Reflections on Right Speech After the Kavanaugh Hearings

Like so many folks, I was troubled by the Senate hearings on Brett Kavanaugh’s fitness for the Supreme Court. Besides the disgusting display of male privilege and delusion the entire thing displayed, AND the heartbreakingly familiar ritual of powerful men completely dismissing a woman’s fully respectable testimony, there was the lying, plain and simple. And of course this is an era where truth and lies are odiously merged in the American public conversation.

So it felt like a good time to talk about Right Speech again. We had a good conversation that centered on lying, and touched on other aspects of the practice of speaking, including the connection of truth to tranquillity (passadhi) and calm.


Meditation: embodied listening, using sounds as a spacious, pleasurable anchor (10.2.18)

Talk: Wise speech, tranquillity, lying as a disturbance in the force (10.2.18)


1 thought on “Reflections on Right Speech After the Kavanaugh Hearings”

  1. Pingback: Toward an Enraged Buddhism, Part 1 – Sean Feit Oakes, PhD

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