Books on Buddhism, Buddha, Buddhism  | June 28, 2010 By jimhilgendorf1 | No comments yet

The Buddha is Coming to America

Ask randomly a hundred people in America whether they have an interest in Buddhism, and many will reply, in varying degrees of enthusiasm, yes. They may not know much about Buddhism, but their interest has been piqued by things they have heard or read or seen.

Many of these people have turned away from organized religion due to their experience of being raised in a particular faith that they can no longer subscribe to. Still, they have an interest in religion. They are part of the growing segment of the population who define themselves as spiritual, yet no longer affiliate themselves with mainline faiths.

Buddhism intrigues them, because Buddhism seems to center itself on humanity, compassion, and the individual, without resorting to God-centered, damnation-and-salvation centered dogma and ritual. People are looking for answers to their problems, and they are not finding them in their old religious institutions.

As for Buddhism, it is as though the seeds have been sown in the soil of America, and now the time has come for those seeds to come to fruition.

My new book, “The Buddha and The Dream of America” is an attempt to help pave the way for this new spiritual blossoming.

New Book: "The Buddha and The Dream of America"

New Book: "The Buddha and The Dream of America"

At the heart of the book is a belief that the true greatness of America still lies unrealized and unfulfilled and ahead of us, and that a new civilization is even now being born before our very eyes.

Buddhism, and the human revolution of each individual, is at the heart of this transformation.

From the book:

“There is a revolution coming.

“And as it reveals itself in the mind of each man and woman, the mountains will fall and shift, chasms will open, the deserts will run with rivers, beautiful blooms will burst from dry dust, suns will sprout in the sky, animals and birds dance, the nuclear force of ten million stars will break forth with light, and the minds of men and women will reflect in every aspect of their lives the halls and mirrors of Eternity.”

The book is available through bookstores, or online at the Tribute Series.

Health Care Reform, National Health Care, Obama, Single Payer, Taxes  | April 19, 2010 By jimhilgendorf1 | No comments yet

Talk About Taxes - What do you get from yours?

Tax day has come and gone, and we had the Tea-Partiers making a lot of noise about taxes and big government.  They proclaim a slide into socialism and the big hand of government and European socialism taking over all our lives.

So you have paid your taxes.  What are you getting?  This is really the question.

I ran across an excellent commentary today in the Sacramento Bee, by Steven Hill, titled ” Viewpoints:  Europe tax model delivers much more.”

Steven Hill

Steven Hill

We have commented on the health care issue on this blog repeatedly, and put up a video to educate people.

This commentary by Mr. Hill talks of health care, but also of the many other benefits Europeans in general receive from their tax dollars, that we are not taxed on but end up paying for out of pocket anyway.

Check it out at this link.

You can also check out his website at Europe’s Promise.

Health Care Reform, National Health Care, Obama, Single Payer  | March 25, 2010 By jimhilgendorf1 | No comments yet

LION & THE FOXES: OBAMA & HEALTHCARE

Something new is emerging in America.

The bitter and fanatical cry of outrage from Republicans, conservatives and Tea-Partiers at the final passage of a first-ever national health care bill is the sign that something unusual is now coming to the fore in America.

The rage, of course, is directed against Democrats, but its real target is for President Obama.

He embodies something this country has not seen in quite a while: a President and a leader who can fight for the people.

The nature of life and of the universe is such that every time this happens - when a lion of the people begins to emerge - the packs of hounddogs and foxes break out in their choruses of baying and yapping, and devilish characters seem to emerge in heated mob-rage from the bowels of the earth itself.

The President is that potential lion.

For the first time in decades, the powerful stranglehold of power and money and selfishness has been directly confronted and stunned to a standstill.  It is only a moment in time, to be sure; but it is an opening.

People are starving for a leader with great heart to step forward and do battle.  And it will be a battle; for never has authority and wealth and privilege easily given up its grip of power.

There is something frenzied in the reaction to this piece of legislation.  It goes way beyond mere objection.  It is filled with a hatred bordering on insanity.

Something good has stepped forward, and something evil is loosed also from the shadows.

This piece of legislation is not perfect.  There is a world of room for improvement.

But the significance of the moment goes way beyond the legislation.  It is a glimpse of something wonderful.  It is a glimpse of something great.

When the lion begins to roar, the foxes scatter.

Jim Hilgendorf writes at http://www.jimhilgendorf.org.




Almaty, Kazakhstan, Peace, Students  | February 4, 2010 By jimhilgendorf1 | No comments yet

KAZAKHSTAN AS SEEN BY ITS STUDENTS

The country of Kazakhstan is not very well known in the United States, nor in many other places of the world.  Ask someone in the U.S. about Kazakhstan, and many people will respond with “Borat.”  The movie “Borat” was not even shot in Kazakhstan, but in Romania, and the scenes in the movie are a gross distortion of the real Kazakhstan and its people.

Until about three months ago, I knew nothing myself about Kazakhstan.  I was planning to begin a new project of  ”America’s Dialogue” that involved interviewing students from around the world, and a set of circumstances pointed me in the direction of Kazakhstan.  One of these circumstances was an interview that developed with Mrs. Bryganym Aitimova, current Ambassador to the United Nations from Kazakhstan.  I picked up a piece about her on the internet which talked about her involvement in crusading against nuclear weapons.  This piqued my interest, since just two years before I had interviewed people around the country and traveled to Hiroshima to interview the mayor of Hiroshima and survivors - hibakusha - of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, and produced a video on Hiroshima and nuclear weapons.

I discovered that Kazakhstan, after becoming an independent nation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was left in possession of approximately 2500 atomic bombs; but that the nation then dismantled its arsenal and renounced nuclear weapons.

I began contacting Kazakhstan students who were studying at universities around the world, and interviewing them on Skype.  I began to learn about their country, their customs, their culture, and their religions through the eyes of these young students.

Kazakhstan is a mix of almost 130 different nationalities, with many different religions also. These young students have grown up in a multi-cultural, multi-religious environment from the day they were born, a society that seems to practice a high degree of cultural and religious tolerance.

The video comments by the students are wonderful.  They show a passion and a pride in their country, and, at the same time, a spirit to reach out to the world.  Their lives give a total lie to “Borat”.

Catch their voices on “America’s Dialogue“.

Big Almaty Lake, Kazakhstan

Big Almaty Lake, Kazakhstan

Health Care Reform, National Health Care, Obama, Peace, Single Payer, War  | December 15, 2009 By jimhilgendorf1 | No comments yet

Health Care Reform - Shame on America

The efforts at health care reform now working its way through the hallowed halls of our government is something that should deeply anger all Americans, left and right, Democrat or Republican or Independent.  Nothing that comes from these current efforts will ever solve the agony and suffering of tens of millions of Americans who are currently caught in the health care dilemma.

The bottom line is that our government - and our representatives in it - is bought and paid for by monied interests, most notably the large insurance companies that siphon off hundreds of billions of dollars each year in profits that should be going, not into their coffers and salaries, but into care for the sick and ill in our society.

No other modern, industrialized country in the world approaches health care in this insane manner.  These other societies spend far less than we on health care, and yet the statistics continually show that they beat us all the time in longevity, percentages of children dying in birth, and most importantly the fact that they provide basic coverage for all of their citizens.  Meanwhile we have tens of millions without any coverage, and tens of millions more with shoddy policies and undercoverage that leads, for many, to bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, our representatives dawdle.

It is part of the larger picture.  The resources and blood and sweat and welfare of the American people, more and more, is taking a back seat to monied interests.  We spend hundreds of billions, even trillions, on war and the production of machines and aircraft and ships and guns that stokes the bottom lines of bloated war production companies whose products get ground up in battle or rust away into obsolescence and never produce anything of real value for the lives of Americans; and then we produce another war, or extend the ones we are in, and the old machines are replaced by new ones that feed once again the bottom lines of mega-war companies.

Thirty-five percent of the monies that flow into insurance companies - totaling hundreds of billions of dollars each year - are chewed up in advertising, paperwork, executive salaries, etc. - and this money alone is enough to provide basic coverage for all of the American people.  Yet we cannot break this vicious cycle of inept, bought-off, uncaring representation we have in the hallowed halls of Congress.

The big insurance companies are not in the least essential to good health care coverage.  They are profit-driven, not people driven.  Our whole system is profit-driven, not people driven.

Even tiny Taiwan, when deciding how to revamp their health care, appointed experts who sat down and objectively tried to examine the best points of  health care in countries around the world, so that that they could create a health care system that they could afford and one which took the very best care of all of their people.  They succeeded.  Take a look at the PBS program, “Sick Around the World“, and see what other countries have done.

Here in America, we refuse to believe that any system in the world can teach us anything, that we are the best, and that we have nothing to learn from anyone.  As a result, we will get the health care system we deserve.  We will stick to our old ways, and the people will lose out.

The current reform efforts will keep the big insurance companies and they will thrive because people will now be mandated to have coverage and the insurance companies will now have tens of millions more customers.  And do you really think the insurance companies and the people who run them will be nice guys and not try to make even more money, more profit?

It’s time to wake up.





Afghanistan, Nobel Peace Prize, Obama, Peace, War  | December 13, 2009 By jimhilgendorf1 | No comments yet

Obama and War: America’s Dead-end Vision

To President Obama’s Nobel Prize speech, we have a mixed and strange response coming out of the country. From a Peace Prize recipient, we are so used to a lofty vision, a vision of achievable peace, that Obama’s words about the necessity of war to achieve peaceful ends falls like a dull thud upon our dreams. It is a vision of perpetual war to achieve intermittent peace.

It makes many people think. It disrupts our normal commitment to the ideals of non-violence, of Gandhi, of Martin Luther King, Jr., as viable and achievable ends. It says there will always be war, and the necessity for war.

The response is interesting. From the right, from hawks, there is begrudging assent. From the left, there is dissent; but, underlying even this dissent , a kind of unspoken confusion and dilemma. This is the man they voted for, he was to be their hero, their dreams were finally on track.

And it posed a question: Perhaps Obama is right. Perhaps this is the reality of life. Perhaps we need, in the final analysis, to adjust our collective vision, to dim it down a bit, to grapple with eternal, unbending realities.

This has been the discourse since time immemorial; and now at this particular moment of time in America - America, the beautiful; America, land of the brave and free; America, the shining city upon a hill - we meet once again hard, seemingly intractable realities; and the pronouncements falling upon our ears and dimmed eyes is: War is with us always. Prepare.

For the President, many seemed to agree: All the choices were bad. To pull out of Afghanistan, would leave the land open to devils. To engage, means death and the always uncertain quagmires of war. And the American people are restless. They want answers. They want clear-cut solutions. They want to win, and they want to be absolved of war, and they fear where we are headed.

In the end, there is no way out, because there is no vision in the land. We are at a crossroads, and we will always be at a crossroads, until we begin to tackle the real problem: Ourselves. Each of us, as individuals, need to grow. We need to expand our own individual vision of our place in the cosmos. We need to see others as ourselves.

This is, of course, the realm of religion. There is no other way. It is beyond right and left, beyond politics, beyond us and them.

And at this point in time, there is no answer from the old religions. Everywhere, Christianity, Islam and Judaism are locked in a death-battle. This is our world’s reality.

It will take another revolution to upend this dead-end vision of history. This will be the greatest of revolutions, a human revolution played out on a mass scale such as the world has never seen before. It is already here, it has begun. It is emerging in the hearts of ordinary people, the housewife down the street, the mechanic, the department store clerk, the busdriver, your hairdresser. It is emerging by the people, of the people, and for the people. It is transformation, and it is hope. It is beyond President Obama, or anyone else leading us out of the wilderness. It is our own individual struggle. And then we can spread our vision, one by one, to others.

Health Care Reform, National Health Care, Obama, Single Payer  | November 11, 2009 By jimhilgendorf1 | No comments yet

Health Care U.S. - Can’t We Learn from the World?

Here in the United States, in regards to Health Care, we seem to have blinders on. There is a mindset here in too many of our people that refuses to believe we can be anything but number one, no matter what the facts and statistics show.

Our healthcare, if you can pay, is good; but the way we deliver and make that care available to our citizens is a disgrace for a country with the wealth we have.

All you have to do is look - and I mean really look - at other countries and what they are doing. Yes, they have problems, but they also have the will to care for the health of their people, and right now they are doing a much, much better job that we are, and, at the same time, spending much less to get the job done.

I was watching PBS last night - “Front Line” - and I wanted to share with you a wonderful program. Please click through “Sick Around the World” and watch this hour long program, and then please share it with others. It is a picture of how 5 other capitalist societies - the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland - deliver health care, and what the United States could learn from their successes and failures. The show highlights trips to these countries by Washington Post foreign correspondent
 T. R. Reid.

Health Care Reform  | September 21, 2009 By jimhilgendorf1 | No comments yet

HEALTH CARE IN FRANCE - AN EXPERIENCE

Here’s another experience of someone who has experienced the health care system of our country, and then was exposed to health delivery in another country - this time France.

For a basic primer on the issues, see our video on health care.

Health Care Reform, National Health Care, Obama, Single Payer  | September 3, 2009 By jimhilgendorf1 | No comments yet

Health Care in England - An Experience

Right now, there is a great deal of confusion blowing rampant through the halls of the media about health care reform.

One of the remarkable things that emerges from all of these so-called national discussions is a mind-set in many Americans that absolutely refuses to look at the facts about our own health care system and the health care systems of other countries.

The World Health Organization ranks our overall health care system 37th in the world.  There are many other statistics that show that we here in America are spending a lot more for our healthcare and receiving in return a lot less that other countries.

We are bombarded with bugaboo words like socialism, communism, government control over our lives, death-panels, that continue to distract us from an objective look at the facts and the truth of the matter.

We are a rich country economically compared to many countries, and yet we have 47 million people in this country with no health insurance whatsoever.  This is a disgrace that is allowed in no other advanced nation in the world.

But in America we turn our backs on other countries’ experience, we refuse to open our minds to facts, we paint false pictures of the health systems of other countries.  If we were truly wise, we would sift through the experiences of these countries and then model a system of our own, using the best of each system.

Thirty percent of our health care monies are simply swallowed up in insurance companies’s marketing, advertising, and paperwork costs, along with enormous bonuses and profits in an industry that should never allow profit to be the main incentive in the first place.

There is much more.  For a basic primer on the issues, see our video on health care.

And here is a commentary from a woman who has lived and experienced health care in both America and England.


Health Care Reform  | August 12, 2009 By jimhilgendorf1 | No comments yet

Health Care Reform: Facts and Fabrications

The health care debate is firing up now, and all kinds of misinformation is being thrown at the public.  People are confused, and rightly so.

Bob Lebow, a former past president of the 15,000 member Physicians for a National Health Program, and author of Health Care Meltdown, once wrote:

“I’ve found that one of the greatest obstacles to meaningful health care reform is the degree to which we Americans are clueless about our health care system.”

Two years ago, I traveled around Oregon interviewing doctors and people working for health care reform, to try and get at the basic issues of the problem.  It was an eye-opener for me.  I learned a lot.  I put together a 30-minute video and sent DVDs all over the country to different groups - part of America’s Dialogue II, the second in a series of national grassroots discussions.

The video was posted to YouTube, and I offer it to anyone below.  The issues are still the same today as two years ago.

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