The Process of Creativity In order for creativity to develop, the mind needs to be free from the automatic and habitual thinking that runs around in circles. It should remain in a state of openness, lucidity, flexibility, clarity, and wisdom. This will allow it to stop superimposing its own projections on to reality. A new unders...

During a recent dialogue with North American academics, I mentioned that training the mind through meditation helps people experience difficult situations in a different way and develop inner resources to deal with the ups and downs of life. Some of them argued that promoting such an adaptation was a very dangerous thing to do; that it wou...

When our meal was served on a recent international flight my neighbor, a young man, asked me with a touch of surprise: -- Are you vegetarian? -- Yes, I am. -- Do you feel that meat is dirty? -- Not at all, but I do not want to cause harm through eating. -- But all animals eat each other. This is natural. -- It might well be, but I...

To imagine happiness as the achievement of all our desires and passions, is to confuse the legitimate aspiration to inner fulfilment with an utopia that inevitably leads to frustration. Among all the clumsy, blind, and extreme ways we go about building happiness, the most sterile is selfishness. Even if we display every outward sign of ...

In Buddhism the word reality connotes the true nature of things, unmodified by mental constructs superimposed upon them. Fabricated concepts open up a gap between our perception and reality, and create a never-ending conflict with the world. ‟We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us,” wrote Rabindranath Tagore. We take for perman...

We usually identify completely with our suffering and become one with it. Yet, even when they torment us the most, we are not our suffering in the same way that we are not the sickness when afflicted by some ailment. To achieve fulfillment in this life, it is most important to understand that suffering is an illness that affects us all t...

In December 2006, Florida governor Jeb Bush temporarily stayed executions because it took twenty minutes for a death row inmate to succumb to a lethal injection that was supposed to kill him in four. He stated that he had acted out of humanity. I see no humanity in taking four minutes to kill someone instead of twenty. We cannot pretend t...

When hearing a door creak, the optimist thinks it's opening and the pessimist thinks it's closing. For an optimist, it makes no sense to lose hope. We can always do better, limit the damage, find an alternative solution, rebuild what has been destroyed, take the current situation as a starting point, and use every present moment to advanc...

True beauty conforms to mankind's deep nature. Love and altruism are beautiful, while hatred and jealousy are ugly. Just look at the way the former beautifies a face, while the latter disfigures it.  True beauty is in harmony with wisdom and compassion. When we meet a remarkable, radiant human being, we intuitively know that we are in the pre...

‟Happiest are the people who give most happiness to others.” Denis Diderot ‟Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed” Gandhi ‟Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize we cannot eat money”...