And this is a Buddhist country?” said Matt, “This is a country of lovingkindness and compassion? Hah. I think the Americans would call this ‘tough love.’ ” “That is the paradox of Buddhism,” said Ranjit, “As a young doctor I would see...
She told us about the goddess called Persephone, who was forced to spend half a year in the darkness deep underground. Winter happened when she was trapped inside the earth. The days shrank, they became cold and short and dark. Living things hid them...
Some very eminent critics writing in the decades immediately after the novel's publication felt that Eliot failed to maintain sufficient critical distance in her depiction of Ladislaw--that she fell in love with her own creation in a way that shows a...
If we recognize the power of entheogenic substances to open us to the universal truth and full dimension of human experience, and if we accept the role of the shaman as hierophant and psychopomp into this realm, as enacted for example by the Huichol ...
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines o...
...and I want you all to remember-that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one. That is the grea...
While humans have the propensity to develop a suite of prosocial behaviors, they are also capable of developing antisocial behavior, engaging in substance abuse, experiencing depression, and bearing children at an early age...Young people who develop...
He, too, was in the grip of rage and rhetoric. I saw that, attractive though his side of the political spectrum was. A cancerous violence had eaten into every political idea, had taken over the ideas themselves, and for so many, all that mattered was...
When the sun of consciousness first shone upon me, behold a miracle! The stock of my young life which had perished, steeped in the waters of knowledge grew again, budded again, was sweet again with the blossoms of childhood. Down in the depths of my ...
I say, we live on, though I am wrong, this is what I say. In the past, present, future, we live on as if in one time. You can never stop the past from happening, and it has happened , and will continue to happen. This is the truth, I think I know, al...
My second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn't realize that it is only the dying who are free from ambition. And they probably have the ambition to live. Some men disguise their ambition--that's all. I was in a position to he...
Eating dinner with conservation biologists was like walking through a minefield of ethical decisions: grasslands have been overgrazed by steer raised for beef, and all cattle emit greenhouse gases though enteric fermentation; the poop from industrial...
That night my mother had what she considered a wonderful dream. She dreamed of the country of India, where she had never been. There were orange traffic cones and beautiful lapis lazuli insects with mandibles of gold. A young girl was being led throu...
In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable lo...
We stepped a little quicker, laughed a little louder and chatted over the fences a little longer. We gathered bouquets of wildflowers, dined on fresh strawberries and began to ride our bikes up and down the Third Line again. We ran up grassy hills an...
THE PLAQUE read HARVEY GOULD, P I. It was the middle of the day, but the blinds were closed. Inside a desktop sat flanked by three non-matching chairs, a creased, leather sofa and a bookcase full of fiction. A middle-aged man lay back with a pair of ...
The Challenge is to pry Bertie loose from Dain and his circle of oafish dengenerates,” Jessica said severely. “It would be far more profitable to pry Dain loose for yourself,” said her grandmother. “He is very wealthy, his lineage is excellen...
Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-nec...
Sometimes I feel she hasn't left...especially when I wear the photo charm necklace with her picture in it. I can't tell you how many young men have stared into that picture and the reaction is always the same: a slow beam rises across their faces and...
Or [take] the old cripple worried about choking on his vitamins or tripping if he tries to hobble over that wide crack in the sidewalk. He won’t be bound by mere experience - he renounces it all together as something confusing; the very moment it o...
Humans have evolved to their relatively high state by retaining the immature characteristics of their ancestors. Humans are the most advanced of mammals – although a case could be made for the dolphins – because they seldom grow up. Behavioral tr...
