When Good Impressions Prevail, Your Character Becomes Good
As you think, so shall you be. Thus writes Swami Vivekananda in Karma Yoga: The Yoga of Action: If good impressions prevail, the character becomes good; if bad, it becomes bad. If a man continuously hears bad words, thinks bad thoughts, does bad actions, his mind will be full of bad impressions; and they will […]
Writing Down A Pack of Lies
Ursula K. Le Guin writes in the novel Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never […]
Distinctions of the Modern Age
Alain de Botton writes in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work: What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could […]
DNA Works in Mysterious Ways
Richard Dawkins writes in his best-selling The Selfish Gene, Different sorts of survival machine appear very varied on the outside and in their internal organs. An octopus is nothing like a mouse, and both are quite different from an oak tree. Yet in their fundamental chemistry they are rather uniform, and, in particular, the replicators […]
Compatibility is a Feat of Love
From The Course of Love by Alain de Botton, Love reaches a pitch at those moments when our beloved turns out to understand, more clearly than others have been able to, and perhaps even better than we do ourselves, the chaotic, embarrassing, and shameful parts of us. That someone else gets who we are and […]
Relating to Our Thought Process
Chogyam Trungpa writes in Mindfulness in Action: Making Friends with Yourself through Meditation and Everyday Awareness, Meditation allows us to step out of fundamental self-deception. This approach is not cutting off the thought process altogether, but is loosening it up. Thoughts become transparent and loose, so they can pass through or float around more easily. […]
Love Only Brings a Reaction of Bliss
Swami Vivekananda writes in Karma Yoga: The Yoga of Action, Every act of love brings happiness; there is no act of love which does not bring peace and blessedness as its reaction. Real existence, real knowledge, and real love are eternally connected with one another, the three in one: where one of them is, the […]
The Tensions of Our Times
Clark Strand writes in A Gleeful Foreboding, There’s a tension between the part of us that wants to move along at speed, infatuated with our ever-proliferating array of screens and gadgets, and the part of us that deeply hates them, too. There’s the part that doesn’t want to be bothered with other people’s lives and […]
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 […]