Tzu-jan (“Self-so”)

Philosophies of nature, most pointedly Taoism, describe large universal cycles as the “Great Transformation.” The multiple transformations we describe, obse...

Huxley and hope

Aldous Huxley’s 1945 book The Perennial Philosophy is an anthology of world thinkers from over thousands of years who have affirmed “the metaphysics that re...

Kalanithi’s ars moriendi

Ars moriendi or the “art of dying” was originally a specific religious essay composed as a comfort during the Black Plague of the late middle ages. Today, t...

Saving vs. Enlightenment

The Dalai Lama’s book A Profound Mind (2012) is a non-polemical summary pf Buddhist thought, specifically Mahayana and Tibetan. These include teachings on dep...

Blindness revisited

A recent post touched upon benign examples of blindness in literature and art: naive innocence, virtue following the notion that “justice is blind,”...

Millennial minimalism

Naming American generations and characterizing them is a fanciful exervise but can yield some points for thought. Here are a few with likely themes. Great Gener...

Blindness and hermits

Blindness is both a condition and, in popular speech, a metaphor. The blind person cannot see, while the metaphor makes blindness both a virtue and a a stigma. ...

Brain development

The structures and morals presented by traditional religions, especially the three scriptural religions of the West, have a clear historical and cultural basis....

Salvation

Salvation is an integral concept in the mature world religions East and West. Christianity and Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, contain salvific mechanisms, althou...

Love

Love is romantic, emotional, even spiritual, according to the various points of perception: literary, psychological, or religious. The dictionary is mundane: lo...