Req. rdg. for the depressed

Ostensibly about boats and cruising, this wonderful article by Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) offers a perhaps even fresher perspective on the most pervasive plague of modern life than when it was originally published in Esquire, May 1977. Cruising Blues and Their Cure by Robert Pirsig Their case was typical. After [...]

Emails on purpose

Correspondence with an old friend, triggered by a post i came across on Tony Tjan’s Harvard Business blog: Dear R– When i read this i thought of you and me. It’s off some website for venture capitalists, of all things, but the five questions made a lot of sense to me: These five questions, when [...]

‘Scientism’ infects Darwinian debates

There’s a good piece from the level-headed columnist Douglas Todd in the Vancouver Sun this weekend. Subtitled “An unflinching belief that science can explain everything about evolution becomes its own ideology“, it makes for a good read on the newest brand of fundamentalism pitting itself against all those “traditional” fundamentalisms. The first few paragraphs: There [...]

Sat Chit Ananda

Well. The more i mess about in this new-age consciousness business, the more i think that everybody is saying exactly the same things. It can’t be described directly, of course — that’s the catch-22 of the whole game — so it must be illustrated obliquely, through yogic posture or Buddhist ritual or, most often, linguistic [...]

Shenpa

Stumbled across in At the End of the World (Economy), What Will I Need?, by Linda Solomon in The Vancouver Observer: Shenpa, Chodron says on her audio book Getting Unstuck, is the “hooked quality,” the “attachment that is a fundamental part of the human condition.” She says that in order to transcend staying hooked to [...]

Men, retreat!

I spent the weekend at a men’s retreat. This bastion of the 1980s and 90s seems to have plummeted in popularity since the millenium (a Google search on “men’s retreat” brings up a scant 434,000 hits), which brings up the burning question “Why?”. Could it be that men are now so bonded and well-adjusted that [...]