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 […]
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 […]