Like a porcupine’s quills, our opinions about things and people can be pointed and dangerous. At least for a porcupine, the quills are are only pointed outwards to defend them from predators. Our opinions, however, may be directed outwards, but they are double ended, so as they point out, they jab in. Those things we…
Read MoreBuddhists are happy to point out that the self is a mental construct. Physicists are happy to point out that time is a mental construct. Consciousness is what observes the construction and deconstruction of time and self. Deconstructing time can help to deconstruct self. Why is it helpful to deconstruct self? Because that construct leads…
Read MoreIt is never nice to say that somebody is out of their head, but to a Zen Buddhist, that could be a fine compliment. Centering ourselves and holding our attention in our bodies is the basic work of meditation. The practice is used to break our normal habits of spending our lives thrashing about in…
Read MoreThe hardest part of life is accepting how things are. What gets in the way of accepting how things are is our perception of how they are. Our perception is limited in many ways. We are limited by our sense organs, which perform sensory miracles by deciphering light, sound, taste, smell, and texture, but, as…
Read MoreA curse of having an over-sized human brain is that we have room for a lot of opinions. Wherever we point our attention, one of those opinions latches onto whatever we encounter. Opinions can be good, bad, or neutral. Those opinions hit us in the form of feelings. When we have a bad opinion about…
Read MoreIn days of old, before cell phones were ubiquitous, guests in hotels could schedule a telephone call to wake themselves up in the morning. A wake up call was a necessary evil, a loud ring to jar you out of dreamland and get you going on your day. It was unpleasant, but helpful, courteous in…
Read MoreThere is a lot to deal with in life. Time has a way of piling up, where seconds become minutes, minutes turn into hours, and hours stack up into years. All of those moments are spaces where events occur. Those events pile up like time does. The events of our lives pile up to become…
Read MoreWhen we get a little break from the pressures of our life, we say it is like a breath of fresh air. When that happens, we may not have noticed how oppressive things had been feeling until the pressure lifts a bit and we notice that fresh air feeling. We can become so used to…
Read MoreThere is an old Maine joke where a tourist gets lost driving to a clam bake and pulls over to ask a local for directions. When the tourist tells the guy where they are headed, the local shakes his head and tells them, “You can’t get there from here!” It’s even funnier with the accent,…
Read MorePeople in the United States are starting to become aware of racism, slowly, slowly, and violently. There has been racial violence on the North American continent since the moment Europeans arrived. They came as a monoculture with guns and swords, what could you expect? As European descendants tend to write the history learned in the…
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