Sitting at a Dharma talk at Plum Village—in south-central France in the summer of 1996—I gazed for a few long seconds out of the large community tent, allowing Thich Nhat's Hanh's words to drift into the background of my attention. In the foreground now was a country road—maybe a football field's distance away—upon which passed a series of slow-driving cars. I thought: How sweetly poignant and …
Reviews
Moonlight
In the previous post, I introduced a psychological model rooted in Vasubandhu’s Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only—which sheds light on how unconscious or subconscious habit-patterns condition our current experience. Neither Random Nor Rigidly Determined Just as important as understanding how such conditioning happens, is understanding how these causal influences can be modulated or dissolved. …
Verses
Fifty Verses For twenty-seven years I've carried around a stack of fifty-one 4×6" notecards, bound together with a small piece of white rope, tied off neatly in a shoe-lace style bow. The card on the top (now a bit tattered) reads "The Fifty Verses on the Manifestation of Consciousness, by Thich Nhat Hanh." And each of the remaining fifty cards hosts one of the fifty verses, carefully …
Gödel’s Kōan
Just finished reading the 2001 edition of Gödel's Proof by Ernest Nagel and James Newman, edited by Douglas Hofstadter. This is an excellent introduction to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, written in mostly non-technical language—which means that you don't have to be a professional mathematician to (at least mostly) understand it. Though still a challenging read, I'd say it's well worth the …
Wild Wild Country
What I most appreciate about Wild Wild Country -- the Netflix documentary about Osho's Oregon community -- is that it poses all variety of interesting questions (social, psychological, spiritual, legal, constitutional) while resisting the temptation to offer heavy-handed answers to any of them. It's a fascinating -- and in moments, quite mind-blowing -- story, with lines between the "good guys" …
Ode To Bone Broth
To Wit It's been a while since last I explored a nutrition-related topic .... so today I'll offer this quick nod to bone broth, with its superhero constituents: gelatin and collagen. Even among my vegan and vegetarian friends, quite a few are making an exception (or are seriously considering doing so) for bone broth, whose proven and anecdotal health benefits span far and wide. To wit: a good …