Some basic facts about my teacher Reggie Ray I’m about to head off across the Atlantic and spend three weeks in the Rockies with my teacher Reggie. So I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts and feelings about him – since I’m constantly referring, at least obliquely, to him in so many of my […]
A failure to empty the dishwasher correctly amounts to a War Crime There’s a great Milan Kundera quote: “The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.” This is something that I have – in a slightly more buoyant fashion – been contemplating […]
England 1-Croatia 2: how football and Buddhism mix Like great swathes of the UK I was watching the football World Cup Semi-Final this Wednesday. I’m not a huge soccer fan. I sometimes get swept up in the World Cup fever but, to be honest, I prefer Rugby for that. (More points scored, bigger thighs.) But […]
“The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.” Milan Kundera
Moving from field to field It is a week since we packed up and left Croydon Hall in Somerset. That was the location of Reggie and Caroline’s UK retreat for Dharma Ocean. A 10-day experience of blistering intensity and also beauty. It was called “Fields of enlightenment”. The day after tomorrow I head up to […]
“Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life on this planet using only one tool: Mistake.” Bernard in “Westworld”, Series 1, Episode 4
“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy” SENECA
“To feel something thoroughly does not mean to be it thoroughly. It is a mistake, a big bad mistake, to take feelings utterly literally” JAMES HILLMAN
“Buddhism was brought to the West mostly by young Jewish people and some Christians, who were white, mostly. […] White culture affected — for example, the focus on meditation, which is, again, what the 21st-century West knows as a headline about Buddhism. This, in fact, is not the primary practice for most of the world’s […]
What percentage of the world do you think lives in poverty? 50%? More? Less? Hans Rosling in his great book, Factfulness, talks about human tendency to think in extremes. He calls this the Gap Instinct. The classic illustration of this is his question about the level of income of the 7 billion people living on […]