Can’t Turn Our Backs on the Global Economy
In The Weightless Society, Charles Leadbeater explains: Globalization is good. Through global trade in products and services, people learn and exchange ideas that drive economic growth. If we turn our backs on the global economy, we turn our backs on the most vital force: the accelerating spread of knowledge and ideas. A thriving knowledge society […]
Study Yourself
Pema Chodron writes in The Wisdom of No Escape, What you will discover as you continue to study the dharma to practice meditation is that nothing you have ever heard is separate from your life. Dharma is the study of what is, and the only way you can find out what is true is through […]
The Agricultural Revolution
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did […]
Anger Has Something to Teach Us
Zen teacher Jules Shuzen Harris writes in his article Uprooting the Seeds of Anger from the Summer 2012 issue of the Tricycle: The Buddhist Review magazine: We operate under a common illusion that the things that make us angry lie outside ourselves, that they are external to us. Something out there is in opposition to […]
The Genius of Horace
University of Chicago’s Professor of Comparative Literature W. R. Johnson writes in his foreword to The Essential Horace, a translation by Burton Raffel Ovid succeeded in writing the greatest poem in the Latin language. … Propertius wrote the most original and artistic poetry in Latin. … Lucretius wrote the most intelligent and most ingenious poem […]
Shakespeare’s Power of Communication
English critic William Hazlitt writes in On Shakespeare and Milton, The striking feature of Shakespeare’s mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds,—so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one particular bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like […]
On the Benefits of Failure
Jennifer Alsever discusses the unexpected payoffs of failure in the March 29, 2016, issue of Fortune magazine: In recent years the notion that failure brings rewards has become so venerated by business thinkers (and publications) that you could be forgiven for thinking yourself lacking if you haven’t suffered at least one calamitous, abject disaster in […]
Emotions: Guard and the Visitor
In The Miracle of Mindfulness, Vietnamese Zen Monk Thich Nhat Hanh describes the first part of the meditation practice: as you observe your thoughts, do not participate in them which leads the observer to be beguiled with the emotions, fantasies and regrets. The essential thing is not to let any feeling or thought arise without […]
Discovery of Important Truths
The botanist Jan Willem Moll posthumously published Phytography as a Fine Art in 1934. He refers to Schopenhauer and included an English translation of a famous quotation: In Schopenhauer’s Parerga und Paralipomena, there occurs a curious passage, in which we find clearly expressed the essential character of the method of pen-portraits. He says: “to the […]
Risk and Long-term Investing Stocks v/s Bonds
From Warren Buffett’s 2017 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, I want to quickly acknowledge that in any upcoming day, week or even year, stocks will be riskier—far riskier—than short-term U.S. bonds. As an investor’s investment horizon lengthens, however, a diversified portfolio of U.S. equities becomes progressively less risky than bonds, assuming that the stocks are […]