The remedy for loneliness is in learning to admit solitude as one admits the bayonet: gracefully, now that already it pierces the heart. —Denis Johnson, “The White Fires of Venus” (1975) In dark times, we often turn to literature to help us understand the turmoil raging within ourselves and our worlds. During the 1850s, for example, American readers looked to…
Buddhism shares with science the task of examining the mind empirically; it has pursued, for two millennia, direct investigation of the mind through penetrating introspection. Neuroscience, on the other hand, relies on third-person knowledge in the form of scientific observation. In this conversation, which appears in the recent book Beyond the Self: Conversations Between Buddhism and Neuroscience, Matthieu Ricard, a…
For four billion years, life on this planet has been ascending to higher and higher levels of organization. First there were just bare, self-replicating strands of information; then they encased themselves in cells; then some of these cells got together and formed multicellular organisms; then some of those organisms developed complex brains, and some species of brainy organisms became highly…
Reviews by Alex T. of Cambridge, MA Buddha – ⭐⭑⭑⭑⭑ Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: super rich guy leaves his wife and kids, goes on an insane diet, and then discovers the key to everything is chilling under a tree in the shade. Srsly? What about the wife? Buddhism – ⭐⭐⭐⭑⭑ Oh wait, there’s like a method…
Our love affair with digital is over. It seems like forever, but it’s been only 10 years since the iPhone first seduced us. Can we remember a time when we didn’t have the sleek, delicious feel of a device in the palm of our hand and instant gratification at our fingertips? Can we remember a time when “app” wasn’t even…
The Buddha said that the origin of all suffering is craving — we either don’t get what we want or we get what we don’t want. But what is the origin of our craving? In his recent New York Times best-selling book, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, Robert Wright argues that the process of…
Does meditation work? I got interested in questions like this through an unusual project I helped develop: the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative. Back in the early 2000s, the Dalai Lama asked Emory University to develop a sustainable curriculum in modern science for his Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in exile in India. As you can imagine, this was (and still is)…
For many of us, Thanksgiving represents a mixed bag of our most altruistic and our most greedy impulses. On the one hand, we gather together with our loved ones to celebrate all that we have to be grateful for. On the other, we often do this through excessive consumption and the madness of Black Friday shopping. In this video from…