“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
UNCOMFORTABLE QUOTES #6: Seneca on right stinginess
UNCOMFORTABLE QUOTES #5: Hillman on Feelings
“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
Uncomfortable Quotes #4: angel Kyodo Williams on the whiteness of Buddhist meditation
“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 […]
The Smelling Salts of Factfulness: how grateful we should be if we’re reading this
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 […]
Uncomfortable Quotes #3: MLK on thinking poorly
“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think…” [many thanks to Jane Davies for the quote]
New Holy Island Gallery 2018
This is a new gallery of pictures of Holy Island. They’re mostly taken from the Mindsprings summer and autumn retreats. There’s views from Lamlash and on the ferry over. There’s Sarah and Jane, Kirsty and Alistair. Rainbows, cute animals and food! If you’d like to experience it for yourself then please come. It’s a […]
Joys of a real Scottish meditation retreat
This summer (and again in October) Mindsprings is hosting our annual Scottish Meditation retreat on Holy Island. So I thought I’d take a moment to wax lyrical about this most special of places and most special of events. It’s like a vast granite crystal. And the power of it throbs up through your feet when […]
Uncomfortable Quotes #2: CTR on Spiritual Cowardice
“If you succeed in encasing yourself completely, you may feel secure but you will also feel terribly lonely. This is not the loneliness of the warrior but the loneliness of the coward-the loneliness of being trapped in the cocoon, cut off from basic human affection. You don’t know how to take off your suit of […]
Uncomfortable quotes #1: George Bernard Shaw on the false comforts of belief
“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.” [quoted in Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now]
Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now : On reading writers you might not like
Steven Pinker, a bone fide factual juggernaut On a random walk through London last year, I stopped at a lovely bookshop and splurged on a handful of random titles that piqued my interest. One was a little book. A transcript of a Canadian debate between Steven Pinker and Matt Ridley on one side and Alain […]