Suffering Can Herald Loving Relationships

From Pema Chodron’s Taking the Leap: When things fall apart and we can’t get the pieces back together, when we lose something dear to us, when the whole thing is just not working and we don’t know what to do, this is the time when the natural warmth of tenderness, the warmth of empathy and […]

We Suffer Because of Our Ignorance

Melvin McLeod writes in his introduction to The Best Buddhist Writing 2007: According to Buddhism, our fundamental problem is not sin or some moral failing. We suffer because of our ignorance; because we do not understand the actual nature of reality… The medicine that heals this illness of ignorance is insight or wisdom, which we […]

Warren Buffett Praises Charlie Munger

From Berkshire Hathaway’s 50th annual shareholder letter: If you’ve attended our annual meetings, you know Charlie has a wide-ranging brilliance, a prodigious memory, and some firm opinions. I’m not exactly wishy-washy myself, and we sometimes don’t agree. In 56 years, however, we’ve never had an argument. When we differ, Charlie usually ends the conversation by […]

In Praise of Pablo Neruda

Chilean politician Luis Corvalan writes in his essay “Pablo’s Examples” from El Siglo, We all know that he has sung in praise of everything-love, birds, stones, southern rains, the rough Pacific Ocean, the Araucan pine, cactus, spoons, onions, salmon-bellied eels, everything he ever saw and touched with his poet’s eyes and feelings. And also human […]

Consider the Opposite Perspective

From John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty: He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much […]

From Belief to Practice

Richard Holloway writes in Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity, I would like to suggest that we ought to switch the emphasis in Christianity from belief to practice, from Orthodoxy to Orthopraxis, from believing things about Jesus to the imitation of Jesus. There would be three challenging elements in such a determination, none […]

Thinking Like a Radical Pragmatist

American author and entrepreneur Ryan Holiday writes in his introduction to The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph, I am unsure when philosophy became a tedious, pretentious field divorced from reality. Philosophy was originally designed to be a disciplined practice for thinking through the best possible solutions for everyday […]

We Have Good Reasons to Fear Saying No

Greg McKeown in Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, We have good reasons to fear saying no. We worry we’ll miss out on a great opportunity. We’re scared of rocking the boat, stirring things up, burning bridges. We can’t bear the thought of disappointing someone we respect and like. None of this makes us a […]

Opening the Door of Wisdom and Compassion

B. Alan Wallace and Steven Wilhelm write in Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground Up: A Practical Approach for Modern Life: Imagine walking along a sidewalk with your arms full of groceries, and someone roughly bumps into you so that you fall and your groceries are strewn over the ground. As you rise up from the […]

Wishful Thinking and Self-deception

Sam Harris writes in The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values: There is a sense in which all cognition can be said to be motivated. One is motivated to understand the world, to be in touch with reality, to remove doubt, etc. Alternately one might say that motivation is an aspect of cognition […]