The Buddha’s Enlightenment
American Buddhist writer and academic Robert A.F. Thurman writes in Essential Tibetan Buddhism (1995,) The enlightenment of the Buddha was not primarily a religious discovery. It was not a mystical encounter with “God” or a god. It was not the reception of a divine mission to spread the “Truth of “God” in the world. The […]
Get Comfortable Not Knowing Everything
Seth Klarman’s extraordinary and mysterious book Margin of Safety, Risk Averse Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor has sold for $700 for used varieties with newer copies going for $2,500 to $4,000. His foremost investing premise is risk mitigation. He writes, First, no matter how much research is performed, some information always remains elusive; investors […]
The Deadliest Species in the Annals of Life
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, The romantic contrast between modern industry that “destroys nature” and our ancestors who “lived in harmony with nature” is groundless. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and […]
Value Driven Management
In Value Driven Management: How to Create and Maximize Value Over Time for Organizational Success, Randolph A. Pohlman, Gareth S. Gardiner, and Ellen M. Heffes write, What people value causes organizations to have cultures and acquire reputations. World-class companies usually have cutting-edge technology, superior management, outstanding electronic systems, and database management, but their reputations come […]
Through Love and In Love
Viktor E. Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning: For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped […]
The Purpose of Life is to Be Useful
Utilitarianism is the philosophical dogma that actions are right if they are beneficial or for the benefit of a majority. From Seneca’s On Leisure: The duty of a man is to be useful to his fellow-men; if possible, to be useful to many of them; failing this, to be useful to a few; failing this, […]
A Novelist’s Integrity
English novelist, essayist, and critic Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own, What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people […]
Religions are Metaphors
Neil Gaiman writes in the novel American Gods, Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you—even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being […]
Too Familiar to Ignore, Too Different to Tolerate
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Over the past 10,000 years, Homo sapiens has grown so accustomed to being the only human species that it’s hard for us to conceive of any other possibility. Our lack of brothers and sisters makes it easier to imagine […]
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana on the difference between mindfulness and concentration
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana writes in his article “Mindfulness and Concentration” from the Fall 1998 issue of Tricycle, In a state of mindfulness, you see yourself exactly as you are. You see your own selfish behavior. You see your own suffering. And you see how you create that suffering. You see how you hurt others. You […]