Dear TMR Readers

This website contains links to journalism and blog posts I wrote between 2000 and 2010 about immigration in Minnesota (see the lefthand column), and about journalism and media ethics (the righthand column).

In my ethics essays, I've explored the potential intersection of the dharma -- the Buddha's teachings on ethics, meditation and wisdom -- and journalism.

How might a dharma-guided, dharma-inflected news reportage support a reformed journalism, one that would be more accurate, compassionate and helpful in a world coping with convulsive change and struggling to evolve a new human consciousness?

How will humanity develop the new consciousness that it needs to survive, when the very terms and symbols it uses to describe that consciousness carry the incendiary freight of our uncontrolled desires, aversions and delusions?

How can we escape our addiction to such poisons sufficiently to do the work of seeing clearly and speaking skillfully?

That would be free speech indeed.

Ultimately, we'll need to answer these questions not only as individuals but also at the institutional level across all of society. We'll need to have institutions where members watch their own minds in this way and join together as passionate, objective, equal partners.

TMR has been relatively quiet for a couple of years. I've been looking inside. On retreat, you might say.

I've been trying to set aside the compulsion to label my experience with journalistic language and imagery, for long enough to better understand that compulsion and even, in some ways, perchance, to uproot it.

I've been trying to free my speech.

Thank you for reading, for the gift of your friendship, and for your support of our interrelated spiritual journeys.

Let's keep on building a better world, inside and outside, together.

Doug

doug@mcgillreport.org

P.S. Please visit the Rochester Meditation Center web site at www.rochestermeditation.org