Buddhist Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Dexter was ready to give up the Wednesday matinee. It was down to nine tickets.

His father had started it in 1958 as the cheap show for the older crowd in their town in eastern Kansas, and Dexter owns the place now. The theater has one screen and 212 seats, and the matinee has always been a dollar off. For most of those years it was where people past 70 ran into each other in the middle of the week. Then the regulars began staying home. Some had quit driving, and a good many had an old dog at home they'd sooner sit with.

In February he booked a collie picture from 1949, mostly because it was cheap to rent. The day the title went up on the marquee, a man called the box office. Ivan was 86 and had seen that picture in that theater when he was nine. He wanted to know if his dog could come. Parsnip was a beagle, he said, and wouldn't know a collie from a cow. Every picture Ivan had watched at home in 11 years, that dog had watched from the other end of the couch.

Dexter thought about his 212 velvet seats. Then he got the ladder out and added a line to the bottom of the marquee: DOGS WELCOME WEDNESDAY.

That Wednesday the box office sold 64 senior tickets. Every one of those customers came through the lobby with a dog on a leash, old dogs for the most part, and the dogs walked in under the ticket window for free.

Dexter had bought out the blanket shelf at the thrift store. He stood in the aisle and handed one down every row, a blanket for each seat with a dog on it. The lights stayed half up and the sound stayed low. Ivan and Parsnip sat four rows up from the screen, on the aisle.

About 20 minutes in, the collie on the screen barked.

Some 60 dogs came up off the blankets. Parsnip answered first. Most of the house joined in, and the picture ran a full minute with nobody able to hear a word of it. Dexter says a matinee crowd hasn't laughed that hard at a drama since his father's day.

He'd braced for a mess. Within the hour most of the dogs were asleep, and the one puddle got mopped up by the dog's owner before he could find the bucket.

The collie picture was held over for three Wednesdays, and the bottom line of the marquee stayed up when the title changed. A Wednesday now outsells a Saturday night. Dexter books a picture with a dog in it whenever he can find one, because the house always answers.

Where would you go if your dog could come along?

You! You have Buddha nature.

Whoda Buddha?! You! Duh.

Still relevant after all this time. Maybe much more relevant.

The people building AI just admitted they can't teach it right from wrong.

According to the New York Times, Anthropic — the company behind Claude — has been holding private meetings with religious scholars from more than 15 traditions: Catholic, evangelical, Jewish, Sikh, and more. Earlier this year they flew a Hindu monk, Swami Sarvapriyananda of the Vedanta Society of New York, to their San Francisco headquarters. Everyone had to sign an NDA.

The question they're trying to answer: how should an AI more powerful than anything we've ever built decide what is right?

Think about that. The smartest engineers on earth looked at their own creation and said... we need help. Not more code. Monks.

Here's what keeps me up at night: if the people who built it don't trust it to know right from wrong, why should the rest of us trust it with our kids, our jobs, our lives?

Be honest... does this make you feel better about AI, or worse?

Someone who still thinks AI is just a smarter search bar needs to see this one.

When we look we see.

For about 20 years, a man known as Birdman lived beneath a freeway in Los Angeles.

Then an anonymous street artist decided to turn the concrete wall behind his mattress into something that looked like home.

The artist, known as Skid Robot, had been creating murals around homeless encampments across Los Angeles, painting bedrooms, living rooms, landscapes and other scenes directly onto the walls surrounding people sleeping outside.

When he met Birdman beneath a bridge in Silver Lake, he painted a living-room installation around the mattress where Birdman slept.

But the story did not end with the mural.

Skid Robot later said that within about a week, Birdman shaved and cut his hair for the first time in years.

He then connected with a nonprofit organization for help.

Eventually, Birdman moved into supportive housing.

Skid Robot has been careful not to describe himself as a social worker or claim that art alone solved Birdman's problems. His goal, he said, was to make people look at those living on the street as human beings rather than something to ignore.

Sometimes the most powerful part of art is not the wall it changes, but the person people finally stop to notice.

Sources: Los Angeles Times; Index on Censorship; The Guardian; LAist.

Do you think public art can genuinely change the way people see homelessness?

Khamzat‘s post fight interview back in 2023 after UFC 294 ❤️

All is created in the mind.

Color and sound are not properties experienced directly by the brain. Light of different wavelengths and pressure waves in the environment are converted by sensory receptors into neural signals, which the brain processes into visual color and auditory experience.

In that sense, perception is not a passive recording of the world. It is the brain’s interpretation of physical signals.

While some exceptions exist most people are kind and express their Buddha nature. We just have to look for it.

In 2015, Vancouver police sent an undercover officer into the Downtown Eastside in a wheelchair.

Staff Sgt. Mark Horsley posed as a man with a brain injury who was partially paralyzed and had difficulty counting money.

The operation followed 28 reported incidents involving wheelchair users, including assaults and robberies.

Horsley spent five days on the streets, deliberately leaving cash visible in a pouch around his waist.

Police expected someone might try to take advantage of him.

Across more than 300 interactions, nobody did.

People helped him count his change. Some gave him money or prayed for him. One man noticed the exposed cash, zipped the pouch closed and warned Horsley to be more careful.

By the end of the operation, there had been zero arrests.

Horsley had actually gained $24.75 from people giving him money, which was later donated along with additional funds to a rehabilitation foundation.

The operation was designed to catch people exploiting someone vulnerable.

Instead, it documented hundreds of ordinary interactions where that vulnerability wasn't exploited.

Credit: Vancouver Police Department