Look up!
“Do you look at the stars a lot? Do you know them? Plato said that sight is not truly precious unless it helps us to know the stars, the planets, the moon, and the sun….
Category: Wisdom Traditions
How to Save Energy
But whatever be the motive of insult, it is always best to overlook it, for folly scarcely can deserve resentment, and malice is punished by neglect. –Samuel Johnson, quoted in Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the…
Advice
Avoid gossip. Avoid their feuds. Concentrate on what is essential–contact with Swami, and prayer. Associate with people you can really help in one way or another, and not with those whose curiosity is always offering…
Abandon Any Hope of Fruition
Anyone who wants to know the art of living, who wants to experience this Dhamma, has to understand it clearly. But as long as you are expecting, then it will not happen. –Mirka Knaster, Living…
Journals and Commonplace Books
It was becoming a habit with [Thoreau] now to work back over his journals and to reread books, to reengage old subjects in the light of new interests, to revise and recopy his own earlier…
Train Wholeheartedly
One who practices the teachings of these great scriptures will become aware of the unity of life, and this awareness will give constant strength and inspiration to those who seek to turn anger into compassion,…
Two Distant Worlds?
There is nothing in mere scholarship. The object of study is to find means of knowing God and realizing Him. A holy man had a book. When asked what it contained, he opened it and…
Soul Sentiment from the Nineteenth Century
I onward go, I stop,With hinged knees and steady hand, to dress wounds;I am firm with each—the pangs are sharp, yet unavoidable;One turns to me his appealing eyes—(poor boy! I never knew you,Yet I think…
This Is Because That Is…
I am spending my mornings reading the riveting new book by Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter. A short while back, I posted a…
Two Sayings
The whole of Buddhist morality can be summed up in two sayings, the first of which is: ‘Treat every being without exception as though it had been your mother in a previous life!’ … The…