When I was in the ninth grade, my best friend Maryam and I used to wake up early and eat bucket loads of Lucky Charms while watching Saturday morning cartoons. She Ra, Princess of Power and Thundercats were my favorites, but there was also a good X-Men series cartoon. It…

In his book The Three Pillars of Zen (1965), Philip Kapleau explains that the mind has two primary expressions — the buddhi (awakened) mind and the discursive mind. The buddhi mind is focused upon a stable and meditative path leading to the full realization of one’s true nature, while the…

What some people call personal identity, and ardently cherish as an expression of their precious uniqueness, others call an accumulation of sense impressions and conditioning transformed into behavioral tendencies that now determine every aspect of one’s life even when we wish they wouldn’t. Culture is the personal identity of a…

I have this great friend who lives in LA and works in the entertainment industry with her husband. They are the coolest, most decent people I have ever met, people who possess these characteristics consistently without ever giving pause, without ever revealing a side of themselves that makes you question…

The wind is invisible but we can tell it’s there because we experience the effects that it produces. For example, this morning while walking the battlements of Vyšehrad, I saw the wind lift up a bunch of autumn leaves into the air and twirl them around, forming a beautiful bright…

Nota bene: I’m going through my old writing from a while back when I felt differently than I do today. Here’s a piece from March 15, 2018, part of a series of daily writing practices I had entitled “Today.” Today, I reminded myself to let go of old gripes. I’m…

Instead of launching into the day head first, nursing a fierce addictive energy, an addiction to doing and doing and doing, an addiction to figuring it all out, controlling it and dominating it and making sense of it and putting it all in order and getting it all right and…

Real wisdom comes to us only when we finally accept the laws and parameters of reality, the reality which pertains specifically to embodied human life on planet earth. This reality tells us that resources are limited, meaning they are not in infinite supply. Resources can run out when they are…

It’s amazing how quickly fear can set in when you find yourself attached to certain outcomes. It’s always a gamble to become attached to an idea or a fantasy because the likelihood of things not going your way is usually very high. Few things in this world are completely reliable…