Strangely enough, my daily rhythms during our quarantine time—from “stay at home” to the more recent “safer at home”—have not been dramatically different from what they had been, before this all began. For quite some time, my yoga/qigong practice has been a “home practice.” And, likewise, the majority of the freelance writing that I’ve recently been engaged with takes place in my home office … …
Reviews
Inner Peace, Contentment, Satisfaction
An excerpt from my new book ... Everyone has had some experience, however fleeting, of deep inner peace, contentment, and satisfaction—a moment of feeling utterly complete. Perhaps such moments have come while listening to beautiful music, or being embraced by your beloved, or feeling awestruck by a million stars in the night sky, or even in the context of an emergency when some kind of quiet …
Practice Notes: Hasty Generalization, Parasite & The Australian Open
Parasite Recently saw Parasite—a brilliantly whacky and over-the-top satire on class relations. If you haven’t already, I’d say it’s worth checking out. The title of the film points to its primary theme and central ambiguity, expressed nicely here in one review: Who are the real parasites? The poor who attach themselves to the rich or the rich who suck the marrow of the poor? Or is the system …
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Driving By
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 …
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 …