kaaayssuth:

they will not laugh when you shout, “OH SHIT, IT’S JUST MACS ON MACS ON MACS!”

Best track, hands down

listentomodsun:

Punk Goes Pop 4 is in stores and on iTunes today! Make sure you check out the cover of Wiz Khalifa’s “Roll Up”, done by The Ready Set and our friend Mod!

7 of these apply to me today/tonight.

kaityjay:

Snuck onto the floor. Shhh…!

I just got done reading this great article about Jainism. Most likely you haven’t heard about this religion, but their core beliefs about humanity, nature, and the planet are worth reading and thinking about. Enjoy

The Jain Path

by Aidan Rankin

I can still clearly remember an occasion when I was young, perhaps four years old, and trod on a small snail when playing in the garden. I do not recall whether this was an act of child-like callousness or a careless accident. Whatever it was, my mother, who was nearby, was horrified. “You have killed a living creature,” she told me, and she proceeded to remind me of the need to be careful at all times not to do avoidable harm.

Her words would be very familiar to a Jain. Indeed, I thought of them when years later I heard of Jainism, and learned of its deep reverence for life in all its rich variety. For the first premise of this ancient philosophy is that all life has intrinsic value and each life form is unique, special, and has the possibility of achieving enlightenment. Thousands of years ago, the Jains of India recognized that all living things depend on each other, and that the concept of life extends beyond humans to animals and plants, to water and rock, to deserts, forests, and mountain ranges. All natural formations contain life, indeed many lives, all of which are crucial in their own ways to the health of the planet. As human beings, our relatively advanced state of consciousness gives us the ability to conserve and protect life, but also arms us with immense powers to destroy, whether through active malevolence or simple carelessness.

The Jain path is one of continuous caution. It urges us to exercise constant care in the way we use our intelligence and in all decisions we make, great and small, because what can so easily seem trivial to us can have global, or indeed universal importance. Jainism makes explicit the links between damage to the environment and damage to ourselves, the way we treat other species and the way we behave to each other. Jains have always realized that if we treat nature as a resource, to be consumed without conscience or foresight, then human relationships will be built on aggression and domination. They sense that all violence, even to the tiniest forms of life, can inflict a much larger psychic harm.

In this in-built caution or cosmic conservatism, we can find radical implications for the way we conduct our lives and order our priorities. Far from being repressive, the Jain emphasis on personal restraint sets us free from our obsessions with unsatisfying material gain and superficial competitive “success.” It shows us that these obsessions are not only destructive but also rooted in delusion. In Jainism, the idea of social justice begins in our daily lives. We are enjoined to live simply, so that others may simply live and so that the balance of nature may be preserved. But at the same time, we are asked to avoid violent thoughts, fixed ideas, impatience, and inflexibility. We improve our own lives, and those of our fellows, through equanimity instead of zealous passion. The Jain principle of restraint sets us free from the irrational attachments that have corrupted and embittered humanity. By cultivating inner calm, we do not become coldly and narrowly rationalist. Instead, we are liberated from the unwanted attachments that make us unhappy and are able to focus on aspects of our lives that really matter, such as friendship and love, and beyond that compassion for all beings and affinity with the whole of nature.

In many ways I have come to see in Jainism’s ancient wisdom a powerful tonic for the contemporary world, including for our Western society, where for all its apparent wealth and technological prowess is undergoing a deepening crises. What better inspiration could there be for those of us who see true growth as personal rather than merely economic? The Jains understand that the pursuit of happiness is usually the pursuit of less rather than the pursuit of more. They also recognize that the protection of the environment is among the most critical challenges facing human society. They are acutely aware of the connection between emotional and environmental health, and that in order to survive at all, we have to accept limitations and cannot go on expanding and consuming eternally.

With respect to the all-important principle of ahimsa, Jains have long recognized that all living systems in the universe are mutually dependent and interlocked, and therefore we must behave towards them with restraint and respect. The Jain understanding of the multiplicity of life forces surrounding us, as well as its stance on the equality of all life, was revolutionary in its day, and strangely it remains so in vast areas of the world today, including the “developed” West. Furthermore, Jainism is distinguished from other religions by explicitly extending the idea of rights to all species, placing a moral obligation on humans to respect those rights and be aware of them in even the most mundane decisions and behaviors. Thus nonviolence is not a passive principle. It is a proactive principle that asks us to act and live in such a way so as to reduce the amount of harm that takes place in the world. While some harm is unavoidable in a life in which the interests of various creatures compete, there is much we can do to lessen this and make life happier for all. Nonviolence is a call to action to encourage us to make the world more peaceful.

With respect to the ideal of nonattachment, the Jain path suggests that there is great value in living lightly and encourages us to reconsider what material possessions we really need and how much mental and material baggage we can safely case aside. Empty preoccupations and priorities are not only of no ultimate value to ourselves but are also detrimental to the rest of the world. We can choose to ignore the consequences of uncontrolled economic growth along with the accompanying pollution, environmental and social instability, and gross material inequalities, both nationally and globally. We can choose to ignore the finite nature of the world’s resources, which means that we cannot continue indefinitely with unbridled consumption. We can also assuage our social consciences, and our awareness of impending ecological crisis, with the idea that we can have “sustainable growth,” which is a contradiction in terms. Or, we can learn to rethink our priorities, values, and goals. Much of our civilization’s chronic anxiety arises out of attachment.  The belief that we can and should always have more is at the root of our culture of insane over-work, the mindless cult of celebrity, the breakdown of relationships, and the despair that comes when materialistic dreams dissolve.    Casting aside attachments, letting go of identification with stuff rather than self, allows us to also let go of our false sense of personal importance and superiority over the rest of nature and other human beings.

Likewise, Jainism’s principle of manifoled truth and nonjudgmentalism is particularly relevant to the modern human predicament of social, political, and economic divisiveness, which in the West is reflected in the increasing fragmentation of society into mutually hostile interest groups, the increasing isolation of individuals from each other, and a state of disconnection from the natural world. Jainism’s concept of “many-sidedness” offers an alternative based on integration and true tolerance. It invites all who have open minds and compassionate hearts to embark on a search for the truth. More than that, it enables us as a society to reach beyond arbitrary divisions, such as left and right, and to instead think for ourselves and evaluate issues on their merit. Central to Jainism is the individual conscience and respect for the intelligence and potential of each man and woman, indeed every being. This provides a healthy inoculation against all forms of fanaticism or fundamentalism, religious or secular, and the adversarial “either you’re with us or against us” mentality that blights us in peacetime and leads us to war. “Intellectual pluralism” is the foundation of nonviolence action, whereas intellectual absolutism generally leads to chauvinism, self-centeredness, and too often, outright violence.

These central insights of Jainism, it seems to me, are critically important teachings for the world today. The Jain view is to express these principles in action rather than in mere theorizing, and to do so to the best of our individual abilities. It is easy to talk about world peace while we are promoting our own particular personal and social agendas, but it is very hard to live in a peaceful manner, not only with our fellow human beings but also with the entire world of nature. These are no doubt high ideals, and certainly impossible to achieve in full. Nevertheless, as we move more deeply into an ecological and global age, Jainism provides many of the values that can direct us forward and help us—along with the many other species with which we share the journey—on the way. For many, these ideals are less attractive because they are bound up with “religion”—the metaphysical claims that are part of the whole package that is Jainism. But Jains deny the need for people to first become Jains before they adopt its recommendations for living. Indeed that requirement would in itself infringed on the notion of anekantavada. Furthermore, these principles and their effects stand on their own, without any basis in supernatural claims. One need not subscribe to the Jain’s “religious” understanding of karma, for example, to recognize that karmic consequences (in the sense of real cause and effect) follow from the ways we choose to live and impact the planet and the living beings it contains.