Howard Marks Can’t Prove Anything About the Future
From billionaire investor Howard Marks’s interview with Bruce Karsh at The Wharton School: There’s no such thing as analysis of what’s coming. We don’t know anything about the future, and you can’t prove anything about the future. But if you’ve been in business and you’ve seen some cycles, and you’ve gained some experience and you’ve […]
Is God Necessary for Us to Be Good?
Richard Dawkins writes in his best-selling The God Delusion, As Einstein said, ‘If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. ‘ Michael Shermer, In The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper. If you agree that, in the absence of […]
Nine Ways of Resting the Mind
According to Maitreya-natha’s Ornament of Mahayana Sutras (Mahayana-sutra-alamkara-karika in Sanskrit), we pass through nine stages in the development of shamatha, irrespective of the object of our meditation. Resting the Mind—focusing the mind upon an object Resting the Mind Longer—maintaining that continuity Continuously Resettling the Mind—whenever one forgets the object and becomes distracted one resettles the […]
Warren Buffett’s Empty Calendar
At the 2016 Daily Journal Meeting, Charlie Munger discussed the importance of keeping an open schedule: There’re two things that Warren and I have done and Rick Guerin has done, too, to a considerable extent. One is that we spend a lot of time thinking. Our schedules are not that crowded. We look like academics […]
The Mystery of Death and Buddhist Reincarnation
Stephen Batchelor writes in his essay “At The Crossroads” in the Fall 2002 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review: I’ve come to hold an agnostic position [on reincarnation]. I do not dogmatically deny rebirth, because I think to do so would be as closed-minded as an uncritical affirmation of it. I simply allow it to […]
Anti-liberal Trolls, Not Conservatives
Conservative political and cultural commentator David Brooks writes in his New York Times opinion, For centuries, conservatives have repeated a specific critique against state power. Statism, conservatives have argued, has a tendency to become brutalist and inhumane because a bureaucracy can’t see or account for the complexity of reality. It tries to impose uniform rules […]
Clinging to the Dead Forms of the Past
Indian statesman Jawaharlal Nehru writes in The Discovery of India, The peasant starved, yet centuries of an unequal struggle against his environment had taught him to endure, and even in poverty and starvation he had a certain calm dignity, a feeling of submission to an all-powerful fate. Not so the middle classes, more especially the […]
Violence of Christian Denominational Indifference
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, In the 300 years of the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians. Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own. Still, […]
Everything is Rooted in Dissatisfaction
Chogyam Trungpa from his The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa, Looking for security and failing to find it is a glimpse of egolessness. Everyone begins the journey on the path by experiencing dissatisfaction. Something is missing somewhere, and we are frantically looking for it. But even though we run faster and faster, we do not […]
Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
Henry David Thoreau in Walden; or, Life in the Woods: Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two […]