenly and luckily into enormous prosperity.  She built a huge home, fashioned to her every whim; bought new cars; took expensive vacations around the world.  In time, the real revelation came when she realized that she was not happy.  What to do then ?

Years ago, I also knew a young man who grew up in a black ghetto.  In his early twenties, he was in gangs and making $15,000 a week doing all kinds of things. He copied the American Dream.  He had cars, women, money, everything he thought that would make him happy.  It was an enormous shock when he realized he felt miserable.  What to do?

Our dreams lead us on.  They are not solely focused on money.  They are of every imaginable shape and color.

We want our dreams to come true.  Yet arriving at our destination, our dreams and desires do not end, because nothing is ever frozen in time.  Our lives morph into something else, joy becomes grief, victory can lead to defeat, nothing is as it ever seems, and in the end everything culminates in death.

Forever and ever, the phantom grail eludes us, leading us ever onward.  Toward what?

What are these phantom dreams?

Life is not as it seems.  Dreams are not a destination. Dreams are signposts toward something else, markers along the way.

What is it we really pursue?  It is ourselves.  It is our true identity.  It is the power and creativity within our life that matches the splendor of stars and galaxies without.

It is to feel, in the deepest core of ourselves, our oneness with the universe itself.

It is to know that we are forever.

________________________

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.


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America – The Lost Family

By jimhilgendorf1 on March 6th, 2013

America was supposed to be the great melting pot – where people from diverse nationalities around the world would converge and meld into a new race.  We would all become Americans.

Yet distinctions stubbornly hold their place.  In every large city, there are divisions – Chinese, Jew, Black, Russian, Arab – ghettoes of identity.

If anything a crisis of identity has emerged all over the world.  Whole countries fracture because of identity, because of religion, race, culture, heritage.  The world is becoming ever more global in scope in all its interactions, while, at the same time, the world breaks into ever smaller divisions.

We want an identity.  We cannot live without an identity.  So we grasp onto those things that lend us an identity, whether it is in politics or religion or whatever. We are Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus – religion is the great identifier, and, at the same time, the great divider.  If I am a Catholic, then everything outside of Catholicism is the “other”.  The same for Muslims, Jews, Hindus.  The very thing that gives us an identity, a place in the universe, a home, a family, divides us at the same time from the rest of humanity.

Identity is at the root of war.  Religious identity is at the root of most of the wars in the world today.

Our religions are not broad enough to include everyone, only certain people. What is different from us, becomes the “other”, and the “other” is not really human in the best sense of the world, does not conform to the parameters of who we are.  The “other” is outside of our family, and foreign.

Everyone needs to belong, to feel at home.  America was to be the place where a human family was to be forged.  But our divisions are on display everywhere, not only in where we live, or who we associate with, but in our politics, where divisions are frozen in place.

People sense that things are increasingly out of whack.  They sense the alienation, the uncaringness, the sense of isolation.  They long for something in their deepest hearts, but they cannot pin it down, or say exactly what is missing. But something is missing.

What they long for is a sense of identity that binds them to all other people.  It is a missing connection to the universe around them, near and far, down the street and around the corner, as well as to the suns and stars that burn in infinite spaces.

America has lost that family, and the world has lost that family.  We are coming together in a myriad of ways – technology, business, communication, travel – and yet the human heart feels the gathering isolation.

It is the world of the spirit that is missing.  It is a gap that the world’s historical religions are no longer able to fill, because they do not supply us with that identity great and grand enough to include every man and woman on the globe. It is a global family we want and are headed for, but there is nothing to supply the spiritual connection needed to forge such bonds.

We are all human.  This is the bottom line.  This is the point we have to get back to, and the spiritual revolution needed to accomplish that has been missing up to this point.

There is a new spiritual civilization, beyond even age-old dreams, that is even now struggling to be born.  Without it, all of the technology we can possibly produce will end up being meaningless.

Buddhism is at the heart of this new spiritual revolution, and especially the Buddhism of the SGI, or Soka Gakkai International.  As yet relatively small – 12,000,000 members in 192 countries – the seeds for a new civilization have already been planted.

Inevitably, this new world is coming.  It is a world with the ordinary human being at the center of everything.  All of politics, economics, and education now need to become oriented to the single individual, and the happiness of men and women and children everywhere.

This requires a great human revolution in the lives of everyone on the planet; and this revolution cannot be accomplished except through the spirit, through a religion or way of looking at things that binds us heart to heart, and reveals and brings forth the grandeur of the universe itself within the life of each single human being.

Everything will be transformed.  This is what is coming.

The truly human family that mankind has dreamed of since the dawn of time is coming.  It is here even now.

Look around.

___________________

James Hilgendorf

 

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.



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Soldiers Returning from War

By jimhilgendorf1 on March 4th, 2013

Soldiers coming back from war enter another time and dimension.

It is a world where everything goes on as before: grocery lists, school time, nine to five, news at six, worries of money and fashion, scrambling up the ladder, obsession with the smallest things, like how to lose a pound or two, hair styles and movies.

The soldier, though, has seen murder and death and war.

This is covered up for most of us here at home.  We go on our way, never surmising a death struggle in other lives a world away.

We cover up death and dying.  We do not want it to enter our world.

Both ways shatter the soul.

We move about our death with the utmost insouciance.

Our soldier looks about him, sensing an incredibly remote world, another dimension.

His inner world fractures in disconnect.  Who am I?

Down the street, lovers stroll hand in hand, their world never ending, beyond time and space.

The sun comes up, the sun goes down.  Time moves in relentless repetitious ways.  Over and over, no sense, no meaning.  Trinkets and trifles assuming the ascendency of the moment.

The bonds of the heart have broken.

For the soldier, a bullet in the head is the way to go.

___________________

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.


 

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Karma: A River that Runs Deep

By jimhilgendorf1 on February 21st, 2013

Karma goes so deep you cannot even see it.

What is karma?  Simply the effects of our thoughts, words and actions.  If we make a cause, we get an effect.  The effect is lodged in our life, whether we recognize it or not.  If we steal, we have to pay. If we belittle people, we will in turn be belittled.

This cause and effect relationship about our actions is not recognized universally.  Some would say there is no effect from stealing if you are not caught.  You win.  But in the spiritual realm of things, this is never the case.  You always get caught.  You always pay.

From a Buddhist perspective, karma goes beyond the current lifetime of a person. Buddhism posits the eternity of life; and the causes that one has made in past lives carries over into this one.  So we may wonder where negative or positive results in our life are coming from, but they are always coming of our own making.  The Bible itself says, as you sow, so shall you reap.

There are things in our lives that we can modify and control to a certain extent. We can adjust our actions.  We can think more positively.  We can try to produce good results.

But there are things in our lives also which are not only exceedingly difficult to control or change, but which are almost impossible to become aware of.  Karma is like a river running deep underground.  Psychology and psychiatry try to delve into the root causes of illness, but it is very difficult process, and even when root causes are revealed, there is no power to control or change the effect they are having on our lives.

We all have those things in our lives which bedevil us, which we cannot seem to change no matter how hard we try, that torture us.  The causes or patterns of thought, word, and actions run so deep that they keep repeating the same effects, without our being able to even recognize what is causing them.  The patterns have become so deeply embedded in our psyches that they are invisible to our eye of understanding.

This is where Buddhism shows its enormous transformative power.  Buddhism reaches deep down, below all of the karmic patterns, to tap into a realm of life that can being forth the energy and power to break up and dissolve and change even the deepest karma.

Nichiren Buddhism, in particular, allows a person to tap into this great river of life force through the chanting of the words Nam Myoho Renge Kyo – the title of the Lotus Sutra – and to realign one’s life with the expansive universal life force inherent within one’s very own life.

__________________

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf is a forty-year member of the SGI, or Soka Gakkai International, a Buddhist lay organization with 12,000,000 members in 192 countries and territories.

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.


 

 

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Eternity, Here in America

By jimhilgendorf1 on February 19th, 2013

The real America has yet to be born and revealed.

Across the prairies and plains, great monuments and structures have arisen, skyscrapers, great roads, steel mills, mega cities covering over the land with lights and endless traffic and hundreds of millions of men and women; and never in this present time is heard or felt the true spirit of the land, which still lies buried beneath the Nebraskan sod, or the Mississippi deltas, or the snow-capped peaks of Colorado.

It was a dream, born out of the heart of endless peoples, reaching back beyond the time that we currently know; past the times of glaciers that opened up across the continent.  Wandering herdsmen slowly trekked their way down great glacial divides, searching and longing for the promised land, for something beyond ice and hunger and loneliness, for a feeling of belonging at last.

They came to America, they were here, they were our progenitors.  They knew and felt what we knew and felt, and it was never enough.  To have another foothold on the land, another beast, another feast around the fire; and then the descent into the dark, always the dark, the unknown.

There were no answers.

We can find no answers either.  We wander in the labyrinth of our buildings and stock market ticker-tapes, of television and computers, and the awful surge towards more and more information, more and more internet connections, and the heart feels no reprieve.

We have shut off the darkness.  It is now fluorescent time forever, lights on, brights on.  Even the prairies are lit full time with lamps.

Eternity dwells in each moment, untapped, waiting.  We walk through the day, the motions of a trillion shards of time, living and dying each moment; and there is never the least recognition or awareness of stars and suns reflected in our eyes, black holes coursing through our arteries, galaxies throbbing in our hearts.

Eternity is here, right now, where we stand.

How to reveal it?

________________

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.


 

 

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What is Happiness? – Surprise!

By jimhilgendorf1 on February 18th, 2013

What is happiness?  This question has been posed – and continues to be posed – throughout all of human history.

But no conclusive answer has really ever been found.

We equate happiness with desires fulfilled, dreams rendered into reality, love found; but we find, in the end, that nothing is permanent, time and life are always changing, and what is here today will not be there tomorrow. As inevitable as the progression of life into death, our summation of happiness evaporates in a puff of smoke.

Life is like that.  Nothing is certain but change.  How can we ever grab onto something that never changes, that is immutable and forever.

Ah, life holds many surprises.  The biggest surprise is that what we normally hold as standards of happiness do not hold up in the end whatsoever.  The secrets of life are not so easily divulged.

Win the lottery, never have to work, lie on the beach, be free from worry, lounge through life – these are things we think about many times as happiness, that illusory goal that is so often tied to money.  But life destroys inevitably such illusions.  The crux of the matter, of happiness, is not to be found in such a leisurely life.

What then?  What is the point?  What is the purpose?

Ah, Life would have us bent over the rack, confronted with insuperable problems, faced with imponderable situations, often of life or death.

What are you made of?  Find the point of power within your own life.  Overcome anything and everything, face it out, climb desperate mountains of resolve and necessity and utter confrontation with the devil of darkness within your own life, those illusions holding you back.

It is a matter of power.  How much can you draw forth?

To face life with a fierce resolve, confident, poised and joyful; grabbing onto the next challenge with a relish mindful of eternity itself, of forever – this is to force from life’s hand the jeweled secret, the eternally abiding identity of our own real core and self.

It is to discover who we really are.

We are forever.

_______________

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.


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Believe in Yourself – A New Myth for America

By jimhilgendorf1 on February 18th, 2013

There comes a time when you just have to hold on.

A small boat, amid giant waves, with no land in sight, the sun by day, but dense clouds and utter darkness at night.  Now or never, it is victory or defeat, life or death.

Land must appear, or we are lost.

Time to summon forth a rallying cry.  Believe in yourself!  Hold fast to the boat of your dreams!

Life was made for dreams, and for the fulfilling of dreams.  Within oneself is the universe, and all the powers of the universe, and all the powers needed to fulfill our dreams.

But we must hold fast, no matter what comes, high waves, typhoons, lightning, storms and torrential rain, waters boiling up from devilish depths.

There is only the tiny boat to hang onto, the self.  There is nothing else.

Believe in yourself.  Believe in your dreams.

—from A New Myth for America, by James Hilgendorf

A New Myth for America by James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.


 

 

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What is America? – Buddhism & the American Dream

By jimhilgendorf1 on February 17th, 2013

America was always a matter of much more than the old American Dream of making it, of money, of getting ahead, of two cars in each garage, of a home in suburbia.

The old notion of the American Dream has died a slow death.  Money does not fill the void in our lives.  We have chased that dream through alleyways and dark tunnels and it leads nowhere.  Money is fine, but it is not the answer we have always chased after, the magic elixir.

America was always about something infinitely greater.  It was a matter of the spirit.

America, essentially, was to be the birthplace of a new history, a new venture into eternity.

As Joseph Campbell, the great interpreter of myths, once said, eternity is right here and now, or it is nowhere.

Buddhism is a key to unlock eternity in the life of each man and each woman, no matter what their station, their wealth, their background.  It is an unlocking of the very source of their being, which is the life and source of the universe itself.

We are here in America to unlock this treasure of life within ourselves.  We were born upon this continent to give birth to this reality.  Nowhere else in the vast universe does this possibility exist.  Call it America.  Call it eternity.  Call it forever, it is the same.

There is a new civilization being born.  A new spiritual civilization, beyond even age-old dreams, beyond anything we have yet imagined, is struggling to be born.  It is here and now.  It grows from the wreckage of despair, of lost hope, of pollution, greed, injustice, hatred and war.  It is the compassionate heart of the universe itself coming to fruition and bloom.

The Buddha is at the heart of creation.  The Buddha is you.  The Buddha is me.

Let creation issue forth.

____________________

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.


 

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The Secret Door

By jimhilgendorf1 on February 15th, 2013

To live eighty or ninety years; to have been rich; to have found love; to have traveled to the ends of the earth; to have been the president of a big company; to have been a professor of this or that; to have played golf whenever you wished in your retirement; to have been a great sports hero; to have been a beautiful woman; to have eaten delicious food every day of your life; to have won the lottery; to have invented a better computer; to have been a philanthropist; to have taken vacations wherever and whenever you wanted; to have been lucky in your health; to have lived in the most beautiful places; to have owned a beautiful home – any of these, and infinitely more desires fulfilled and goals won were nothing at the end of the day, at the end of your allotted time, if you had not found the secret door, the way into another dimension, as you stood with your two feet on the ground and the spring air soft about your head, and the rain and thunder and lightning and rainbows and people everywhere and failed to notice that where you stood and who you were was eternity.

—From “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity”.

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.


 

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The World Around Us and Shadows

By jimhilgendorf1 on February 13th, 2013

From “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity”, the newest book by author James Hilgendorf:

“So it comes down to the real crux of the matter.

“I must change.  I must win.  I must overcome.  I must reveal victory within my own life.

“The world about me is only a shadow.  The people around me move as I move.  The suffering or joy around me moves as I move.

“This is the real battle.  It has finally come down to this.  There is no retreat.

“We now know the enemy.  It is doubt, it is ignorance of self, it is unbelief.  It is the failure to recognize that everything turns on one’s own growth, the shattering of obstacles, the release of a victorious self.

“Shadows turn as I turn.”

__________________

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.


 

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Eternity, and Time, and the Buddha of Forever

By jimhilgendorf1 on February 10th, 2013

The Buddha was thought of for millennia as this grandiose, godlike figure, beyond time, partaking of eternity, above and beyond all mundane affairs and figures.

Great statues were built in memory of this god, stupas erected upon the Buddha’s remains, in hopes of somehow partaking even a little of the mystery and greatness of his majestic being.

But this has now been shown to be a lie, a fabrication woven out of delusions and dark dreams.

There is no godlike Buddha.

The Buddha has been among us all along.  In the simplest man or woman, lies the buried image of the Buddha , waiting for resurrection.

The woman, wheeling her child in a carriage along the pathway.  The elder man, sitting on the park bench.  The children playing on the grass.

Their forms move this way and that, we see them with our everyday eye; but there is another dimension we do not see.  We do not see eternity.

Eternity lies in their every motion, or bending this way or that, in the way they meet and talk, not recognizing the vast reservoir of time and generations that lie behind each simple word, or smile, or thought, or gesture.  No recognition of the halls of forever that lie buried beneath the most commonplace hours of the day.

We are here forever.

We live cordoned-off lives, bound by barriers of the mind and heart.  Our travails are given to us to open up avenues of compassion.  Time and living is meant to break down walls of separation and aloneness and devastation of the heart.

Eternity lives within our body.  The Buddha pines to emerge.

Open up the time-bound doors.

_____________________

James Hilgendorf

James Hilgendorf’s latest book is “Poems of Death: Time for Eternity“.    He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“. All of his books are available through bookstores, and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.


 

 

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Good & Evil and The Mind of the Buddha

By jimhilgendorf1 on February 7th, 2013

We are all human beings.  We are bound together.

The Buddha’s mind is the mind and intent that embraces all of humanity and all of life as its very own life itself.

This is no illusion, nor is it mere words and theory, this is the deepest reality.  This is what humanity must awaken to.

That we are separate – this is the most fundamental of illusions.  All of true religion must be focused upon awakening humanity to this reality.  Any religion that divides, that excludes, that separates, can no longer hold our allegiance.  Any religion that advocates war and the use of nuclear weapons and the wanton destruction of millions of men and women and children for the sake of an illusion, for the sake of security, for the sake of eliminating the bad guy, of annihilating evil, is a blatant fraud of a religion.

What is evil?  Evil is that which denies, suppresses and distorts from view the vast, hidden potential of Life.  It is the delusion which causes the individual to doubt the existence of this potential and power within his or her own life.

Life is growth, Life is development.  Life is expansion.  Life is that which is ever reaching out to comprehend and give expression to its own phenomenal urge toward fulfillment and joy.  To be on the side of Life is to give expression – individually, collectively, universally – to this urge.  To be against Life is to forever be relegated to the dustbin of history.

________________________

James Hilgendorf

“Poems of Death: Time for Eternity”, author James Hilgendorf’s newest book,  is available through bookstores and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.  He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“.


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America & the World – A New Generation of Youth

By jimhilgendorf1 on February 6th, 2013

There is a new generation of youth arising in America, reaching out to the world.  I meet them everywhere.

They are studying at universities, they are working at all kinds of jobs.  They are a new breed.

They are not concerned with the normal trappings of the business world.  They are looking to connect to something larger than themselves, to use their talents in a meaningful and contributive way.

Barack Obama is a representative of this mindset.  After graduating from Harvard Law School, he could easily have been on a fast track to a high-paying corporate job, but he chose instead to spend time as a community organizer.

The youth of today, more and more, are looking for meaningful work.  How does it help other people?

Youth in America, more and more, have a global vision.  The world is their workplace.  I meet them time and again, traveling and studying abroad, familiar and avidly interested in other cultures.

This is the future of America.  From this land of America, youth will carry a new vision into the world.

______________________

From “A New Myth for America”, by James Hilgendorf:

“Never compare yourself with others.  You are one of a kind.

“The universe looks upon you with a mother’s fawning eye, dreaming impossible dreams through your very own mind, wanting these dreams to give shape to things never before seen.

“Our task is to link our heart with billions of others, and to make their hearts our own.”

A New Myth for America by James Hilgendorf

“Poems of Death: Time for Eternity”, author James Hilgendorf’s newest book,  is available through bookstores and online in paperback or in e-book format at Amazon.com.  He is also the author of five other books: “Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective“; “The Great New Emerging Civilization“; “The New Superpower“; “A New Myth for America“; and “The Buddha and the Dream of America“.