I once read the words of a man who explained how the saint differs from the sage. The saint is revered because he displays the highest and most noble human qualities that a given society can conceive of in a person. He is therefore exemplary, and represents an ideal to which it is admirable, even […]
Category: Reflections and Miscellany
Happy Year of the Boar!
It’s a tad late for even belated New Year’s wishes, however, there is another New Year rapidly approaching – in much of Asia, it will be the Year of the Pig! Except in Japan, where it’s not just a mere pig, rather it’s a wild boar. When a friend in Japan told me this, I […]
A Mantra Lasts Three Days
“A mantra lasts three days,” the British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes tells us. Allow me to explain: let us suppose you’ve set out to ski solo and unaided to the pole – as one does. And let’s suppose the weather becomes a tad nippy, perhaps somewhat unpleasant, or, why not, unimaginably harsh. Now I may […]
Problem solving for dummies
Problem solving may not be the most festive or Christmassy topic, but we don’t often get to choose exactly when life is going to drop a challenge into our path. And there’s no harm in getting an issue or two out of the way before the New Year. There are folk of the optimistic kind, […]
Looking backwards through the lens of discrimination
Far-right anti-migrant protests in Germany lead to violence. In Italy and Austria, the political counterparts of these protestors are on the rise. Meanwhile, Steve Bannon has merrily embarked upon a European tour. This is the tone of the news I return to, after almost two years away from the European union. On television, I see […]
Rootlessness
By the time I was seven years old, I had lived in seven different houses, and my family’s itinerary spanned three countries and two continents. There followed a seven year reprieve, of relative stability in rural Suffolk, where I gradually found my marks, and some roots, climbing (and falling out of) trees, catching tadpoles and […]
Yoga, and the ownership, or non-ownership, of culture
I recently came across an interesting article by a blogger called Satinder. Satinder is an American who, somewhere along the line, chose to convert to Sikhism, (and in so doing change his name), also an experienced practitioner and teacher of ashtanga yoga, and a man who spends as much time as he can living in India. […]
If not now, then when?
“If not now, then when?” asks Tracy Chapman in her beautiful song, “If not now”. It is a question Zen monks have pondered for centuries before her, not as one requiring an answer, but as a koan, a seemingly nonsensical query pointing to a deeper truth that must be grasped beyond intellectual concepts. I was […]
Interview with Arnaud Riou
Arnaud Riou was born in France in 1963, and became a student of Tibetan Buddhism over twenty-five years ago. He first studied with Tibetan teachers at a Buddhist centre near Paris. His travels later brought him into contact with shamanic traditions, which at once strongly appealed to him, in particular because of the way direct […]
Wall Gazing
When I was about seven years old, my father told me one of the stories he likes to tell now and again – there are several, and on occasion we remind him we’ve heard the stories before, but this particular one is about the English economist John Maynard Keynes. It goes like this: one evening […]