Social Media Ideas for Alan Watts

The Unspeakable World: Alan Watts on How to Touch the Pulse of Life

What makes life so disorienting is that its greatest revelations and greatest transformations are inarticulable. William James knew this when he listed ineffability as the first of...

Walt Whitman, Shortly After His Paralytic Stroke, on What Makes Life Worth Living

"Tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies."

The Single Most Effective Remedy for Despair: Advice from T.H. White’s Merlyn

"Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream o...

This Moment Contains Everything

Inspired by William Blake

Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, ar...

How to Break Free from the Tyranny of Certainty: The Japanese Concept of “Ma”

“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,'” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. But despite all...

Why Your Mind Creates Reality (And How to Change It)

How to Hold Your Helplessness: Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell’s Salve for the Anxiety of Overwhelm

"A way of life cannot be successful so long as it is a mere intellectual conviction. It must be deeply felt, deeply believed, dominant even in dreams."

The Art of Solitude: Buddhist Scholar and Teacher Stephen Batchelor on Contemplative Practice and Creativity

"Here lies the paradox of solitude. Look long and hard enough at yourself in isolation and suddenly you will see the rest of humanity staring back."

Wisdom Doesn’t Care Where It Comes From

When I was growing up, I don't remember anybody sitting me down and giving me profound advice about how to live my life. I've joked over the years that about the only thing my fath...

The Real Teaching Begins After Enlightenment

The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior: Bertrand Russell’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

"Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought."

The Way Out of Suffering Is Nearby

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Why Do We Sit Zen

Abandon the myth of the essential self

Everything around us changes: the history we tell, the past we remember and even our conception of time as the neutral vessel in which events unfold. To understand these transforma...

We are water

we are water...

Correct Direction: Finding Your Intention in Zen Practice

Emerson on How to Trust Yourself

"It is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

Why Meditation Is Not What You Think: Ashtavakra on Effortless Awareness

Beyond the Effort: Ashtavakra's Revolutionary Teaching on Pure Consciousness In Hindu spiritual teachings, few voices have been as revolutionary and direct as Ashtavakra, the ancie...

No Metaphor Can Hold What We Are…

No metaphor can hold what we are;...

The Power of Being a Threshold Person: Liminality, Communitas, and the Anti-structures of Possibility

“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” one of the Moomins observes in Tove Jansson’s masterwork of philosophy disguised as a children’...

Practice Without Expectation