Never Own a Disease

At age 71, it occurs to me that my actual job, for the rest of my life, is to have peace of mind and enjoy myself. I mean to work at that with some determination, whatever the vicissitudes that come my way.

Arts Education Eminently Practical

Yes, a university liberal arts education is so useless, I'm sure the rich will stop sending their children to get them at expensive private schools. Or is it only the working class and the middle class who are supposed to remain ignorant of the finer things in life?

How to Let Go

David R. Hawkins: “The first step is to allow yourself to have the feeling without resisting it, venting it, fearing it, condemning it, or moralizing about it. It means to drop judgment and to see that it is just a feeling. The technique is to be with the feeling and surrender all efforts to modify it in any way. Let go of wanting to resist the feeling. It is resistance that keeps the feeling going.

"When you give up resisting or trying to modify the feeling, it will shift to the next feeling and be accompanied by a lighter sensation. A feeling that is not resisted will disappear as the energy behind it dissipates."

It's Not Immigration Control. It's Ethnic Cleansing

The Advantage of Acceptance

“Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now. Let it teach you Being. Let it teach you integrity — which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real. Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.

“I have lived with several Zen masters — all of them cats.”

— Eckhart Tolle

As Gary Denton said, “Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet." -- Roger Miller (though often misattributed to Bob Marley).”

Guard the Unendurable Laughter

A sense of humor is sanity’s steam valve.

Shaftesbury, in his Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor, said humor is the only real test of gravity because “a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious.”

Put another way, it’s just that cartoonists realize that sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.

In fact, speech that offends someone is the only speech worth defending. Inoffensive speech is necessarily meaningless, and is never censored.

And why keep the stiletto of ridicule always handy up your sleeve? Because, as Euripides observed, “The laughter of one’s enemies is unendurable.”

Visiting an Art Guru