Life is suffering said the Buddha, and it is through chronic or acute suffering that we at last say ‘enough’ and begin the search for an alternate path, a way out of our humanness. Suffering is perhaps the greatest and most obvious portal into spirituality.
God died the other day after a long battle with leukemia. With his death god took all the answers with him, the ones that might have helped me to understand why he bothered with the whole creation thing if he was just going to be…
It is said the worst punishment that can be meted out to a prisoner is solitary confinement. Lock someone in ‘the hole’ long enough and he starts to go mad (note the metaphorical connection between ‘hole’ and burial/death). Seems rather clear to me now that this…
An avid reader as a child, at some point I remember being intrigued by a rather simple discovery: that most of the really interesting people in life came from difficult circumstances. I don’t remember any notable personalities, artists, writers, etc., emerging from the antiseptic…
A lot of people have been pretty upset about Robin Williams’s suicide. Many reasons for their unhappiness are given. Ultimately, I think it boils down to this: If someone like Robin Williams – a man who ostensibly ‘has it all’ – finds life unworthy of…
When I was a kid my mom used to caution that I was “too smart for my own good.” She was right. We’ll circle back to this in a moment. Recently I’ve been marveling at – and feeling gratitude for – the many and varied…
The most maddening thing about existence is that you can’t just turn it off, can’t exit the stage, can’t really put an end to any of it. Suicide, you say? Well, sure, that’s an option, but given that nobody has yet to blow out…