The ability to make decisions quickly and confidently is widely lauded in our culture. But whether decisiveness is a virtue or not seems to depend, as usual, on the context. Situation A. You know a lot about the relevant variables of your decision and you have reliable intuitions about how they interact and how tweaking them will affect the outcome of each potential action. This might be your situation at work: you are skilled and experienced enough to know what to do, so it's easy for you to … [Read more...]
True Pride Revisited
Although I have written numerous blog plots on the concept of true pride in previous years, I have only now found myself able to distill the concept's quintessence in three sentences, and here they are: There are two types of pride: false pride and true pride.False pride is ego—a defense mechanism that protects us from getting emotionally hurt by others and that undermines rational thought.True pride is devotion to principles—the root of discipline and the foundation of a rational lifestyle. … [Read more...]
What Do Science and Spirituality Have in Common?
Science and spirituality have something important in common: both center on the process of observation. In science, we observe nature in its concreteness and then move towards causes, abstract concepts, generalizing theories, experimental repetitions, mathematical descriptions, and statistical models. In spirituality, we too observe nature in its concreteness, and with similar curiosity, but we then move no further. Instead, we keep observing—the breath, the friend, the water flowing down … [Read more...]
What You Judge You Cannot Understand
As soon as you judge—say, a person's behavior, a political idea, or something that happened to you—you have cut yourself off from the well of understanding. For in order to understand, you need an open, observing, and questioning mind. What exactly is the person doing and why might he be acting that way? What exactly does the idea imply and where might its implementation lead to? What exactly happened and how might the event have come about? Judgments, by contrast, are closed assertions that … [Read more...]
Are You Experiencing or Experience-Chasing?
Let us read chapter forty-seven of the Tao Te Ching: Without opening your door, you may know the whole worldWithout looking out your window, you may see the way of the heavensThe farther you go, the less you knowThus the sage knows without travelingHe sees without lookingHe accomplishes without doing This is not what society tells us. Rather, what we are taught to believe is the exact opposite: that we must pursue events, culture, travel, adventure. There is always a way to expand our … [Read more...]
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