“Zen Buddhism is a way and a view of life which does not belong to any of the formal categories of modern Western thought. It is not religion or philosophy; it is not a psychology or a type of science. It is an example of what is known in India and China as a ‘way [...]
“Astonishment is the proper response to reality.” — Terence McKenna There’s a certain feeling—a feeling that’s also kind of an experience and an idea and a way of seeing. This feeling is central to my perspective and my shifting identity, my perpetual becoming. And I always want to articulate it, but I can never seem [...]
One year ago, I was an English teacher in South Korea. My days were spent preparing PowerPoint-supplemented lesson plans and playing English games with groups of hyper-energetic elementary school children. In August of 2014, my teaching contract ended, and thus began an eight-month period of jobless drifting that took me throughout Asia—from South Korea to [...]
“Sit in a room and read—and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.” ― Joseph Campbell The indelible Joseph Campbell may have been talking about books in the above quote, but I imagine [...]
“Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.” ― Chuang Tzu A sizable number of humans who hear the phrase, “go with the flow,” probably barely register it or associate it with some reductive hippie philosophy of yesteryear—a philosophy of laziness [...]
“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.” ― Neil Gaiman As Mr. Gaiman cleverly suggests in the opening quote, the Internet is, like, a super-sea of information, and a whole lot of the information on the web is just . . . noise-content—i.e. irrelevant, undesired, vapid, and/or bite-sized content. In [...]
“The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own.” ― Bertrand Russell In 1932, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell penned a poignant and paradigm-challenging essay titled “In Praise of Idleness.” In it, Russell [...]
“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky I’m guilty, I confess: I love quotes. In our meme-saturated, sound-bite culture, it seems almost [...]
“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!” ― Søren Kierkegaard [...]
Since the day you emerged into this bizarre, sparkling universe, you’ve been conditioned to think in certain ways. And that’s damn wonderful a lot of the time. It’s arguably a blessing that our minds learn to auto-dismiss certain notions—like, say, walking off of that cliff or stabbing Uncle Melvin with a butter knife—and auto-accept others. [...]