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 […]
Evaluating the Facts of the Past and the Possibilities of the Future
From Benjamin Graham’s The Interpretation of Financial Statements, If the market price of some issue appears out of line with the facts and figures available, it will often be found later that the price is discounting future developments not then apparent on the surface. There is, however, a frequent tendency on the part of the […]
Conflict and the Insistence on a Particular View of Things
Norman Fischer quotes a Chinese Zen poem in his Tricycle (Summer 2011) article Beyond Language: Finding Freedom Through Thoughts and Words: What makes us miserable, what causes us to be in conflict with one another, is our insistence on our particular view of things: our view of what we deserve or want, our view of […]
What Makes for a Great Team?
The best teams succeed because of the conditions, not the causes. When certain conditions are established within effective teams, whether deliberately or by happenstance, team productivity can blossom within those conditions. Applied mathematics consultant John D. Cook argues in his essay on group projects, The best teams have people with complementary skills, but similar work […]
Lamenting The One-Size-Fits-All Culture
It is time to stop designing the world to fit the “average” human. The utmost opportunities lie in regarding people as individuals with a set of jagged features or a summation that differs from every other person anchored in their distinct life experiences, strengths, skills, knowledge, interests, goals, and narrative. Todd Rose writes in The […]
Catholicism: Shame and Punishment
American-Irish author Malachy McCourt writes in You’ve GOT to Read This Book!, a compilation by Gay Hendricks and Jack Canfield: Ninety-nine percent of teenage boys admit they think of nothing but sex—and the other 1% are liars. It’s a universal phenomenon, and yet this natural human urge was made out by the Church to be […]
Contribution = Happiness
We have to contribute because it is the only thing that will gives the highest happiness than any other thing in this world. From German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in The Wisdom of Life: … what a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has, or how he is regarded by others. […]
The Greatest Artist That Russia Has Yet Produced
Vladimir Nabokov writes in Lectures on Russian Literature: Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed the secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift. But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art, so that whenever he tried to […]
Theodore Dreiser’s Realistic Portrayal of Life in America
Approbation for Theodore Dreiser as a literary pioneer has been loathing at best. Dreiser has been castigated for his longwinded, unstylish style and crude manner. American writer and literary critic Alfred Kazin writes in his introduction to The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, At a time when the one quality which so many American writers have […]