Relating to Our Emotions
Joy and sorrow can materialize only after you register physical changes in the body writes Joseph Goldstein in If There Is No Self, Who Is Born, Who Dies, Who Meditates?, When anger arises, or sorrow or love or joy, it is just anger angering, sorrow sorrowing, love loving, joy joying. Different feelings arise and pass, […]
William James’s Criticism of Christianity
American philosopher and psychologist William James gives the most incisive criticism of Christianity: Were it true that a suddenly converted man as such is, as Edwards says, of an entirely different kind from a natural man, partaking as he does directly of Christ’s substance, there surely ought to be some exquisite class-mark, some distinctive radiance […]
The Paradox of Miguel de Cervantes
American literary critic and scholar Harry Levin writes in “The Example of Cervantes” in Contexts of Criticism, his introduction to literary criticism, To crown him with an adjective of his own choosing, Cervantes continues to be the exemplary novelist. It is a truism, of course, that he set the example for all other novelists to […]
A Process of Accepting the Reality
Judith Lief writes in the preface to Chogyam Trungpa’s The Heart of the Buddha: Entering the Tibetan Buddhist Path: In beginning the path, we need to be willing to confront ourselves directly, without either wishful thinking or harsh judgmentalism. Through the practice of meditation, we are constantly brought back to working with what is, rather […]
Adaptability, Compliance, and Threat
Christopher Hitchens writes in Letters to a Young Contrarian, We are an adaptable species and this adaptability has enabled us to survive. However, adaptability can also constitute a threat; we may become habituated to certain dangers and fail to recognize them until it’s too late. Nuclear armaments are the most conspicuous example; as you read […]
Do Not Let Your Vision of People Be Distorted
From Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged: In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are at its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of people be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those […]
Hate the Sin, and Not the Sinner
Mahatma Gandhi writes in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments With Truth, Hate the sin and not the sinner is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practiced, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world… . It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, […]
There is No Such Thing as God
You’ve Got to Read This Book is a compendium of 55 individual’s stories of life-altering events. Jim Guy writes about discovering Buddhism and acquainting himself with its foundational principles. Not that I was interested in religion. I was an agnostic—with an attitude. I had been raised Methodist but had let it go as a teenager […]
Social Proof and Peer Pressure
In Organizational Alpha, investment manager Ben Carlson discourses on the conundrum with peer pressure. He consults Robert Cialdini’s work (see Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion) on the common themes that customarily motivate we human’s recognized endeavors to influence one another: Psychologist Robert Cialdini has shown that one of the main filters we use to make […]
Humankind is a Banana Republic Dictator
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have […]