It is good to abandon what is superfluous, futile, and useless as quickly as possible and not cling to these from force of habit. If I go hiking in the mountain, and midway I find that my packsack is half-filled with provisions and half-filled with stones, I would, of course, gladly get rid of the latter. Likewise, in life, there are so m...

The year 2010 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (1910—1991), one of the most remarkable spiritual teachers of our time. On this special occasion, Khyentse Rinpoche's grand son and spiritual heir, Shechen Rabjam Rinpoche is organizing, with the help of many Khyentse Rinpoche's disciples all over the world,...

Blaming someone is an unjustified simplification of a complex human situation. We may disapprove of the actions or the behavior of someone, but that person himself is not ‟useless” or ‟evil.” No one is intrinsically ‟this” or ‟that” within their being. The fundamental nature of consciousness or pure awareness is neither ‟good” nor ‟bad”: it i...

In December some members of the Davos World Economic Forum in collaboration with Facebook conducted a poll on ‟values”. The poll was conducted with over 130,000 participants largely through the Internet. Eighty percent of the people polled were under 30 and, as these opinions expressed were mostly by young people, the result is certainly food...

A study, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), showed that the Arctic tern, whose annual migration is the longest of any animal, travels 70,000 km each year during its seasonal movements between Greenland and Antarctica. When you consider that an Arctic tern can live ...

At the Davos World Economic Forum, I also participated in a session on ‟Lessons from the Past to Redesign Future Values” with Jody Williams. She received the Nobel Peace Price in 1997 for relentlessly and successfully campaigning for a United Nations' treaty banning landmines. She told the UN delegates that they were proceeding in too slowly,...

I attended the recent Davos World Economic Forum as a speaker and was inspired by the voices that called for a greater sense of values and altruism in the world. In the session ‟Rethinking Values in the Post-Crisis World,” Mohammad Yunus, the Nobel Laureate who created the system of micro-credit to help people free themselves from poverty, sa...

‟When you look closely at life in a city, you have the impression that all the facets of individuals' lives must be defined with great precision, like a screw that has to fit exactly in its hole. In one sense, you have little control over your own life. To survive, you have to follow that model and the rhythm you're provided with.” The Da...

In conventional terms, we can talk about an ‟individual” consciousness, even if the individual doesn't exist as an isolated entity. The fact that there's no such discontinuous entity being transferred from one life to the next doesn't mean that there can't be a continuity of functioning and a particular history. That the self has no true ...

First of all, it's important to understand that what's called reincarnation in Buddhism has nothing to do with the transmigration of some ‟entity” like an autonomous ‟self”. It's not a process of metempsychosis. As long as one thinks in terms of entities rather than function and continuity of experience, it's impossible to understand the Bu...