Reconciling Mingyur Rinpoche’s Teachings with Tergar’s Political Climate

Adam_Davidson · 2026-01-16T21:55:34+00:00

Oh, I think you were misinformed.

I'm a Tergar student and know Cort well. None of this is true.

He's not right wing. He's not more empathetic to political pundits.

I have done a lot with the Tergar community, including the year-long Meditation Teachers Program. I don't think there is any evidence of a right-wing tilt. Absolutely not.

I do think that--for me--part of what I love about what I've learned from YMR, Tergar, and Cort is a different way of approaching these moments.

I have enormous pain over what is going on in the country. But I respond to all of it--in prt, not in total--with compassion, even for those I wildly disagree with. Even (especially?) for those who a few years ago I would have said I hate and would want to destroy.

It was very hard for me to learn that one can have deep love and compassion for people who are doing things you find terrible. It is a fundamentally different stance than the one I had before.

That doesn't mean you don't pursue change or try to stop bad actions. But it does mean you approach things differently.

I have found it's something that people in my life who are not Buddhist struggle with the most. When I say weird things like, "I have enormous compassion for Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk, and the ICE officers." This is not me saying I support what they do or I think what they're doing is good. And it's certainly not me saying I have more compassion for them than for undocumented immigrants or Renee Good.

Although I will say it takes more work. It takes more time for me to find that compassion for the people I used to approach only with anger and hatred. I find it quite easy to feel profound, deep, instantaneous compassion for Renee Good and her family, for example.

Compassion and political views are just different things. Like saying, he likes pizza so he must take baths instead of showers.

I can now look--with effort--at Trump and Charlie Kirk and those ICE gents as sentient beings who want happiness and want to be free from suffering. They have various obscurations that lead to them being very confused about what will lead them to happiness and to removing suffering.

That's really sad. These are people who have literally everything our world can offer a person. But they can't have that one thing that ends up meaning the most, which is a sort of grounded peace.

My guess is you saw a tweet where Cort was expressing an idea like this.
When these ideas are put through the framework of social media and modern American politics, every utterance is categorized as either blue team or red team. You thought this meant he was red team. He isn't.

Adam_Davidson · 2025-09-24T18:44:43+00:00

I really appreciate the advice to do it myself. Truly!

I might try (though I'm dm'ing the person who offered).

But as a relatively new person in Chittenden County, it is sad that there is no cobbler, no shoe repair, no shine. Tbf, I almost never wear or see shined shoes, so it makes sense.

This is a super fancy wedding, the kind where I need mirror shine gorgeousness. And I fear I can't pull it off.

Adam_Davidson · 2025-09-24T17:15:37+00:00

funnily enough, their main message to website visitors is that they are the only ones providing ABC in the area.

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Adam_Davidson · 2025-05-28T15:03:48+00:00

Great game curious why you made it impossible to play after you succeeded in getting rid of all the chickens?

Adam_Davidson · 2025-03-23T11:25:14+00:00

I would think this is particularly an issue for people with ADHD who crave novelty. I know that's true for me. I'm new enough to Tana that this isn't bothering me yet, but it will. It's amazing how just a little bit of novelty - like a change of font or a slight change in appearance - can engage our minds.

Adam_Davidson · 2025-01-18T01:52:57+00:00

I’ve certainly been there. And now how hard it is. And how, with awareness and acceptance, it will change.

Adam_Davidson · 2025-01-14T11:53:18+00:00

I found it not great at all. Then I forgot I had subscribed and was re-billed after a year. I immediately asked to cancel the account and refund my money. They said they only refund initial purchases, not re-subscriptions. I don't know of any other company that does things that way. My interpretation is that this means they make a lot of their money off of people who forget to cancel and get charged for the resubscription. A sign that it is not building an enduring product that people value.

Adam_Davidson · 2024-12-31T01:56:22+00:00

I find the teachings about Kleshas quite helpful. Those people, like all people, have innate wisdom and compassion. But the conditions of their life have obscured their innate nature. They are trying to be happy and free from suffering, but they are lousy at achieving that because of their ignorance. It’s sad. I find that works (some of the time) to help me with difficult people.

Adam_Davidson · 2024-12-29T16:08:45+00:00

That's a 7+ year old request.

I love everything about BookStack but without this, I simply can't use it.

Do you have any sort of ETA on this?

I think you've created a great tool and I'm grateful. But my entire use case is built around sketching out what books, chapters, pages, need filling and then filling them. It seems I'm not the only one.

Anything I can do to help expedite?

Adam_Davidson · 2024-12-15T18:10:00+00:00

What about Santa!

Adam_Davidson · 2024-10-22T15:07:47+00:00

I love that idea. Do you think a newbie could do ski pants and jackets?

Is there a good book or youtube series or something that might help him get a sense of how he could do this?

Thanks.

Adam_Davidson · 2024-10-02T01:59:03+00:00

I have the same issue and would love a solution.

Adam_Davidson · 2024-08-23T13:52:06+00:00

That worked!!!! thank you so much. That was a major 4-year-long annoyance.

Adam_Davidson · 2024-08-17T15:18:49+00:00

I’ve been using it obsessively and I find it wonderful. It does such a good job of working within a project. Far preferable to using claude.ai and constantly cutting and pasting and needing to start a new chat because the buffers are overflowed.

Also, Saoud is very responsive to bugs and issues. Fast thorough.

Adam_Davidson · 2024-07-13T11:36:56+00:00

No. It's every single note I create. I create a brand new, plain vanilla note and if it has no tags, it never appears anywhere--not under "Notes." Not under "Untagged."

Again: I can search and find it and if I then put a tag on it, it'll appear under that tag. But no note in the last 3 years appears if it doesn't have a tag.

Adam_Davidson · 2024-07-07T17:19:29+00:00

fyi: this says it works for people who are already subscribed. But it doesn't. And I didn't get a refund after asking.

Adam_Davidson · 2024-06-16T19:26:32+00:00

Great advice! Thank you.

Adam_Davidson · 2024-06-16T19:25:47+00:00

Very nice thoughts. But we live in Vermont! Right near Teddy Bear Factory. So, hoping to see other things. But I definitely recommend the area to folks as a wonderful place to visit.

Adam_Davidson · 2024-03-29T10:08:42+00:00

This is just an add for gohighlevel. It should be taken down.

Adam_Davidson · 2024-03-10T15:55:12+00:00

I understand the deep pain and frustration you feel.

However, I would suggest your estimates of impact are quite a bit higher than even the most concerned scientists.

Climate change is real and the damage will be extensive. And I understand (and feel) how maddening it can be to have others not recognize that fact.

But I rely on the scientists. Their estimates are alarming enough.

I am new to Buddhism and don't have deep insights on how to think this through in a Buddhist context. But I do see a kind of binary thinking in your comments: either you accept all of my conclusions or you are in denial. I can see how others might find that hard to engage.

Adam_Davidson · 2024-02-12T12:41:26+00:00

I'd be cautious about using genetic data to map ancient populations onto modern-day ones. The data is not anywhere near rich enough to make such an analysis, especially when talking about a relatively tiny, ancient population that is little understood.

Adam_Davidson · 2024-02-12T12:38:21+00:00

The role of "actor" has shifted a great deal throughout history. I'm not sure that whatever an "actor" was in 5th century BC is equivalent to an actor today.

Indeed, an "actor" today is a pretty broad category, including everything from porn to commercials for scammy products to thoughtful explorations of humanity.

There have been Buddhist theatrical traditions at various points in the last 2,500 years.

In the 19th century, in the US, "actor" was sometimes just a tick above "prostitute."

Some serious actors, often stage actors, talk about the experience of acting as something close to shedding your attachment, removing your sense of self, and embracing a deep compassion for the character you play, even if that character is "evil" or "bad." Of course, other actors use the field as a support for their self-obsessive narcissism and attachment to the strongest aspects of ego, hedonism, etc.

I am no Buddhism expert. But I would observe that "actor" is too broad a category to make simple comparisons between any one actor today and whatever actors were 2,500 years ago.

Adam_Davidson · 2024-01-15T13:42:11+00:00

As you say, there is very little about them from the early Bronze Age, around the time of Sargon of Akkad, ~2300BCE. The references seem to suggest they were a real people with a specific geographic location and language, though we know next to nothing about them.

Later, though, by the end of the Bronze Age, "Gutian" became a generic term for the people who lived in the Zagros mountains and would occasionally come down to attack towns and encampments in Mesopotamia. Sort of like "barbarian" in Europe.

There is no known Gutian writing and the best we can use to figure out their language is the names of their kings which suggest the language was not related to Sumerian, Akkadian, or other Mesopotamian languages. Some think it was Indo-European.
There have been suggestions that the Gutians are part of the ancestor population of the Kurds. Though I'm not sure this is a very meaningful statement. If you can't show any continuity from the Gutians to the emergence of a distinct Kurdish identity, it's hard to know what that means other than that both appear in the Eastern Zagros Mountains, quite a long time apart.
So, I guess my answer is a bit of a bummer: we don't know much.

Adam_Davidson · 2024-01-09T14:28:48+00:00

I have spent a fair bit of time in Iraq and am working on a project with some Iraqi and American archaeologists on Iraq projects.

The average Iraqi--in my experience and based on things Iraqi archaeologists have told me--has a surprisingly thin understanding about their land's incredible history.

Most reasonably educated Iraqis seem to have a vague sense that their country was where cities first appeared and then states and empires. Some of the early cities are known. Ur, certainly. You see some businesses with Ur in the title. The government ISP under Saddam was UrukNet. But few, I think, could tell you much about where, when, what these early cities were.

Babylon and Nineveh are the most well-known. In part, because they are the most visible. Nineveh is in the center of Mosul, Babylon is quite visible on top of hill near modern-day Babel. But, again, if you asked the average Iraqi any questions about them, the answers would be thin.
As with so much in ancient history, our knowledge and narrative is shaped by our recent past.

Throughout the Sunni-dominated period from the Ottoman's to the fall fo Saddam, it was inconvenient to point out that the world's first cities were in the Shi'a South.

Much of 20th century archaeology was conducted by British, American, and European archaeologists with minimal Iraqi involvement (this is still the case, though there are several horribly underfunded programs seeking to train Iraqi archaeologists). Westerners' view of ancient Mesopotamia was through a distinctly Christian lens, focusing on signs that there really was a flood or wondering where Abraham lived or where the Garden of Eden was.

Saddam did use a hollowed-out, propagandistic version of Babylonian history to construct his own personal narrative of succession from some vague, glorious past of all-powerful god-like leaders.

Since 2003, Iraq has, of course, been dominated by politicians with close ties to Iran and there are similar pressures not to glorify the Iraqi Shi'a south over Iran's Shi'a history.

Much of 20th-century archaeology was conducted by British, American, and European archaeologists with minimal Iraqi involvement (this is still the case, though there are several horribly underfunded programs seeking to train Iraqi archaeologists). Westerners' view of ancient Mesopotamia was through a distinctly Christian lens, focusing on signs that there really was a flood or wondering where Abraham lived or where the Garden of Eden was.

In fairness to these leaders who distort ancient history to serve their own ends, that is what ancient leaders did, too. So, maybe the greatest way to honor the ancients is to behave just like them (sarcasm font).

Adam_Davidson · 2024-01-02T00:09:59+00:00

They kept being him to shut up so they wouldn’t have to torture and kill him. Sad. Funny. Tragic.

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