(ข้อความที่คัดมาลงไว้ ณ ที่นี้ บางกรณี (3 และ 4) เลือกเก็บเอาเฉพาะจุดที่เด่นๆ มาปะติดปะต่อกัน มุ่งให้ผู้อ่านเห็นภาพชัดเจน ในกรณีเช่นนั้น ถ้าจะนำไปใช้ในการอ้างอิง พึงอ้างเฉพาะประโยคที่จบความในตัว หรืออ้างเพียงสาระสำคัญ)
1. “...The religion (Buddhism) ... was introduced to the United States from Japan about 100 years ago. But even as lateas the 1960s, there were only a few thousand practicing Buddhists, mostly in California, New York and Washington. While figures vary, the recently created American Buddhist Congress estimates there are 3 to 5 million followers. In comparison, there are just under 6 million Jews in the U.S. today and about 2.5 million Episcopaleans.
In the past 20 years, Buddhist centers have increased from a handful, mostly in the most cosmopolitan cities of the United States, to more than 425 in the United States and Canada... They say that in the Western State of Colorado alone, there were no Buddhist centers two decades ago. Now there are twenty. The impact and increasing influence of Buddhism in the United States can be seen in many ways. ..."
(“Newsline”, Voice of America, Monday morning, August 19, 1991.)
2. กาลามสูตร หรือ เกสปุตติยสูตร, องฺ.ติก. 20/505/241 (A.I. 188) มีสาระสำคัญ ดังนี้
๑. อย่าปลงใจเชื่อ ด้วยการฟังตามกันมา - Be not led by report.
๒. อย่าปลงใจเชื่อ ด้วยการถือสืบๆ กันมา – Be not led by tradition
๓. อย่าปลงใจเชื่อ ด้วยการเล่าลือ - Be not led by hearsay.
๔. อย่าปลงใจเชื่อ ด้วยการอ้างตำราหรือคัมภีร์ - Be not led by the authority
๕. อย่าปลงใจเชื่อ เพราะตรรก - Be not led by mere logic
๖. อย่าปลงใจเชื่อ เพราะการอนุมาน - Be not led by inference.
๗. อย่าปลงใจเชื่อ ด้วยการคิดตรองตามแนวเหตผล - Be not led by considering appearances.
๘. อย่าปลงใจเชื่อ เพราะเข้าได้กับทฤษฎีที่พินิจไว้แล้ว - Be not led by the agreement with a considered and approved theory.
๙. อย่าปลงใจเชื่อ เพราะมองเห็นรูปลักษณะน่าจะเป็นไปได้ – Be not led by seeming possibilities.
๑๐. อย่าปลงใจเชื่อ เพราะนับถือ ท่านสมณะนี้เป็นครูของเรา – Be not led by the idea, ‘This is our teacher’.
ต่อเมื่อใด รู้เข้าใจด้วยตนว่า ธรรมเหล่านั้น เป็นอกุศล เป็นกุศล มีโทษ ไม่มีโทษ เป็นต้น แล้ว จึงควรถือวัตรปฏิบัติตามนั้น
3. “Don't today's technological changes and social upheavals mean the end of friendship, love, commitment, community and caring?
... For if we look around us we find widespread evidence of psychological breakdown... fully one fourth of all citizens in the United States suffer from some form of severe emotional stress... almost no family is free of some form of mental disorder ... all complain of social isolation ... the plague of loneliness.
... Faced with an absence of visible structure, some young people use drugs to create it. “Heroin addiction,” ...“ gives a way of life to the young person....”
To this loss of order we must also add the loss of meaning. ... most people surveying the world around them today see only chaos. They suffer a sense of personal powerlessness and pointlessness.
... For meaning, structure, and community are interrelated preconditions for a livable future... the present agony of social isolation, the impersonality, Structurelessness, and sense of meaninglessness from which so many people suffer are symptoms of the breakdown of the past ...
(Alvin Toffler. The Third Wave. New York: Bantam Books, 1982, pp. 365-379)
4. ... psychic surrender, a kind of creeping zombiism peculiar to our times…, a malady that's becoming progressively stronger in many aspects of our culture,... is a recent twist. Only for a little more than a decade has a sizable portion of our population decided that the search isn’t worth it and turned their lives over to others.
…Psychic surrender is a form of symbolic suicide: ... And more and more Americans are "hanging it up" in this manner. Why do they suddenly feel they are incapable of living their lives? Psychic surrender is a last desperate attempt to remove the stress. In psychic surrender, we choose a symbolic rather than a literal death The ultimate effect is the release of stress. … why is the stress of nothingness so prevalent in our culture? Why do we feel so alone and lost?
…our is an other-directed society. Both by our job-training and our education, we are taught that what we need to thrive comes from outside us. ... and problems are solved by consulting an expert.
(Michael Scott Cain, “Psychic Surrender, America's Creeping Paralysis,” The Humanist, September/October 1983, pp.5-11, 32)
5. Almost absent in the United States today is a sense of what the founders of the American republic called "public happiness" - a state whereby trust and civic friendship make public life something to be valued, enjoyed, and respected, rather than avoided, perfunctorily undertaken, or ridiculed.
(Robert J. Nash, Robert S. Griffin, "Repairing the Public-Private Split: Excellence, Character, and Civic Virtue,” Teachers College Record, Vol. 88, No.4, Summer 1987, pp.550-551)
6. ... the Freudian one; that of the humanistic psychology of Maslow and Rogers; and the behaviourist and existential forms.... nearly all of them, ... extend their work to the normal person as well. ... terms like, for instance, 'sick society' and 'pathology of normalcy', used by Fromm, betray the dimension in which the concepts of the 'normal' and 'abnormal' are used today. According to Fromm the pathology of contemporary society includes such features as alienation, anxiety, the fear of feeling deeply, passivity, lack of joy, etc. Symptoms of this nature have made it necessary that the psychologist deal not only with the sick patient, but with the deeper diagnosis of a sick society also.
(Padmasiri de Silva. An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1979, p.100)
7. Some decades ago, meditation was commonly neglected by Buddhists who were trying to be modern, because until recently Westerners have scorned it, alleging that quietism and subjectivism are morbid and sap the will to act ... and now that psychiatry has sparked a cult of self-awareness in the West, meditation is coming back into fashion in every part of Buddhist Asia that Marxism does not hold in thrall to 19th century European attitudes.
(Richard H. Robinson. The Buddhist Religion. Belmont, Ca.: Dickenson Publishing Co., 1970, p.116.)
8. เช่น
Charles Ansell, a California psychologist, blames this lack of direction largely on the impersonal workplace.
(Bernice Kanner, "What Price Ethics? The Morality of the Eighties," New York Magazine, July 14, 1986)
9. According to the Buddhist analysis, there is a difference between ‘being alone’ and ‘being lonely’. The inability to experience solitude and delight in a short spell Or DC alone is due to the fear of loneliness.
(Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, "Loneliness”, Psychiatry, 1959, vol.22)