UNCOMFORTABLE QUOTES #8: Kundera on Order-as-Death
“The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.” Milan Kundera I’d love...
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Alistair Appleton
Jun 22, 20181 min read
UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH #7: Bernard on Evolution
“Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life on this planet using only one tool: Mistake.” Bernard in “Westworld”, Series 1, Episode 4...
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Alistair Appleton
Apr 20, 20181 min read
Uncomfortable quotes #1: George Bernard Shaw on the false comforts of belief
“The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober...
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Alistair Appleton
Oct 12, 20171 min read
Bob Thurman on the state of the world:
We cannot blame the massive subliminal despair and defeatism we harbour about sustaining our lives on this planet just on some greedy...
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Alistair Appleton
Dec 8, 20161 min read
“To see is to love”
“To see with the eyes is not to see. To see with the mind is not to see. The only way we truly see things is to love them. What we don’t...
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Alistair Appleton
Jun 23, 20151 min read
Chögyam Trungpa
“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.” I’d love to...
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Alistair Appleton
Mar 12, 20142 min read
Dancing with Reality
Listening to Reggie Ray’s excellent Dharma Ocean podcast, I heard this – : “We’re living in a world where reality is seen as an enemy....
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Alistair Appleton
Nov 29, 20131 min read
Slamming the Gate
Reggie Ray said a striking thing in one of his Dharma Ocean talks (highly recommended btw) about the Tibetan Buddhist practice of totally...
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Alistair Appleton
May 19, 20131 min read
Trungpa on “getting over our embarrassment of being alive”
If we open our eyes, if we open our minds, if we open our hearts , we will find that this world is a magical place. It is not magical...
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Alistair Appleton
Feb 19, 20133 min read
Togetherness
We tend to practice meditation alone. It’s a hangover partly from the monastic emphasis of going away from the world and sitting under a...
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Alistair Appleton
Nov 20, 20121 min read
Found on my Evernote server, I don’t remember reading it, but so striking
I often dream about falling. Such dreams are commonplace to the ambitious or those who climb mountains. Lately I dreamed I was clutching...
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Alistair Appleton
Feb 13, 20121 min read
The Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska died aged 88
Her favourite phrase was “I don’t know”. She told the Nobel audience: “It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to...
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Alistair Appleton
Oct 6, 20111 min read
Steve Job’s Standford Speech, 2005
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other...
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Alistair Appleton
Sep 29, 20102 min read
Joanna Macy, “World as Lover, World as Self”
Of course, even when you see the world as a trap and posit a fundamental separation between liberation of self and transformation of...
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Alistair Appleton
Sep 25, 20101 min read
Jeanette Winterson
Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean...
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Alistair Appleton
Aug 30, 20102 min read
1952, John Cage and the ‘sound of silence’
There were – not one, but two articles on the ‘nada’ sound in this month’s London Review of Books. One, an article by Jenni Diski on...
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Alistair Appleton
Aug 25, 20101 min read
A Rumi quote
This Rumi quote seems to encapsulate how wonderful the mindfulness was on Holy Island last week. Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and...
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