On Kindness

On Learning…

Meditation – our experience of self and of the world…

‘Try to be a little kinder’…

Saturday Morning: We immerse, slow down

Live & Learn

“… to read, we need a certain kind of silence, an ability to filter out the noise. That seems increasingly elusive in our overnetworked society, where every buzz and rumor is instantly blogged and tweeted, and it is not contemplation we desire but an odd sort of distraction, distraction masquerading as being in the know. In such a landscape, knowledge can’t help but fall prey to illusion, albeit an illusion that is deeply seductive, with its promise that speed can lead us to more illumination, that it is more important to react than to think deeply, that something must be attached to every bit of time. Here, we have my reading problem in a nutshell, for books insist we take the opposite position, that we immerse, slow down.”

– David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading

---

Notes: Quote – Litverve. Photograph: Amoris-Causa

View original post

Montaigne and the Double Meaning of Meditation

Russell on thinking and societal changes…

The great majority of men and women, in ordinary times, pass through life without ever contemplating or criticising, as a whole, either their own conditions or those of the world at large.  They find themselves born into a certain place in society, and they accept what each day brings forth, without any effort of thought beyond what the immediate present requires…they seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought, and without considering that by sufficient effort the whole condition of their lives could be changed…It is only a few rare and exceptional men who have that kind of love toward mankind at large that makes them unable to endure patiently the general mass of evil and suffering, regardless of any relation it may have to their own lives. These few, driven by sympathetic pain, will seek, first in thought and then in action, for some way of escape, some new system of society by which life may become richer, more full of joy and less full of preventable evils than it is at present (p. viii).  

Bertrand Russell

Suicide, a Crime of Loneliness

Good article from The New Yorker…worth a look: 

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/suicide-crime-loneliness

On mindful listening…

Sunday considerations of philosophy….on uncertainty, openmindedness, and independent thought…