A Determined Approach

It is difficult to resist magical thinking without becoming a determinist.

I Will Listen On One Condition

Facts have become as perishable as opinions. This holds true even of scientific facts. Only the human condition has remained timeless.--Eric Hoffer in Before the Sabbath

If we were able to travel back in time and have a conversation with the wisest of antiquity, a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the Internet would not get very far.

But if we were to solicit their thoughts on the question of how to live we would find that these sages were our contemporaries.

In our absurd age, such society can still be found in books. To keep company with the noblest men and women of history is to sit humbly at the gate of Wisdom and to commune in spirit with those who have gone before us.

A Curious Statement

"Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions."--Eric Hoffer in Reflections on the Human Condition

If you find that you have lost the innate curiosity that is characteristic of all young children then ask yourself why you are no longer curious and you will instantly regain what was seemingly lost.

A Different Point of View

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.--Percy Bysshe Shelley

And so does great art.

The Room with a Balcony by Adolph von Menzel 1845

A Hopeful Case

A child is hope personified.

A Masked Truth

When learning to meditate, we need a good teacher because the fraud committed on us is so close to home.

We are so accustomed to disguising ourselves to others that we end up being disguised to ourselves.--Francois de La Rochefoucauld

A Biased Opinion

True meditation can be described as the ongoing effort to deepen the awareness of our own cognitive biases.